The shooter that Tencent abandoned: Wardogs hits 2m sales in one weekend

0:00Joe Brammer: We're not transparent and we're not honest. That's not what we're doing. We're being clear. They know I don't believe in work from home for making video games. They know I don't stand for that. They know I expect people to crunch. Like I own that. I don't try and hide it. For the last six years, we've made redundancies every single year and about 20 % of the company. This will be the first year we haven't done it. The whole team went, Joe, we've got you back. You can do this. and I'm there like, I can't do this. Take the job. Like, I'm telling you, we're going down.

0:35Joe Brammer: Hello and welcome to the Game Business Show. This week's edition is sponsored by Exola. So you already sell your PC game on Steam, but having a direct channel adds a second place to sell it and the two can complement each other. Exola Publishing Suite gives you your own PC game store, a launcher with your branding and payments in every market you sell in and you keep up to 95 % of every sale. Makes a lot of sense right? More than a thousand PC game studios already sell direct and you can have your own store live in days not weeks. Find out more at publisher.exola.com or alternatively click the links in the newsletter attached with this show.

1:16Joe Brammer: Speaking of which let's talk about this week's show. So last week a 100 player tactical shooter came out in early access called War Dogs. It's from a UK studio called Bulkhead who were really well known for FPS games, they made Battalion 9044, they made the Turing Test, they've also done work on PUBG. Now they've had a few owners down the years, they were once partly owned by Square Enix, before being picked up by Splash Damage and Tencent to work on an ambitious Transformers title that ultimately didn't work out. Then last year, Tencent decided to divest from Bulkhead, and the Derby-based studio faced potential closure.

1:50Joe Brammer: That was before they were saved thanks to investment from Hero Capital and Team17 parent company ever play which is just as well because bulkhead has just launched war dogs to immense success it sold one million copies immediately and has gone on to do even more there are so many people trying to get into the game there's been some severe server issues too it's just been a sensation so it's a good time to coax bulkhead ceo joe brammer away from fighting all those fires to chat to the game business all about the titles launch check it out hello joe welcome to the show Hey, Chris, big fan. I told you before I mow my lawn listening to this podcast.

2:28Joe Brammer: So I'm a very quiet lawnmower. Well, congratulations. What a launch you've had. You were telling me before that you're quite tired from everything. Yeah, it's the Monday after and it's been just standing up a game of that scale was not what we kind of planned to do. So it was obviously a lot bigger than we expected, which Which is great. It's just, we've had to be there like, oh my God, DDoS attacks and like constant and cheaters and like all just different kinds of things. So scale are just bigger problems and yeah, it's interesting. So what happened? You had 1 million wishlists and 1 million sales like straight away.

3:11So I think we got to like 1.7 or 8 million wishlists by the time we launched. okay we had pre-orders so the million units were we did in pre-order all right which was really cool because i don't mind sharing with you our like to keep going we had to do like 400 000 units right and that was like bare minimum and we've got to do a load of code of work and then it was like okay the happy scenario like this is good we're okay it's like 600k and then this has gone crazy well it's 900k so we're doing really well just in pre-orders so we're quite happy I think at this point, I think whenever this goes low, it's 2 million units.

3:51So I think that's today it's going to cross. So we're really happy, but we haven't had much time to celebrate to be honest.

3:56Joe Brammer: Yeah. Is it profitable already then? Oh yeah. Like it was profitable, but like quite early on. So we run a tight ship and a controversially tight ship perhaps. And we live in Derby, which is cheap. So if nothing else. Well, yes. This reminds me, because I read your Games and Shop Busy article, where Tencent was suspicious of your budget. They didn't accept the fact it could be so cheap. Is that right? Yeah, not necessarily Tencent as an organization. More like individuals in that kind of layer often track, are they spending more or less than they say? If they're spending more, they're probably just trying to hit their deadlines.

