Bulkhead's Wardogs has become a Steam hit thanks to sales of over two million copies since launch, but not so long ago it looked like writing was on the wall not just for the game, but for the studio, too.

Speaking to The Game Business, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer reveals that when Tencent walked away, he faced the very real prospect of making his 100-person team redundant.

"What happened was the whole team went, ‘Joe, we’ve got your back, you can do this’," says Brammer. "And I’m there like, ‘I can’t do this! Take the job! I’m telling you we’re going down!’ 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’."

Investment firm Hiro Capital and Team17 parent Everplay stepped in, and a deal was made to save the 100-player online shooter, which has now repaid Brammer and his team's faith in him many times over.

Brammer says that the scaled-back Wardogs needed to sell 400,000 copies to survive, and even then the company would have had to make some of its staff redundant. 600,000 copies would have been a more agreeable target, but it ended up getting a million sales based on pre-orders alone – and that has now surpassed two million.

To say it's been a rollercoaster ride would be an understatement, but Brammer admits he and his team haven't had time to take stock of what's happened.

"We haven’t had much time to celebrate,” he tells The Game Business. “It was obviously a lot bigger than we expected. Which is great, it’s also been: ‘Oh my God.’ Like DDoS attacks, constant cheaters, and things that, at scale, are just bigger problems.”

One thing Brammer is sure of is the fact that the spectre of job losses no longer hangs over Bulkhead as it once did:

"For the last six years, we have made redundancies every single year, about 20% of the company. This will be the first year we haven’t done it.

We’re very conscious of scaling up and upheaving people’s lives, and also getting a stain for doing this. We want to lean more and more into the gig economy approach. What we’ve been doing is going, ‘You’re really good. We want you to leave your job and come work with us. Why don’t you do 12 or 18 months remote? And if we get along, we’ll give you a big load of money in a fixed offer to come and work for us in-office’.

We definitely need to scale. But we need people, and the cost of co-dev is so high and the reliability is so low, the best way for us to do it is to hire internally. So, we’re trying to rush, and people who like FPS games are who we’re looking for."

You can read (and listen to) the full interview here.