“They wouldn’t look at any game that was less than £50 million” Why Tencent’s all-in strategy didn’t suit Bulkhead

The team at Bulkhead has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Initially working on indie budgets, the studio eventually found millions being thrown its way under Tencent. But ultimately, it was more money than they could spend.

The company started out around 11 years ago as a group of friends who left university and dove straight into the then-booming games industry, telling fibs to the relatively-new ID@Xbox programme in order to secure an Xbox One dev kit to work on 2016’s The Turing Test. “I just lied on a form and said we had loads of devs from Fable working with us,” recalls CEO and founder Joe Brammer. “We were like three devs or something like that.”

The firm had huge success with its military shooter Battalion 1944 in 2019, which went on to sell north of 580,000 units according to Video Game Insights’ estimates, although it saw some controversy when the console versions promised in the game’s Kickstarter campaign failed to materialise. The game was published by the indie imprint Square Enix Collective, and the Japanese firm bought a 20% stake in the developer in 2018. Bulkhead later worked on a survival game for Square Enix, but found itself caught in a space between indie and AAA with its £2 million budget.

“We were too big for Collective, too small for Square Enix, so we just got lost in that middle ground,” says Brammer.

The project was eventually canned, and Bulkhead split with Square Enix in 2022. Later that same year, the studio was acquired by Splash Damage, which had been acquired itself by the Chinese giant Tencent around two years previously, when Tencent snapped up Splash Damage’s parent company Leyou Technologies for around $1.3 billion.

For Brammer and his team, being purchased by a bigger company didn’t just mean a level of security and a pocket full of cash; it was an opportunity to gain knowledge from an established studio with a wealth of experience.

“We figured we could do some real learning, because it’d been six or seven years and we’d never had any mentors or people to listen to,” Brammer laughs. “I levelled up massively from being a stroppy, passionate kid to being a business leader… There’s really talented individuals in both of these companies. We wouldn’t be the company we are today without Splash Damage.”

Make it bigger

“The first year we were with Tencent, 2022, it was a dream,” recalls Brammer. “It was like: ‘Here’s a load of money, go and make a thing, tell us what it is and who you’re selling it for’. It was great. That was when we got the most out of it.”

Bulkhead pitched PC first-person shooter Wardogs, a project with a budget of between £10 million and £12 million. It was a massive step up for the team, but Tencent wanted the studio to go even bigger.

“They’d say that it wasn’t big enough for them,” Brammer says. “They told everyone in the UK in 2021/22 that they wouldn’t look at any game that was less than £50 million… It was not what we wanted to make. It was too big.”

Brammer says that the parent company was at times suspicious of how little cash the studio was spending on Wardogs. “We were hitting all our targets,” he says. “Even though we were doing a four-day work week, we were drilling through things. They’d say they were suspicious and say we were underdelivering… because we had spent 50% of the money we said we’d spend. We couldn’t spend that money. We were very adamant [about] not throwing money at people and problems.”

Regardless of these growing pains, Brammer says that Tencent liked Wardogs, and the firm initially retained Bulkhead when it set out to divest Splash Damage – ultimately selling it to a private equity firm (eventually revealed to be Emona Capital) in September 2025.

But in the end, it seems, Wardogs was just too small for Tencent’s tastes. Mike McGarvey at Hiro Advisory – which advised on Bulkhead’s bid to go independent late last year – told GamesIndustry.biz in a recent interview that Tencent’s priorities had changed, which meant that Bulkhead was “not getting enough focus, support, and all the other things that they need as a smaller developer.”

In hindsight, Brammer describes Bulkhead’s time under Tencent as involving “quite corporate work.”

“I was being shoved into board meetings,” he says. “I wondered why we were doing this. We never ever wanted to be in corporate… We wondered whether we should just quit and start another company and do it all over again.”

“When we found out we had to find a buyer or close, we just told everybody.”

Eventually, it became clear that things weren’t going to work out.

“The long and the short of it was we were going to have to shut the company in December last year. But we took a different approach to a lot of other studios when we found out we were going to have to find a buyer or close. We just told [all the staff]. For 12 months, everyone knew. The message was: ‘If you find another job, we want you to take it’. We saw that our staff was highly committed and dedicated to us. We felt we couldn’t abandon them and start again with a small team and just do game development.”

Ultimately, Bulkhead did a deal with Team17’s parent company Everplay to help spin the studio out under a new holding company, Super Media Group. Everplay owns 20% of SMG, while Hiro Capital has a minority stake, and “close to 50%” of Bulkhead staff own stock in the company.