4:34If they're spending less, they're probably slow. And we couldn't spend loads of money. So yeah, but that's normal, all publishers, not specific to Tencent really. But yeah, that was one metric. And then, you know, now we're, we learned a lot over the last few years with not booming in hiring. So now we're kind of facing that, well, we need to do some hiring, but to support the scale. But how do we not boom and not upend people's lives and then inevitably have to make redundancies later in a few years time? So trying to balance that right now.

5:07Joe Brammer: Yeah. Well, is outsourcing then the option there? Is that the solution? The problem with outsourcing we see is so often that the only way to make it viable is that the outsourcers will put, or Kodav for example, you get one superstar and then six juniors and they don't really know what they're doing. That's not always the case, but that's how you make it financially viable. Whereas what we're seeing is that with an FPS game, which is particularly difficult to make, the only one harder is probably like an MMO really. and with it being so difficult you can't just be any team and jump in and do it and when you're an expert team like we are in fps games and unreal engine performance if you come to us and say we're an unreal engine performance expert studio we're like no you're not yeah so so it's quite hard we're quite picky and quite demanding so what we've seen is we adopted the gig economy to work for us we've been quite public about we don't really do work from home don't really like it but it's kind of not true in that we do love it but we'll only take you for six months 12 months 18 months and then we won't you know that's how that works and it kind of works for everyone in that way yeah okay wow these are good problems they have though joe yeah it's where we're having to invest in leads and leadership and managers basically to manage these external people so we're having to pay quite a lot to kind of be a bit more professional than we were in the past perhaps let's So what fires are you putting out then?

6:34Joe Brammer: You had such an influx, servers fell over and you had some warning this might happen but it obviously exceeded even that. Yeah for an FPS game you generally don't have loads of queues to get into the game but for new MMOs, brand new MMOs, you will. But for us we had an issue really early on with getting into servers which meant there was a backlog at the queue and when the queue had a backlog it just meant it just got bigger and bigger and bigger and we're just taking stuff down so we basically had no choice but to do our best to fix it and but but really we just stayed really calm that was that was an amazing thing for us is we made a game years ago called battalion 1944 with a massively struggled at launch and obviously all the servers went down everything was broken it was just nowhere near we were just a bunch of kids making an fps game because of that really negative experience.

7:27We knew this time around, we had to invest massively in it. So we work with a company called Pragma who kind of run our backend and we have our own backend guys who work with them. So we had a really, really professional AAA backend team. And that's what people probably don't see is that actually it looks like small indie team in Derby. We have a hundred people and we haven't, we've outsourced some of our backend work and, you know, it's a lot bigger than people think.

7:52Joe Brammer: Do you think there's people over at Tencent right now looking at this going I'm saying bugger. Look, we had a great time with Tencent and this game wouldn't be possible without them. I think there's people at lots of the companies we've worked with over the years, as far back as Square Enix. We were with them. They're our first kind of publisher. I think. Yeah, I remember. Everyone like that is kind of kicking themselves. But I'd say that like the one constant throughout that journey is my first year in the industry was Debbie Bestwick and Team17. and she will not mind me saying that we tried to negotiate and I was big-headed and I turned her down twice when I was both times was like, I shouldn't have done that afterwards.

8:31And then this time she was like, if you do that again, I'm done with it. And she's been very nice and very helpful, but her advice has kind of helped me get to this point where I went through so much learning as an indie dev who came through the British education system, the British games education system to university into setting up its own studio and just kind of end up back with Team17 and a British publisher has been a really good journey. But I wouldn't say Tencent specifically are kicking themselves because I think they've got plenty of good things coming. But with War Dogs, they pushed us really hard to make something great.

9:07And that was our time there. Oh, very un-Joe answer there.

