The trailer for Join Us first appeared during the Xbox Showcase in June, offering a glimpse of a darkly humorous cooperative cult simulation. In the clip, robed followers zip around on pigs, unleash a barrage of machine‑gun fire, and the sequence culminates with an image of massive, Cthulhu‑like tentacles. One element that didn’t make the public cut was the snake‑gun, a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a child’s off‑hand suggestion.
"One of the team members’ kids asked, ‘What would a snake‑gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that let us spin up a new weapon in about thirty minutes, so I built a gun that fires snakes on the fly. The kid went nuts, and the weapon stayed in the final build," Dietsch recalls.
That anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival game where players can recruit followers—or teammates—to join a 1970s‑style cult. It also highlights the studio’s technology‑first mindset, which has enabled a small crew to deliver 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. We told everyone we could build a AAA‑ish title with just a dozen people.
Most people thought we were crazy.” The founders’ background in low‑budget indie filmmaking gave them confidence. “We grew up making indie movies, constantly punching far above our weight,” Abbott says. After 80 pitches, the team finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital, both of which now hold stakes in Wolf Haus.
Wolf Haus’s leadership team is steeped in Hollywood pedigree. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who later co‑founded the studio. 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 founded by Chris Roberts before his shift to Star Citizen.
Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84 starring Jamie Foxx. Join Us originated from Dietsch’s early experiments in Unreal Engine. “I discovered Unreal was free to download, and that felt like a door opening,” he explains.
Having been a lifelong gamer, he felt the barrier to creating games was too high, so he dove into YouTube tutorials and began tinkering. Without any formal training, he produced a few small prototypes before deciding to tackle something bigger: a doomsday cult simulator that fused his love of survival games with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept, expecting to hit a technical wall at some point. When he showed the demo to Abbott, the latter immediately took it to Dooma, a production partner.
Dooma’s CFO and narrative director, Dooma Wendschuh, had transitioned from film producing and screenwriting into games in the early 2000s, founding Sekretagent Productions, which supplied narrative work for titles like Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins. Later he launched several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis formulation company Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million. After selling Ebbu, Wendschuh bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, intending to retire.
Yet a sudden call from his old Hollywood Hills roommate, Michael Abbott, changed his plans. "He told me a friend had made a video game and sent me a demo.
It blew my mind and pulled me out of retirement," Wendschuh says. He introduced the project to Reid Schneider, former VP at Warner Bros. Games and now head of Raccoon Logic, who became a strategic advisor and recruited Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing.
Pitching began in summer 2023, a period marked by a broader industry downturn. "People liked what we were showing, but the market was tough," Dietsch notes. The studio enlisted CAA (Creative Artists Agency) in Los Angeles, refined its pitch, and continued seeking investors through 2024.
Eventually, Lifelike Capital and Krafton closed a seed round, providing the capital needed to move forward. Wendschuh credits the CAA relationship and the presence of seasoned veterans like Schneider and Chartrand for smoothing the fundraising process. "My agent at CAA, Derek Douglas, had represented me during my twelve‑year game‑making career and previously ran the video‑game department at William Morris," he says. Despite the Hollywood‑sized pedigree, Join Us is being built by just 13 full‑time staff members.
Dietsch emphasizes that the small‑team philosophy is intentional: "We wanted everyone to have a voice, to touch the creative, and to feel ownership over the final product." To make such an ambitious open‑world game feasible with a lean crew, Wolf Haus invested heavily in custom tooling early on. "Any system in the game must be scalable and debuggable by a single person," Dietsch explains.
The studio spent the first year simultaneously designing gameplay concepts and constructing the internal toolset that would later allow those concepts to be realized across a six‑kilometre‑square map without the project collapsing under its own weight. The equity‑funding model gave the studio the runway to perfect those tools.
"Krafton and Lifelike’s investment essentially self‑funded the development," Wendschuh says. "We’ve started to take on a modest amount of project finance for marketing, but the core development was covered by the equity partners." One of the benefits of equity backing, according to Wendschuh, is that investors share the studio’s goal of increasing enterprise value, which aligns with Wolf Haus’s tool‑building ethos.
"Whenever we encounter a problem we don’t know how to solve, we build a bespoke tool. It may slow us down in the short term, but it enables a tiny team to create a game of this scale." When the industry talks about tiny development teams, generative AI often enters the conversation. Wolf Haus, however, deliberately avoids it. "We don’t use generative AI for any creative work," Dietsch states.
"Our process is hands‑on; handing it over to an AI would defeat the purpose of why we love making games." Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses AI for administrative tasks such as calendar management and email drafting. "We have no AI involvement in design, art, or narrative," he confirms.
Even Krafton, which has publicly positioned itself as an “AI‑first” company, insisted that Wolf Haus not rely on generative AI for creative production. This mirrors a similar stance taken by Neon Giant, another Krafton‑owned studio, which publicly denied using AI in its pipelines. The team’s commitment to a human‑centric workflow extends to the game’s assets. The six‑kilometre‑square world is entirely handcrafted, and the 15,000 voice lines were recorded by real actors, not synthetic voices.
"That was a non‑negotiable for us," Dietsch says, even though the studio is small. Dietsch finds the immediacy of game development especially rewarding compared with film.
In cinema, an idea can take years to materialise, requiring approvals, casting, and location logistics before a director ever sees a scene. In games, an idea can be prototyped in a matter of hours and instantly visualised in the engine.
"You can have a concept in the morning and see it live by afternoon," he enthuses. Wendschuh notes that film production is heavily front‑loaded: securing a high‑profile director or star is often the key to greenlighting a project, and without those names, a movie’s chance of success plummets.
By contrast, the barriers to entry for games are lower, with fewer gatekeepers and no need for A‑list talent to achieve commercial viability. Both mediums, however, share a common creative impulse: storytelling and experience design. Dietsch reflects, "When I was six, I wanted to make either movies or games. It came down to a coin toss and whether I got a camera for Christmas.
I learned to program on a TI‑83, so I’ve always been straddling both worlds. Whether it’s a film or a game, the goal is to give people an experience, tell a story, and engage them. The medium changes, the intention stays the same."