Bulkhead’s new tactical first-person shooter Wardogs is turning out to be one of the most promising new entries in it’s genre in the recent years as the game has already sold past 2 million copies in just 5 days, besides reaching a staggering 428,000 concurrent player count on Steam and becoming one of the most-played games on Valve’s online storefront. Moreover, the user reviews for the game is also at the ‘Very Positive’ rating right now, with initial complaints regarding the game’s launch likely to have been fully fixed which indicates even stronger player counts in the coming days and weeks.
As Wardogs has already proven itself as a surefire win for the developers, Joe Brammer, the CEO of Bulkhead, has opened up on the studio’s approach to crunch time for the developers, and said that they actively avoid hiring people who aren’t willing to put the extra time.
In a recent interview with The Game Business, Brammer discussed their unique approach on working overtime and making it feel rewarding for the developers in the long run:
“For the last three months, Wardogs has been a lot more important than a lot of their family lives,” said Brammer. “It has been, because that’s what pays the money for them. But now Bulkhead has to acknowledge that it needs to go the other way. For example, everyone is pushing us to get console out earlier.
“We’ve just said, ‘No, you don’t understand, that’s not how it’s going to work. We can’t push them more. We’re not doing that. It’s going to release in 2028 when we say it’s going to release.’ So, for me it’s about balance and helping people and making sure they have a company where they can say, ‘I’m tapping out,’ and not feel like they’re going to get fired for tapping out.”
He also made it clear that they don’t hire people who actively speak out against crunch in the videogame industry:
“A lot of people who may have an issue with crunch — rightly so, I understand that issue, we always try and avoid it, but we don’t hide that this is going to happen at some point — they often don’t make it in the door,” he says. “We want to be known for that: this is a place you come to work hard. If you care about the work you’re making and the result of what you make here, you’ll feel really valued. If you don’t, you will feel slave-driven.”
However, the team also makes sure to balance things out with meaningful incentives, for the developers who put in the extra time:
“If we’re going to be a company who says, ‘we do crunch’, then we have to also say, ‘but you get something for it,'” he said. “We want people to know that those people who do work hard get that return, and it is life-changing.”
Bulkhead has also released a new update for Wardogs which includes Community server improvements plus several other fixes.