9:11Joe Brammer: Yes. It's true. Debbie, not to deep derail it, but years ago on Games and ShopBits, she was incredibly supportive, very encouraging of me to go off and do the game business and had loads of calls and chats with her. I had a family tragedy in 2018. She invited me up to see her and spent the day with me. Lovely person. She is nice. Scary but nice. She keeps me in line. So that's scary, but nice. That's yeah. Told no prisoners, I guess. The Iron Lady of the games in Stryth. Maybe. I'm not sure. I'm not sure she'd like any of these descriptions. I think she would. I think she would. you obviously you've been you're quite known for being transparent and honest i noticed that you've been actively encouraging players who have had had some of the issues to take a refund and then maybe come back later um does that level of sort of you know transparency that level of honesty is that really important do you think from a brand loyalty point of view is that what you think about when you say those sort of things it's quite funny because i've had this sort of question a lot throughout the last few weeks and games come and we're not transparent and we're not honest That's not what we're doing.

10:17We're being clear. And right now it's in our interest to be transparent about some things, but we're not telling everyone everything we're doing and we're not, you know, I don't, I'm not saying we're lying. I'm saying that like the brand is becoming that they believe we're transparent and honest and that's creating a new problem. And that if we choose not to be transparent or honest about something that therefore we're moving away from the thing that people believe we are. Whereas we've always been the same. We've kind of, you know, my LinkedIn kind of not, I don't want to say famous, but famously divisive.

10:49I get no likes in my comments, but somehow everyone at gamescom has said, I love that post you did. Right. Or you could have clicked like, but in the, um, in the, like, I think there's too much. And this goes for the game marketing side as well, not saying what you mean and not being clear. And I, I, I, something from satire, I forgot his name. for Nadella, yes, where he said like people should know what a leader should stand for. And at Bulkhead and online, people know what I, they know what I believe. They know I don't believe in work from home for making video games. They know I don't stand for that.

11:28They know I expect people to crunch. Like I own that. I don't try and hide it. That doesn't mean that we'd also didn't try and do the four day work week and make workplaces better. They know or care about my team and my very close team. And I think with War Dogs and how we did this marketing approach, it very much came from not just me, but also Howard, one of our founders and a few of our founders who were very frustrated on our journey from Square Enix to now with people who have the inability to say what they want or to hold themselves to account. And with War Dogs holding ourselves to account saying, for example, we're not going to monetize and early access is a kind of big thing, but also being clear and saying, don't play the game if you want these things, because we're not that.

12:13Don't be upset. And I think people respect, we knew that that 10 Reasons Why video, when we wrote it, we knew it was a hit. We knew that already. But in many ways, it was like obvious to us. It's obviously not Call of Duty. Don't buy this if you want to play Call of Duty. It's obviously not. So I think just saying it and owning it in all aspects of Bulkhead's marketing and Wardog's marketing has been the way to go. But I wouldn't necessarily call it honest and transparent. Like we have elements of being honest and transparent. But I think that's a mistake to say that because, spoilers Chris, I'm not giving you all the answers.

12:53Joe Brammer: It's a shame. That's why I'm here. You talk about that 10 reasons why, what's the name? 10 reasons why not to buy the game. Not to buy the game video. You know what's quite interesting about that is, this may be a tenuous thing, but one of my first interviews on the game business was with Arrowhead, Held Ivers 2. And obviously they had an idea of what their game was, they had a vision for their game, but then they had this situation, which maybe you're in now, I don't know, where they suddenly got an influx of Call of Duty players. And they're like, oh, we weren't expecting you guys to like this game.

13:21Joe Brammer: And then they adapted their game to what they thought Call of Duty players wanted. And in the end, they realised that was a mistake. And they had to move back to the sort of game it was supposed to be because ultimately people wanted the different things but um i guess you sound to me like you're talking about clarity does that clarity help you yeah setting expectations i think is an expectation management is really important like we can't pretend that we didn't set war dogs expectations really high and that we said it's going to be a really good game and you know lo and behold war dogs is a good game there are people at gamescom saying hey like how would you do this and your 10 reasons not to buy i'm like well your number one reason can't be that game's a bit that can't be the number one reason and yeah the game was good so we were confident but the the the biggest challenge for us now is that we were quite clear with the players but they weren't all have seen it is that we said we're not going to basically you would struggle in any of our marketing or messaging in the last two years to see where we say listen to feedback from the players you'll struggle to find it you may say like listen to the community or like observe things like that.