“Ultimately, people really care about the thing they work on all day, every day, and what we found is when people feel like they’re in the trenches together, morale goes up,” says Brammer. “When we told people ‘you’re at risk of redundancy’, we told them our plan and said that it might not go through. We told them ‘prepare for this, and here’s how we’re going to solve this, and we will update you every week we get closer to it.’ Then the day we signed it, we went to the pub and it was just one of the best days ever. For the team to be given really scary, really bad news like that, and to stick together… No one posted on LinkedIn. No one from Bulkhead said they were at risk of redundancy. They just hung in there.”

The other side

The studio is still working on Wardogs, which is being published by Team17, and which involves 100 players split between three teams, all fighting over a single control zone. The game is set to launch into Early Access at some point in 2026, and Bulkhead is hoping to stand out in the crowded shooter market with a unique angle.

“The difference is between each game, you keep your cash,” Brammer says. “You spend money on weapons, you get a kill, and you get money for it. It’s a bit like Counter-Strike, but between games you keep your money in your bank account. There’s some inspiration from MMOs there. What we want to do is reward players’ time. We want people to feel value, that they were given something for playing, which is something that shooters notoriously struggle with at the moment. At its core, that’s what Wardogs is. But on simpler teams, it’s all-out warfare, bombs, tanks, guns, planes in a big battlefield.”

This isn’t the first time that Bulkhead has launched into Early Access; Battalion 1944 spent over a year in paid alpha before its 1.0 launch in May 2019.

“We’re quite big on community,” Brammer says. “Not in the way AAA companies say it, but if you make a 100-player game, we need feedback from players all the time. We need lots of testers. Relying on the audience and building it alongside them is really good.”

Tencent had big aims for Wardogs; Brammer says the company is “really ambitious” and wants its studios to “dream impossibly big”. “I think until you’ve seen how they solve problems and the sort of money they spend on problems, you can’t really understand how big you’re supposed to dream,” he says. But Bulkhead doesn’t want to dream big, or at least not that big. It just wants to “retain a player base”.

“We’re not trying to take on Battlefield or anything like that or be the biggest game on Steam”

“For us, having a game that has 3,000 players every night and selling a few hundred thousand copies, that’s successful,” Brammer says, adding that breaking away from Tencent has left them redefining what success means. “Now what we’re asking is whether we get to work with our friends? Do we get to work on our own game? Do we get to be in charge of our own destiny? We’re looking at what success is for us now, and we realised in that corporate journey that that is what success is to us.”

Going independent has changed the parameters. “We can dream realistically sized. We don’t have to move someone else’s needle. Our judge, owner, and investor are the players. They keep us in business. That approach and being very product-focused and customer-focused is what is going to separate us out.”

In short, big isn’t always best. “We’re not trying to take on Battlefield or anything like that or be the biggest game on Steam. We’re trying to consistently deliver and build up to something. I think we expect our player account to go bang day one and then trickle off. We’re going to see that happen. We’re not secret about that.” Instead, the idea is to supply a steady drip feed of content, gradually build up the community, and then eventually release on console “in one big package.”

It’s an approach that stands in stark comparison to Tencent-backed Highguard – a game that seemingly followed an “everything or nothing” strategy which saw it being shut down after less than two months, despite attracting more than two million players.

The gamble

All in all, it’s been quite the journey. In addition to working on Wardogs, Bulkhead has been “sought out” by major players in the FPS industry, and is contributing to PUBG and Team17’s Hell Let Loose. It has has also been followed by a “Netflix-approved” camera team for the last four years, detailing the inner workings of Bulkhead.

But Brammer is fully aware that the company isn’t out of the woods yet; Wardogs still needs to perform, and everyone at the studio knows it.

“That could mean redundancies, or it could mean bonus schemes. That’s the games industry”

“Right now, we’re focused on releasing Wardogs this year and reacting to how that does,” Brammer explains. “That could mean redundancies, or it could mean bonus schemes. That’s the games industry. For some people, that transparency is really comfortable. But actually, what we found is that people like to know where they stand and what the stakes are.”

The studio has at least moved to a “nice new office space” and Brammer says he wants to find a way to reward his team for their work over the last few years. “We’re currently not doing the four-day work week,” he says. “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.”

He really wants the staff to be happy, he says, “because by the time we release Wardogs, it would have probably been two years of: ‘You might lose your job’. [I want to] come out the other side and go: ‘Hey, we’re good, we can show we have lots of cash for X years, and we’re going to work in this way and we’re going to do this thing’.”