Two months after his first crunch row, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer has told Edge "we do crunch" and that devs who won't do overtime for a six-figure salary can get stuffed.
Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer told Edge "we do crunch" and that sometimes, near a launch, "work's more important" than life.
He said devs who won't do overtime on a 100K salary can f*** off, calling it "Californian bulls***".
It follows his September row over checking applicants' socials for anti-crunch posts, which he later walked back.
Bulkhead says the Wardogs beta crunch was four optional weeks, and points to a four-day week, staff shares and December off.
Wardogs has sold over 3 million copies. Bulkhead is in Derby, England, where game dev pay is usually well under US$100K.
Joe Brammer has done it again. The Bulkhead CEO, whose studio made one of the biggest shooters of the year in Wardogs, has told Edge magazine that game devs who won’t work overtime on a US$100K salary can, and we’re cleaning this up a bit, f*** off. “Respectfully, it’s Californian bulls***,” he added.
If you’re thinking “didn’t this bloke already cop a hiding for crunch talk in September?”, yes. Yes he did. Two months, one clarification and three million sales later, he’s gone and said the quiet part even louder.
In the interview, reported by GamesRadar+ on 4 November, Brammer laid out why Bulkhead is so picky about who it hires. He has previously said the studio checks applicants’ Steam accounts to see if they’re actually into FPS games. “We liked how talent-driven the industry used to be,” he said. “And then it started to be about ‘everybody should be able to get a job in games.’ We don’t really think like that.”
He reckons the industry’s hiring “floodgates opened” and are now closing again, and that there might be some benefit in telling people “you have to be f***ing good to be here, and you have to prove your worth.”
Then he got to the hours. “Our team doesn’t love working late, but they do work late and we do crunch,” he said. “What we’re saying is that sometimes, yes, life is more important. But sometimes, when you’re on the eve of releasing a game that keeps you all employed, work’s more important.”
And the line that’s now all over the internet came when he talked about his mum, a teacher and headteacher. He said he’d never seen anyone do so much crunch for barely any money, so when game devs say they don’t want to work overtime for their 100K salary, his answer is the one in the headline.
Back on 15 September, days after Wardogs launched into Early Access, Brammer told Christopher Dring at The Game Business that Bulkhead tries to avoid crunch but doesn’t hide that it’ll happen at some point. He also said the studio checks people’s socials, and that applicants who are constantly posting anti-crunch messages rarely get hired because “you’re not going to be happy here.”
That went down about as well as you’d expect. Within a day he was on X saying nobody ever called crunch mandatory and that reporters “made this up”. In a statement to Eurogamer he said the comments were informal chat about studio culture, not the formal hiring process, and that Bulkhead only looks at publicly available info in line with UK law.
He also gave the actual numbers. After Bulkhead ran late on the Wardogs beta build in June, the team did four weeks of overtime: two extra hours a day, Monday to Thursday. He said it was optional, that four people opted out with no consequences, and admitted “social pressure” might have left some people feeling less than great about it.
To be fair, he pointed to the other side of the ledger too:
On the less flattering side, Kotaku and The Game Business noted Bulkhead has made layoffs every year for the past six years, and Brammer himself posted a video of beds set up in the studio around launch, saying some people had been there two days straight.
Here’s the bit that doesn’t add up. Bulkhead is based in Derby, in England’s East Midlands, not the Bay Area. US$100K is roughly £75,000, and nobody on the UK pay data we checked thinks that’s a typical game dev wage. Job ad tracker ITJobsWatch had the median advertised UK game developer salary at £30,000 earlier this year, and Paylab’s survey puts 80 per cent of UK game devs somewhere between roughly £30,000 and £67,000. Specialist programmers earn more, sure, but the “spoiled six-figure dev” Brammer is swinging at mostly lives in California, which is probably why he named it.
His point about teachers is fair, by the way. Teachers in the UK, and here in NZ and Australia, absolutely do unpaid hours for rubbish money. But “someone else has it worse” has never been a great reason to make your own team’s life harder. It’s an argument for paying teachers more, not for everyone else to crunch.
None of this is happening at a struggling studio. Wardogs hit 3 million sales 18 days after its 10 September Early Access launch, peaked at more than 428,000 concurrent players on Steam, and topped Newzoo’s September PC revenue chart ahead of FC 27 and Fortnite. Brammer has also admitted the team is “overwhelmed” by the game’s success.
Which is exactly why the comments land so badly. The game that “keeps you all employed” is selling like crazy. The studio has the money and the breathing room. And the guy at the top is using it to tell the rest of the industry that people who want boundaries should get stuffed.
Look, the GetRekt crew plays a lot of Wardogs. We’ve written about the launch, the Blue team bribe and the Season 3 U-turn. The game rips. That’s why this is so frustrating.
Plenty of what Bulkhead actually does sounds better than the industry average: a four-day week for half the project, a month off, staff owning a big chunk of the company. If Brammer just talked about that, he’d be the boss everyone wanted to work for. Instead he keeps leading with “we do crunch” and telling devs who don’t want to work late to get stuffed. You can’t brag about a four-day week and screen out anyone who’s ever tweeted against crunch in the same breath. Pick one.
And “optional” overtime that people feel social pressure to do isn’t really optional. He admitted as much himself. When the CEO is out there telling the world that people who say no are talking Californian bulls***, how optional do you reckon it feels to the junior dev sitting in that office?
Bulkhead’s staff earned a hit. They’ve earned their December off. What they haven’t earned is a boss who keeps handing the internet ammo every time he gets near a microphone. Give the team some peace, Joe. Go play GTA 6 too.
Reckon Brammer’s got a point, or is this peak boss brain? Come argue about it with the crew in the GetRekt Discord.
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