14:31But we know what we want to make. And this was a problem throughout, not just Tencent from Square Enix up to Tencent splash damage and even Team17 recently to some degree. And what we've learned is each layer we've gone through is people have understood like, we've got tougher is what I'd say and being like, we're not listening to you. We don't want to listen to you. We don't want to listen to you. And sometimes that makes enemies. But what we found is usually the middle layer of all publishers, to be clear, all publishers and businesses in the industry. A middle management layer seems to really struggle with having their position threatened and needing to exist and needing to control.

15:09And the higher up people in all of these companies again seem to really like our approach in that we know what we're making, this is what it is. If you don't like it, don't fund it. And that has been rewarding us. So we're now sticking with that. the problem is it hasn't gone wrong yet and i'm sure it will soon and i'll have a lot of people telling me i told you so but that was mostly my journey of splash damage there was a lot of like i'll try this it'll work and it didn't so yeah we've well if you ever listen to my interviews

15:37Joe Brammer: with live service games i actually ask that question a lot which is like how do you listen to the players but also stay true to your artistic vision and they always have an answer and it's always around you listen then you go right what will they're saying mean for us in our game Yeah, I think we're in a unique position, right, where we didn't go, this is what the early access version of the game will be, and this is what the big version of the game will be. We were making a big AAA game and then had to choose to go alone and we need to make a smaller game to then release it in time in a reasonable budget.

16:12So instead of designing a game and then Arrowhead being an example of how do we keep it going? or Greyzone Warfare another example how do we figure this out now we were like what do we not do to get it smaller and then now when we're like we know what we're making and players giving a feedback we're like we already have all the answers like especially when it comes to some of our balancing stuff in the bigger game we have the answers we have to keep building that thing that we're always building so it's sort of a model early access game in that we designed the full game for years and then very late when let's just build half of it yeah oh wow in the old days

16:53Joe Brammer: people would uh put that as the first game and then the sequel would be the game it's meant to be yeah we live in a live service world very much is that yeah i have to say when i think of shooters and i think of this genre and you think of the games that succeed in it and they're always ones that break through here and there they still often and bring up hell dives too it's not the best example because i guess they're quite a small team but like your battlefields and even the arc raiders talk about arc graders being a sort of small double-a gamer and that was a lot of people and a lot of money it was it was a lot less money than battlefield but that's that doesn't hide the fact that it was a huge project and here we are sort of talking about and i know it's very early days like they all disappear tomorrow i guess but um you've got a huge amount of success very very fast is it always a bit of a myth that this is a impenetrable genre it's it's all i want to say because I think um War Dogs has a very unique background from a team very few people make a game like Battalion 1944 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 like no one does that so I think it's very penetrable but I think 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 and I said this a couple times people um War Dogs is closer to Mecha Chameleon than it is to Call of Duty for me like when we were designing War Dogs it was about the social aspects and if you look at men 18 to 40 years old has a lot of lonely or bored or underappreciated men who miss their mates and war dogs his audience is 99.9 percent male doesn't mean we don't want women playing the game it means it's a huge demographic there and i think what we realized was we need to provide a space to have fun and do silly things.

19:00And a space where a 35-year-old man can still make a penis joke is kind of what it is. And we wrapped it in this military aesthetic because I think it grounds it and people can very quickly understand the rules, whereas something sci-fi that you'd be like, I don't know how that's going to work. So we basically made a social experience where people are basically playing digital rock, paper, scissors. You know, you buy this gun, there's a counter for that. You buy this one, there's a counter for that. And that's, and they're just doing stupid things and getting stuck. Like everybody thought that all of the publishers, all of them that were with this said, you can't have team killing on.

19:38And we were like, absolutely not. We need team killing on the amount of funny stuff that happens with team killing. It's hilarious. Um, so I think when you look at shooters, people look at them in a different way to how we, as players look at them and their opportunities to spend time with your friends. and that is what we were trying to do.

