Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTube In This Edition, Bulkhead’s Joe Brammer on…
The surprise success of Wardogs
The realities of crunch
Being clear, not transparent
The FPS Games Show, and more
In December last year, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer warned his 100-person team they faced redundancy.
The UK studio, best known for the military first-person shooter Battalion 1944, had been owned by Tencent. But the Chinese giant no-longer wanted it. Brammer was working on a deal with investment group Hiro Capital and Team17 parent Everplay, but there was no guarantee of success.
So Brammer advised his team: if you can find a new job, take it.
“What happened was the whole team went, ‘Joe, we’ve got your back, you can do this’,” Brammer shares on today’s episode of The Game Business Show.
“And I’m there like, ‘I can’t do this! Take the job! I’m telling you we’re going down!’ It was a great team moment and they stuck together, but if we hadn’t pulled it off, I would have been like, ‘Guys, please’.”
The money did come in, but the situation was still precarious. Its longer-term survival rested on its 100-player tactical first-person shooter Wardogs. Under Tencent, the game was planned as a significant AAA title, but now it needed scaling back with an Early Access approach. The “bare minimum” it needed to sell was 400,000 copies. Bulkhead would still need to make some redundancies, and take on co-dev projects, but it would survive. If it could sell 600,000 units, that would have been ‘okay’.
Wardogs sold one million copies in pre-orders alone. That number has now surpassed two million.
“We haven’t had much time to celebrate,” he says.
“It was obviously a lot bigger than we expected. Which is great, it’s also been: ‘Oh my God.’ Like DDoS attacks, constant cheaters, and things that, at scale, are just bigger problems.”
Bulkhead now face the good challenge of trying to work out how to deal with this success. It will mean hiring more people, but Brammer is wary having overseen six years of continued layoffs.
“For the last six years, we have made redundancies every single year, about 20% of the company. This will be the first year we haven’t done it,” he reveals.
“We’re very conscious of scaling up and upheaving people’s lives, and also getting a stain for doing this. We want to lean more and more into the gig economy approach. What we’ve been doing is going, ‘You’re really good. We want you to leave your job and come work with us. Why don’t you do 12 or 18 months remote? And if we get along, we’ll give you a big load of money in a fixed offer to come and work for us in-office’.”
“We definitely need to scale. But we need people, and the cost of co-dev is so high and the reliability is so low, the best way for us to do it is to hire internally. So, we’re trying to rush, and people who like FPS games are who we’re looking for.”
“Wardogs is closer to Meccha Chameleon than it is to Call of Duty”
That’s what Brammer believes is key to Wardogs success. The first-person shooter genre may seem impenetrable from the outside. But if you have a team that loves the genre, then it’s possible to break in.
“Very few people make a game like Battalion 1944 and the game bombs, I mean it made some money and got us on the map, right? But it bombs. And then you go, ‘Let’s try that again, but bigger.’ No one does that.
“It’s very penetrable, but to pretend you can be an analyst wanting to get into FPS games is a mistake. You have to be an FPS player, because the community is so vicious and fragmented. I’ve said this a couple of times to people: Wardogs is closer to Meccha Chameleon than it is to Call of Duty. When we were designing Wardogs, it was about the social aspects. If you look at men 18 to 40-years-old, there’s a lot of lonely, bored, or underappreciated men who miss their mates. Wardogs’ audience is 99.9% male. That doesn’t mean we don’t want women playing the game. But we realized we needed to provide a space for them to have fun and do silly things, a space where a 35-year-old man can still make a penis joke. That’s kind of what it is.”
It’s certainly found its audience. And with two million sales in one weekend, you’d have to imagine Tencent is feeling a sense of regret.
“We had a great time with Tencent, and this game wouldn’t be possible without them,” Brammer tells us. “There are people at lots of the companies we’ve worked with over the years, as far back as Square Enix - they were our first publisher - I think everyone like that is kicking themselves.
“Tencent has got plenty of good things coming. But with Wardogs, they pushed us really hard to make something great.”
You can watch or listen to our full interview with Brammer above, or read on for more highlights.
