Wardogs CEO Says Workers Who Speak Out Against Crunch Won't 'Be Happy Here'

Crunch is a pervasive and long-standing issue in video game development. Developers have long been pushing back against it, and studio leaders have tried different ways to get ahead of causing it. This week, CEO of Wardogs developer Bulkhead, Joe Brammer, told The Game Business podcast host Christopher Dring that not only does Bulkhead crunch, but that the studio scans the social media of potential hires to see if they’ve ever shit-talked the practice. If they have, the studio is unlikely to hire them.

Dring quotes Brammer in the podcast’s notes:

“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,” [Brammer] 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’.”  

According to Brammer, Bulkhead's stance on crunch shouldn’t be a surprise to people applying for jobs there, saying on the podcast, “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.” 

Brammer says on the podcast that Bulkhead tries to balance these periods of crunch, citing as an example that Bulkhead is resisting pushing the console version of Wardogs out faster despite players asking for it. He also says that workers who own shares in the company get a payout if a Bulkhead game does well. “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,” Brammer says. Wardogs, an FPS that came out on September 10, has sold two million copies since launch, and Brammer wrote in a tweet that "80% of the shares in Bulkhead are owned by 50% of the staff."  

Brammer's podcast appearance has received a lot of attention from outlets and developers. Brammer wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday, “This discussion perhaps exposes some of the controversial strategies AKA toxic traits we and I have embodied over the years. We're not got the balance right yet, but from lots of overtime to get the game out the door to the other end of the scale where 50% of Wardogs was developed on a 4 day work week [, it's] hard for me to feel ‘in the wrong’ about some of our attitudes here.”

Brammer has frequently spoken publicly about how Bulkhead works. In a Devcom keynote in 2022, he described the studio’s experiments with the four day workweek, including a setup in which remote workers kept longer hours each day than those who came in person, and where the studio managed hours and days on pretty rigorously, while still attempting to provide flexibility. Brammer told Games Industry in March 2026 that Bulkhead was “currently not doing the four-day work week… I really [want to] find a way to bring it back for our staff or to do something different with working hours, where we're kind of innovating on working practices.”

In the podcast, Brammer also discusses Bulkhead’s efforts to give workers 10 weeks of paternity leave, noting “it was a disaster–[people] took the 10 weeks, as they should, but their partners, when it got to week 11, could not handle them leaving, they couldn’t handle the fact that they’re on their own with a kid now.” So the studio moved to two weeks of paternity leave, followed by gradual half and full days coming back into the office, which Brammer described as “training your partner how to look after their first child together, and you’re building a routine.” Eventually, workers get three weeks of paternity leave to use across the rest of the year, when parenting “gets a lot harder.”

Listening to him, it’s clear Brammer and the studio put a lot of intentionality into how they work, and that they're willing to talk about it. But thought and transparency don't mean a studio’s ethos isn’t still grounded in the same exploitation of passion and romanticism of overwork that leads to harmful conditions across the games industry. Brammer's quotes can be read as connecting crunch–or at least a willingness to keep silent about it–to a developer caring about their work, which is precisely the kind of attitude that can foster unhealthy work environments. Screening out employees who hate crunch might prevent those employees from being unhappy at the studio, sure, but it also runs the risk of creating a workforce that reifies practices the games industry as a whole would be better off without.

Not all studios see crunch as an inevitability: Waypoint spoke to several studios about crunch at E3 2018, and Dring spoke to game developers in 2020 about how their studios try to avoid it.