19:57Joe Brammer: How did your FPS game show, the FPS game show, how did that go? Better than we thought, harder than we thought. I think it was really cool that we could make something specific and bespoke for that audience, because I think, as you could, I'd love Jeff to come in and take this over because it was harder than I thought. But I think, and he'd do a better job too, if I could say, but, um, the reality is that our pub very public and unfair, perhaps feedback to big shows, obviously one of which being some ones that Jeff himself is involved with is that. I don't want my big game to be next to an Asian MMO.

20:42Yeah. And because it's my big opportunity and it just, you just get mixed messaging and then the players kind of dogpile something, but they were, They never should have even been watching it, you know. So I think breaking it up was really the way for us to go and seems to have worked.

21:01Joe Brammer: If we faces it himself, he said it when we came on, actually talk about the Game Awards, that it doesn't work for every game. And also, you are competing. It's a very competitive space. You know, it's all about everyone's trying to outdo each other's trailers and all that kind of stuff. If you're Capcom and you're trying to find a wider audience in Resident Evil beyond your core base, then there's an opportunity there. But yeah, I'm a Nintendo fan, you can tell. So I watched the Nintendo Directs and it's great Because I'm almost watching wall to wall stuff that I'm probably going to be interested in to some degree.

21:26Joe Brammer: I watch something like one of the more, you know, multi-platform shows and I might discover something I never even considered I'd be interested in. But actually most of it, I'm like, no, that's not for me. And that's not for me. And that's not for me. So from an audience perspective, I do find the big shows quite fun as well. But I do find the targeted ones definitely have a have a role. We wanted to be in those big ones, right? Like it's there's a it's a prestige that goes with it. and that the FPS game show will never deliver right yeah but there's also it's almost a digest kind of thing is what we're saying FPS game for digest is what it really was we can come digest all these updates from all these games you there's a higher chance you're interested in and then move on and I think that the real question is if War Dogs doesn't have a massive release on the doorstep does it still carry interest or was War Dogs driving all that but I think I want to do more of a festival type thing going forward and try and have like a, you know, some sort of paid tier because it did cost us a fair bit to run, but really just covering costs and then having a pre-show where a bit like an opening act where you can for free pick those indie games of teams of one to ten people that are making in the FPS games and go, this is what they're doing.

22:37So yeah, still toying with the different ideas at the moment, but yeah, harder than I thought.

22:42Joe Brammer: Well, everyone will be doing it. I think a lot of people are. um war dogs i'll wrap up talking about war dogs loads and loads of players lots and lots of interesting engagements probably two million by time this goes out you talked about how you might need to hire up how fast are you having to move in that regard are you completely sort of caught on the hoof um yeah our scenario where we sold 400 000 units you know we were making a few redundancies and just slimming up um for the last six years now actually thinking about this now out loud, uh, for the last five years, we have made six years. We've made redundancies every single year.

23:18Um, and about 20 % of the company, this will be the first year we haven't done it. Um, and that's what actually happened was the first year we did it is we cut quite a few people cause we'd overexpanded and we cut quite a few people, um, adequate performance warrants for generous severance is this kind of thing we'd, we'd stuck to. And then ironically, we did redundancies two years ago when it all kind of really started being a thing and people were panicking, but we were like, guys, we made less redundancies than we've ever made before. This is like, it was like eight people in the end. So I think we're very conscious of scaling up and, and upheaving people's lives and also getting a stain for kind of doing this.

24:02So it's not something we want to keep doing, but we do want to lean more and more into the kind of gig economy approach of it and what we've been doing is going you're really good we want you to leave your current job and come work with us why don't you do 12 months 18 months remote if we all get along because that often doesn't happen right we don't like how we all work we're working together we go we'll give you a big load of money in like a fixed offer to come and work for us in office so you can take like you've got this trigger you can pull in our contract and be like I would like my 25 grand now, please in cash, because I'm going to relocate to Darbados.

