You may remember seeing the Join Us trailer during the Xbox Showcase in June. The clip introduced a darkly humorous co‑op cult simulator where robed followers zip around on pigs, wield machine guns, and the finale hints at Cthulhu‑like tentacles looming in the distance. What didn’t make the edit was the absurd “snake gun,” a detail that CEO and creative director Joe Dietsch of Wolf Haus Games says was born from a youngster’s off‑hand suggestion.
"One of the team members’ kids asked, ‘What if there was a snake‑shooting gun?’" Dietsch recalls. "Because we had a modular weapon system, I could crank out a prototype in about thirty minutes.
The kid went nuts, and the weapon stayed in the final build." This anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit AI followers or friends to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also illustrates the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has allowed a tiny team to produce a high‑fidelity experience that would normally require a much larger staff.
Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, summed up their ambition: "We set out to be disruptors. Everyone told us a twelve‑person team couldn’t deliver a game of this scope, but we knew from indie film work that we could punch well above our weight." The studio’s background in low‑budget filmmaking gave them a practical understanding of how to stretch limited resources. After 80 pitch meetings, they finally secured equity financing from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which took stakes in the company. The founders’ Hollywood connections run deep.
Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who now co‑founder Wolf Haus. Together they co‑wrote and co‑directed the indie features Happy Hunting and Manifest West. Abbott is the son of veteran makeup artist Larry Abbott and helped launch Ascendant Pictures, the production company originally founded by Chris Roberts before he turned his attention to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced movies such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx.
These film‑industry roots gave the team a shared language of storytelling and a comfort with high‑stakes, high‑concept projects. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine. "Unreal was free to download, and I’d been a gamer forever, but the barrier to actually creating something felt huge," he says.
He taught himself the engine through YouTube tutorials, built a few modest prototypes, and eventually gravitated toward the idea of a doomsday cult simulator—a mash‑up of survival mechanics, grindhouse cinema aesthetics, and the narrative freedom of games. He built a proof‑of‑concept demo, showed it to Abbott, and the concept was quickly handed off to Dooma Wendschuh, the studio’s CFO and narrative director. Wendschuh’s career is a patchwork of film and game experiences. He began as a producer and screenwriter in Hollywood, then founded Sekretagent Productions, providing narrative services for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins.
In the 2010s he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis‑formulation company Ebbu, which sold for roughly C$430 million. After a brief retirement—he even bought a remote island restaurant in Canada—an unexpected call from his old Hollywood‑Hills roommate Michael Abbott pulled him back into game development. Wendschuh was impressed by Dietsch’s demo, quit his retirement, and recruited former Warner Bros. Games VP Reid Schneider as a strategic advisor.
Schneider, in turn, brought on Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. Funding proved to be the next hurdle. The team began pitching in summer 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn. "People liked what we were showing, but the market was tight," Dietsch notes.
They eventually partnered with CAA in Los Angeles, which helped them refine their pitch and secure seed investment from Lifelike Capital and Krafton in 2024. Wendschuh credits the CAA connection—alongside seasoned veterans like Schneider and Chartrand—for opening doors that might otherwise have stayed shut. What truly sets Join Us apart is how it’s being built.
The studio operates with just thirteen full‑time staff members. "From day one we defined the project’s scope and insisted on a small‑team culture where everyone’s voice matters," Dietsch explains.
To make a large‑scale open world feasible for such a lean crew, they invested heavily in custom tooling early in development. "Every system needs to be scalable and debuggable by a single person," says Dietsch.
The first year was spent simultaneously iterating on gameplay ideas and constructing the internal toolset that would keep the project from collapsing under its own weight. The equity funding model gave Wolf Haus the runway to perfect these tools.
Krafton and Lifelike’s capital financed the entire development, with only a modest amount of project finance earmarked for marketing later on. "Our investors are motivated to increase the studio’s enterprise value, so they support our tool‑building ethos," Wendschuh says.
"When we hit a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a tool for it. It may slow us down short‑term, but it enables a tiny team to achieve something massive." Despite the buzz around generative AI in game creation, Wolf Haus deliberately steered clear of it. "We believe a human touch is essential," Dietsch asserts. "We love making games ourselves; handing the creative process to an AI would defeat the purpose of why we get up each morning." Wendschuh adds that the studio’s AI usage is limited to administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting—nothing that influences art, design, or narrative.
Krafton, which has publicly positioned itself as an “AI‑first” company, actually insisted that Wolf Haus avoid generative AI in the creative pipeline, fearing it could dilute the studio’s artistic integrity. This stance mirrors that of Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio that publicly denied using AI for game development. The commitment to handcrafted content runs deep.
The six‑kilometre‑square map in Join Us is entirely hand‑built, and the game features roughly 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors. "Even as a small indie, we felt that preserving a human‑driven experience was non‑negotiable," Dietsch explains. Dietsch also highlights a key advantage of games over film: immediacy.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialize, subject to countless approvals and scheduling constraints. In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a matter of hours, allowing creators to see their vision instantly within the engine. Wendschuh notes that film production is heavily front‑loaded, requiring the attachment of high‑profile talent to secure financing, whereas games face far fewer gatekeepers. "You don’t need an A‑list actor or director to get a game funded; the barriers are lower," he says.
Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and delivering an experience. Dietsch reflects, "When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games.
It came down to a coin toss and a Christmas camera. I learned programming on a TI‑83, so the love for both has always been there. Whether you’re crafting a film or a game, you’re trying to engage an audience, tell a story, and create an experience.
That core drive hasn’t changed."