Joe Brammer, the chief executive of BULKHEAD, the studio behind the incredible new FPS WARDOGS, has responded to claims that he doesn’t hire developers who do not agree to mandatory crunch. Brammer said these claims were taken out of context and “made up,” while announcing his studio is getting a full month off in December.
Yesterday, PC Gamer ran a piece on an interview between Joe Brammer, BULKHEAD’s CEO, and The Game Business Show, where Brammer talked about crunch and how developers who are against it in full “often don’t make it in the door,” implying those opposed to crunching in general don’t usually tend to get hired by BULKHEAD. However, PC Gamer framed this stance as Brammer’s support of “mandatory crunch,” which the CEO now says was “made up” by the outlet.
“No information says mandatory, they made this up,” Brammer wrote on X. “Eighty percent of the shares in Bulkhead are owned by 50 percent of the staff,” he added, and further said that half of WARDOGS‘ development was done on a four-day work week. “We gave everyone the entire month of December off [and] made a game you like [for which] our staff will be rewarded for it accordingly,” Brammer noted.
Brammer said that this whole situation is “the other side” of the transparency BULKHEAD had vowed to uphold, and truth be told, the studio really is trying its best to do things under total public scrutiny, rather than hiding behind the veil of social media and bureaucratic, sterile posts promising this and that. Crunch is, unfortunately, a reality of modern game development, and while Brammer could’ve worded things better, I still don’t see where the “mandatory” bit came from.
I hope the devs at BULKHEAD never actually have to crunch, and if they do, I hope they’re at least paid accordingly. Many studios go in over their heads trying to build things they don’t have the resources to make in a timely manner, and so management forces them to work extensively, which, in salaried positions, tends to not result in any extra cash for those involved.