24:43So that price, that number is going to have to go up, I think. But it's yeah. So I think we're not we're definitely needing to scale and we definitely need to support the code of partners who did support us throughout the journey. But we need people and the cost of code of so high and the reliability is so low the best way for us to do it is to hire internally so yeah we're trying to rush in people who like fps games that's who we're looking for let's talk a little bit more

25:13Joe Brammer: broadly before to wrap up because um you've you've bought yourself out you know i think hero has capital as a stake and everplay which most people know as team 17 has a big chunk but the rest of it's owned by you and your staff is that that's that's right isn't it yeah so is it everyone's everyone's an owner in it is it like a big partnership how's it all work not everyone There wasn't enough to, it had to be meaningful. It's the same way we do bonuses. Not everyone gets a bonus, but when people do, they get a meaningful bonus. It's the same with our shares. We actually had to fight quite hard to get a bigger option pool and take it out of like some of the founders packages because it was unusual to have such a big one.

25:53But I think the whole vision is when the game does well, you do well. And I think 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. Especially recently we've been saying we need to be like the Lannisters and pay up at this point. We want people to know that like those people who do work hard, like that you do get that return and it is life changing. So it's quite a controversial stance for us to have, but we, there's numerous people who've worked at bulkhead, bought houses with cash they've got. And this time around I'm going to be really excited to see there's juniors who've been with us for two years, three years who are going to get money again to buy a house or at least a down payment and we actually find is we have to coach them with this is not financial advice but please don't spend all your money on takeaway and energy drinks so we have a new kind of responsibility to our younger staff who are making good money um and usually and often money they haven't seen before

26:52Joe Brammer: i'm interested you've brought up crunch twice now what does that actually look like if because because because it can mean different things to different people i know somebody who's a much younger person that i know you started in game development and him crunch was like occasionally having to stay a couple of hours and i'm like that that that that sounds like you're on deadline i don't think that's it's quite the same thing but everyone has different different views on what it is it generally it depends what age you are it's what we're seeing um the older you know, the older guys are like, this isn't crunch.

27:24This is like mild overtime. But to do that, we have to be very conscious and supportive of our own staff and try and coach them to know when it's enough, when it's not enough. And what's quite frustrating is I find British HL, our laws quite restrictive to wanting to do better things. The four day work week, for example, was very restrictive. we had to get around laws to make the four day work week possible and I think when we try and do something a bit different again we hit blockages but in terms of defining what it is I always use the analogy of life being a balancing act and sometimes you know if you ask someone to mimic balancing they will put two hands out like they're on a tightrope kind of thing but really it's probably more like this and for the last three months war dogs has been more important than a of their family lives.

28:17It has been because that's what pays the money for them. But now Bulkhead and me have to acknowledge that it needs to go the other way. So for example, everyone's pushing us to get console out earlier and we've just said, no, you don't understand. Like that's not how it's going to work. We can't, 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 that they have a company where they know they can say i'm tapping out and not feel like they're going to get fired for tapping out is that not because you're talking about you know

28:54Joe Brammer: trying to bring people in and i appreciate you're up front and you're transparent about it you know this is what's expected of you in this company but i always think about there's the industry gets older right and people who make games get older i have so much less i when i was starting off in game journalism nobody made me do it i want to be clear no i was never working anywhere that sort of told me I had to work extra hours, but I did. And I did a lot. I physically can't anymore. I mean, I do move my hours around and stuff, but I have far less ability to do it now that I've got children. And there's a certain level of expectations that for me, it sounds like all sorts of different how difficult that is.

29:28Yeah, it's getting harder, right? The average age is 33 in the company, so it's getting harder and harder to do. But that again just means we have to make an adjustment. So for instance, we once tried to do paternity leave and give people 10 weeks paternity and it was a disaster because they 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 and it was super consistent so we went the other way we went two weeks paternity the bare minimum and then we and then what we said was the third week you come back half day just the morning and i don't care if you do no work you're training your partner how to look after their first child together and you're building a routine and then the third week it was like you do uh full days for two of the days whatever and then we say is we're going to give you three weeks to use as paternity weeks across the entire year for the first year because as you know the first two weeks are actually kind of easy for a lot of people for some people it's it's a yeah it's a lot of sleep yeah if you get you get it gets a lot harder later so and that again like do you know what be honest i think that you can interpret that in hr laws other people being given more holiday than others who are not in the same position so you can actually go that's not fair but we're just like sue us at this point like this is ridiculous so trying to look at it in

