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 enormous, Cthulhu‑like tentacles looming in the distance. One element that didn’t make the final edit was the infamous "snake gun," a quirky weapon that Joe Dietsch, the CEO and creative director of Wolf Haus Games, says was born from a simple family conversation. "My team member’s kid asked, ‘What would a snake‑shooting gun look like?’ We had a rapid‑prototyping tool that lets us spin up a new weapon in minutes, so I built a snake‑gun in about half an hour.
The kid went nuts, and we kept it in the game," Dietsch recounts. This anecdote captures the chaotic, improvisational spirit that defines Join Us, an open‑world sandbox survival experience where players can recruit followers—or friends in co‑op mode—to build a 1970s‑style cult.
The game’s wild design is matched by the studio’s unconventional production philosophy. Michael Abbott, Wolf Haus’s chief operating officer, explains that the team set out to be "disruptors" by proving that a high‑fidelity title could be built with a dozen developers instead of a hundred. "Everyone told us it was impossible," he says. "But we came from indie‑film backgrounds where we learned to punch far above our weight, so we knew we could make something big on a shoestring budget." After 80 pitches, the studio finally secured equity funding from Krafton and Lifelike Capital.
Both investors took a stake in Wolf Haus, allowing the team to retain creative control while accessing the capital needed to finish the project. The founders’ Hollywood pedigree runs deep. Dietsch studied film at Chapman University alongside Louie Gibson, son of Mel Gibson, who now co‑heads 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 founded by Chris Roberts before his transition to Star Citizen. Abbott later produced films such as Fight for ’84, starring Jamie Foxx.
Join Us began as a hobby project in Unreal Engine. "I discovered Unreal was free to download and started tinkering after watching YouTube tutorials," Dietsch explains.
Although he had no formal training, he managed to put together a few small games before deciding to tackle something larger—a doomsday cult simulator that merged his love of survival mechanics with grindhouse cinema aesthetics. He built a proof‑of‑concept prototype, showed it to Abbott, and the idea quickly gained momentum. The studio’s narrative director and CFO, Dooma Wendschuh, arrived from a career that straddled film and games.
He produced and wrote for titles such as Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, Assassin’s Creed, and Batman: Arkham Origins through his company Sekretagent Productions. In the 2010s he founded several tech ventures, most notably the cannabis‑formulation firm Ebbu, which sold for C$430 million (≈US$330 million). After selling, he bought a remote island restaurant in Canada, planning to retire. Yet a call from his old Hollywood‑hill roommate, Michael Abbott, pulled him back into development when he saw Dietsch’s demo and was blown away.
Wendschuh recruited former Warner Bros. Games VP Reid Schneider as a strategic advisor, and Schneider brought in Pierre‑Olivier Chartrand, a former Ubisoft Montreal programmer, to serve as chief technology officer. With the core team in place, the next hurdle was financing—a daunting task given the industry downturn of 2023‑24. The studio partnered with CAA for representation, leveraged those connections, and eventually closed a seed round with Krafton and Lifelike Capital.
Despite the high‑profile backers, Wolf Haus kept the team deliberately small—13 full‑time staff members. The goal was to maintain a tight‑knit environment where every voice mattered and each person could influence the creative direction.
To make a sprawling open‑world game feasible with such a lean crew, the studio invested heavily in custom tooling early on. "Any system we build must be scalable and debuggable by a single developer," Dietsch notes. The first year of development was spent simultaneously designing gameplay and engineering the tools that would later enable the world to expand without collapsing under its own weight. Funding from Krafton and Lifelike was structured as equity, meaning the studio could self‑finance the core development while using a modest amount of project finance for marketing.
This model gave Wolf Haus the freedom to build tools whenever a problem arose, even if it slowed short‑term progress, because the investors shared the studio’s long‑term vision of creating valuable IP. When asked about generative AI, the team is unequivocal: they do not rely on it for any creative work. "We believe a game needs a human touch," says Dietsch.
"Using AI to generate assets would defeat the reason we get up every morning—to craft something ourselves." Wendschuh adds that the studio only uses AI for administrative tasks like calendar management and email drafting, not for design, art, or writing. Interestingly, Krafton—positioned as an "AI‑first" company—explicitly required that Wolf Haus not employ generative AI in its creative pipeline, echoing similar statements from other Krafton‑owned studios.
The commitment to handcrafted content extends to the game’s massive six‑kilometre‑square map, which was built entirely by hand, and the 15,000 voice lines recorded by human actors. Dietsch emphasizes that preserving a human‑driven production was essential, even for an indie‑scale title. Comparing his film background to game development, Dietsch highlights the immediacy of the latter. In movies, an idea can take years to materialize, requiring approvals, casting, and studio greenlights.
In contrast, a game concept can be prototyped in a single morning, allowing developers to see and iterate on their vision instantly. Wendschuh observes that film production is front‑loaded with high‑stakes negotiations for talent and studio backing, whereas games have far fewer gatekeepers—no need for A‑list actors or directors to secure a green light.
Both mediums, however, share a core purpose: to deliver an experience, tell a story, and engage an audience. Dietsch reflects on his childhood fascination with both film and games, noting that whether one is making a movie or a video game, the ultimate goal remains the same—to create an immersive narrative that resonates with people.