Following up on his statements from earlier this week about how Bulkhead, as a studio, wouldn’t hire developers who have been critical of crunch, CEO Joe Brammer has taken to social media to offer some more insight into what he meant. Among other things, he said that nothing he said implied that crunch was a mandatory practice at Bulkhead.
A core argument he makes is that 80 percent of Bulkhead’s shares are owned by 50 percent of the studio’s staff. This means that the success of WARDOGS also led to the staff getting rewarded accordingly. Along with this, he notes that 50 percent of the development period for WARDOGS involved staff members only working 4-day weeks, and they even got the entire month of December off.
In a further statement to Eurogamer, Brammer further elaborated on how Bulkhead had to go into crunch because it was running behind on completing the beta build for WARDOGS in June 2026. While he said that it would be an opt-in decision for the employees, he also acknowledged that there may have also been a social aspect that pressured developers into working for longer hours.
“In this instance, I apologized and said the only way I thought we could get the game into beta was by working an extra 2 hours a day Monday through Thursday, for 4 weeks (16 working days total). We admitted to the staff that this was crunch; we clearly stated that we needed to crunch. It was optional; four people opted out, nothing happened to them, and nothing will. But I can admit that maybe the social pressure within a very tight-knit team might make those individuals feel less than great.”
“The reason it was 2 hours and not something else was build times. Extending slightly meant we could get x1 more build per day, review it and get QA’s pass back on it, instead of waiting on the nightly build and picking it up the following morning.”
On the subject of his recent interview, Brammer also spoke about “trying to do things differently at Bulkhead”. He even mentioned the 4-day work week that was used for two years. However, he went on to say that the team still “needed the fifth day of productivity, but we saw huge benefits and absolutely aspire to bring some form of it back in the future.”
When it came to his statement about checking the social media accounts of potential employees to look for anti-crunch sentiment, Brammer said that it was meant to be an informal description of the studio’s culture rather than part of a formal recruitment process.
“Where we do consider publicly available information as part of recruitment, it is done in line with applicable UK employment and data protection law. We don’t access private accounts or carry out covert or intrusive checks.
“My comments were really about being upfront about the kind of studio we are and making sure it’s the right fit for both sides.”
Bulkhead has seen an incredible level of success with WARDOGS. For more details, here are our thoughts on why players keep coming back to it.