30:52Joe Brammer: different ways and we talk about yeah yeah you've always done this joe you win because obviously we You took part in Best Place to Work Awards when I launched that many, many years ago. And from the four-day working week was your effort to sort of go, hey, we're introducing this, we're trying this. Even back then, I remember from your entries, it was like, there's a lot of really thinking about this. I'm coming up with alternative ways of trying to, you know, approach things just like your example there around paternity. I think that's what one day I'll write a book about this when we're all doomed.

31:22But the four-day work week being, it was never about working four days a week. it was always about working differently. And the snazzy title was four day work week. But really it was like, if we had a great idea, we really liked of like, look, in the summers, we work in office. In the winters, we work from home. And having that seasonal flip of like, it's always dark. You never get the sunlight. Spending time in traffic, it's miserable. Just work from home. You get to see daylight a bit more. But that doesn't work for kids in the bedroom. So I think just doing something differently and accepting that challenge and to credit the staff when we we would like playing with their lives going change the amount of time you're doing something and going okay we're gonna work these hours now that's really hard but it took the the two-way relationship of a company and for that to work the staff have to work with the company as well but to your question before um a lot of people that may have an issue with crunch rightly so i understand you know i understand that issue i I don't want to say we are.

32:23We always try and avoid it, right? But we don't hide that this is going to happen at some point. They often don't make it in the door because 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, this is a place to work. You'll feel really valued. If you don't, you will feel slave driven. and it's a constant to and fro with that. But we will check people's socials and if you're constantly tweeting anti-crunch messaging, this should never ever be a thing. We know that and we're like, look, you're not going to be happy here, so we're not going to go with you.

33:06Joe Brammer: I think it's interesting you brought up, I think in another interview, how when you told staff in December that, look, or maybe it was December, I can't remember exactly what it was, look, but there there might be some redundancies you're all at risk of redundancy and nobody leaked that yep that was a that was a good one we said you if you leak it it'll change the whole dynamics of our deal that we're working on with hero and 10 uh 10 team 17 and all these guys so we we can't leak it and um what was more annoying was we said like we're going to do absolutely everything to protect everyone's jobs here guys that's what we're doing like we've got it but we can't guarantee anything So if you have a job, go look for a job.

33:45Like if you've got an offer, I'm telling you to take it, accept it. We know hard feelings, like please do it. And what happened was the whole team went, Joe, we've got you back. You can do this. And I'm there like, I can't do this. Take the job. Like I'm telling you, we're going down. It's like a Titanic sinking. They're like, it's okay. We'll fix it. Don't worry. We trust you. like 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 so yeah okay um you've stopped the four-day work weeks now though isn't

34:23Joe Brammer: it is that uh you've had to take a break we've always been clear that doesn't make you more productive we've never ever said it makes you more productive it makes you shock horror 20 % productive but um i think we've always got an ambition to go back to doing something else So with the staff today, we told them they've got the entire December off. Right. Oh, nice. But then someone tried to book every Friday off between now and December. And we said, no way you asshole. Like, let's balance this. So, you know, we were always producing a bit different, but the stat like a bulkhead, you have the standard holidays, like 20 days statutory, but you never, no one's ever had 20 days holiday.

35:01They've always had more. So yeah, it's a weird trying to work within the law and provide a good service to people and a law that's designed to stop bad people. It makes quite restrictive, difficult. Are some other questions related to that?

35:17Joe Brammer: Do you have a connect with, I read something about a Netflix crew. Is that thing still happening? Yeah, we've had a Netflix, it's not Netflix. It's a Netflix approved camera setup thing. They've been following us for four years now. Oh, wow. We always call, talk about ourselves as bulkhead is an entertainment company that makes video games and the video games are vehicle for us to make entertainment and money kind of thing. So yes, we make money on our game sales, but we need to keep people interested in us. So again, it's not necessarily transparent in that we're not showing people everything, but everything's on camera.

