"We hire people who are ready to work hard": Bulkhead CEO does not want to hire those who are dissatisfied with crunch time
Joe Brammer, the CEO of Wardogs’ authoring studio, gave an interview to The Game Business portal. During the conversation, he stated that he views crunch times as inevitable and does not hide the likelihood of them occurring from potential new employees.
Wardogs
Brammer believes that developers should understand what they are committing to when joining his team. Even though Bulkhead tries to avoid crunch periods as much as possible, the top manager knows that sooner or later they will occur.
“If you care about your work and the fruits of your labor, you will feel like a valued employee here. If not, it may seem like slavery to you,” Brammer added.
The head of Bulkhead also shared that the studio reviews candidates' social media and simply refuses to hire those who regularly criticize the crunch culture in their posts. In his opinion, such specialists would feel uncomfortable working at Bulkhead anyway, so it’s better not to complicate anyone's life in advance.
This does not mean Bulkhead employees are constantly overworked. According to Brammer, before the early access release of Wardogs, developers indeed had to sacrifice a significant portion of their personal time, but they will be on vacation for the entire month of December. There will also be generous financial bonuses. Furthermore, the studio decided not to rush the console version release of Wardogs despite gamers' requests to speed up.
As a reminder, Wardogs was released on September 10th on Steam and quickly achieved success. Within the first five days, the game's sales exceeded 2 million copies.