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With the technical problems, Brammer advised dissatisfied players to get a refund and then return once the issues are solved. It’s somewhat in keeping with Bulkhead’s brand, the firm even put out a marketing video before launch listing 10 reasons not to buy the game.
I asked about this level of transparency and honesty, but Brammer insists that’s not what they’re doing.
“We’re not transparent, and we’re not honest. We’re being clear. Right now, it’s in our interest to be transparent about some things, but we’re not telling everyone everything we’re doing. The brand is becoming that they believe we’re transparent and honest. That’s creating a new problem in that if we choose not to be transparent or honest about something, therefore we’re moving away from the thing that people believe we are.
“We’ve always been the same. My LinkedIn is famously divisive. There was something from Satya Nadella where he said ‘people should know what a leader stands for’. People know what I believe. They know I don’t believe in work-from-home for making video games. They know I expect people to crunch. I own that. I don’t try and hide it.”
He continues: “We knew that ‘10 Reasons Why’ video, when we wrote it, was a hit. But in many ways, it was obvious to us. It’s obviously not Call of Duty. Don’t buy us if you want to play Call of Duty. So, just saying it and owning it in all aspects of Bulkhead and Wardogs’ marketing has been the way to go. But I wouldn’t necessarily call it honest and transparent.”
That clarity can be helpful in business as much as it helps with players.
“We know what we want to make. This was the problem from Square Enix up to Tencent, Splash Damage, and even Team17, to some degree. Through each layer we’ve gone through, we’ve got tougher, saying, ‘We don’t want to listen to you.’ Sometimes that makes enemies. But what we’ve found it’s usually the middle management layer that seems to really struggle with having their position threatened. The higher-up people seem to really like our approach: ‘We know what we’re making. If you don’t like it, don’t fund it’.”
Wardogs didn’t make it into Gamescom Opening Night Live, and so Bulkhead decided to do its own showcase dedicated to shooters. The aptly titled: FPS Games Show.
“[It went] better than we thought,” Brammer says.
“It was really cool that we could make something specific and bespoke for that audience. To be clear, I’d love Geoff to come in and take this over, because it was harder than I thought. And he’d do a better job.
“Our very public and unfair feedback to big shows is that I don’t want my big game to be next to an Asian MMO, because it’s my big opportunity and you just get mixed messaging. Then the players dogpile something, but they never should have even been watching it. But we wanted to be in those big ones, right? There’s a prestige that goes with it that the FPS Game Show will never deliver.
“We want to do more of a festival-type thing going forward and to have some sort of paid tier, because it did cost us a fair bit, but really just covering costs. And then having a pre-show, a bit like an opening act, where for free you can put those teams of 1 to 10 people making neat FPS games. We’re toying with different ideas at the moment.”
Brammer is open about the fact that he expects his team to crunch when the time comes. He compares the situation to a balancing act, but one where things shift from one extreme to the other.
“For the last three months, Wardogs has been more important than a lot of [our team’s] family lives,” Brammer says. “But now, Bulkhead and I have to acknowledge that it needs to go the other way. Everyone’s pushing us to get console out earlier, and we’ve said, ‘No, 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’.”
The company will be getting the whole of December off, Brammer adds.
His perspective on crunch is undoubtedly controversial, but he says he’s upfront about it. It’s not something a new recruit is going to discover after joining.
“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. We check people’s socials, and if you’re constantly tweeting anti-crunch messaging: ‘This should never ever be a thing’, we know that and go, ‘Look, you’re not going to be happy here, so we’re not going to go with you’.”
The upside to working like this, Brammer says, is the financial reward. Not everyone within Bulkhead owns shares or receives bonuses, but those that do get a meaningful amount.
“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.’ We want people to know that those people who do work hard get that return, and it is life-changing.
He concludes: “I’m going to be really excited to see juniors who have been with us for two or three years who are going to get money to buy a house, or at least a down payment. What we actually find is we have to coach them.... please don’t spend all your money on takeaway and energy drinks. We have a new responsibility to our younger staff who are making good money, often money they haven’t seen before.”
Check out our full interview with Joe Brammer in the links above.