35:54So we can choose what to show them. So for example, we had servers go down on our launch day. the entire thing. We had two camera men in the whole thing, just all night for like eight hours of filming. And then we cut it together and released it 24 hours later, I think. And now we're deciding whether we go with, we're having some conversations with those bigger platforms. But ultimately we think we have more power and control as we do it via this new YouTube premiere system it's got. But it's really interesting if nothing else, I think, and you'll just see like it just is hard work you can't make war dogs without hard work

36:33Joe Brammer: now let's talk about you being involved in the hell let loose series has that i mean it sounds like you've been quite busy with war dogs but has that come to pass yeah it's it's no secret that we were working with team 17 um and they have a big fps game and we love world war 2 fps games so we don't have any confirmation right now because we're only so many people but um wherever we can be involved in working on a cool fps game we will be so we're talking about it but it's not like uh this is happening thing and um yeah just i'm always down for more hell or loose so i was surprised hell it loose and the war dogs were so close together it was particularly from the same publisher that was a bit of a um uh yeah i was yeah anyway i think there's always slips and date slips and then eventually they end up in the same window and you know at a certain point you've got to release them so yeah but also you said earlier about competition and i think that these a lot of these players buy all these games and move between them oh yeah i think it's kind of nice to see it because i don't think the uk has necessarily been known for shooters it's not entirely true we're trying to fix it we're trying to fix it well if you go back to goldeneye i guess and rare and then sort of uh time splitters and then the bit of you know here and there and black and whatever but like certainly not recently but then there's you and then there's the hellet loose team i've forgotten their names for a second there and um battlefield six been made in criterion i know it's part i thought they're not the lead studio on it but it seems like a little bit of a i think for us like that's one of our that's our advantage right is you can make we also work on pub g right we have a pub g team we're doing some stuff there a couple of times we've gone to hire someone and they've gone we go watch the dream game like this guy's gonna be awesome on war dogs gonna really help sound against all my dream games work on pub view and like, for God's sake, I'm like, this is going to happen to put him on the PUBG team.

38:20So yeah, like we're trying to be the place to go and work if you want to work on an FPS game.

38:25Joe Brammer: Joe, I had that when I was a GI. I invite someone in to do an interview and say, I'd love working for Eurogamer. I'm like, ah. Yeah. Ah, balls. Yeah. You'd go eventually. I've taken up too much of your time, so I'm going to ask my question I always end with, which I know you're in the middle of sort of, you know, this huge launch and dealing with all these players all this feedback and all this noise, but where would you like to be in five years? Ooh, it's a good question. I think the easiest answer is I want to be making games with my friends still. That's why our thing works is we've been friends for 12 years since we left uni and made a company.

39:04I want to be making games with my friends. New friends come in, some friends leave, but that's what I'd like to be doing. And within that, really what we're trying to do is this hard work period has made us a lot of our own independent money that we can choose what to do with we can choose how hard to work and that's what the staff really got behind after years of being owned by different people the ability to say we don't want to work in that on that i think is a really powerful thing will only make us make better games but being able to spend more time with our families and then make games with our friends feels like a dream come true to us well joe it

39:42Joe Brammer: It certainly seems like it's been a battle, but congratulations on the launch of War Dogs. I'll be watching it, of course, as the numbers inevitably go up and down and do all that thing where the emotional roller coaster of running an online shooter game. Yeah. And I'll still be listening to your podcast. So please keep going with it. Yeah. I like the fact you mow the lawn every week. Yeah. Well, there's a lot to digest in there. Well, that's it from us for the Game Business Show. I will be back with more news analysis, insight and interviews in the days and weeks ahead. you can find all our stuff on thegamebusiness.com or so you can sign up to our newsletter there to make sure you never miss an episode.

40:18Joe Brammer: But that's it from us today. Until next time, thank you for tuning in.