Wardogs Studio Checks Steam Accounts to Hire Passionate FPS Fans: “You have to put the Steam hours”

If you are applying to work at Wardogs developer Bulkhead, your resume apparently is not the only thing the studio wants to see. The developer checks applicants’ Steam records to see how much experience they have with first-person shooter games.

The reasoning is fairly straightforward. Bulkhead wants people who understand the genre from a player’s perspective, particularly the small details that can make or break an FPS. Speaking to GamesRadar+, studio CEO and Wardogs executive director Joe Brammer and senior producer Kane Allard explained why Steam hours have become part of the conversation:

[We] won’t always get it right, but we like people to know where their money is going and what type of studio it’s going into, and [into] someone that they feel they can share values with.. We are FPS players. You know, [when] you apply to Bulkhead, you have to put the Steam hours.

For a studio making a multiplayer FPS, that experience can give developers a better understanding of the details players notice during hundreds of hours with the genre.

Bulkhead Wants Developers Who Understand FPS Games

Bulkhead is not claiming that playing other genres makes someone a worse developer. In the interview, Brammer specifically distinguished between general development ability and having firsthand familiarity with the type of game the studio is making:

It doesn’t make you a worse developer, but we want to know that you really care about the details of what we’re doing.

In other words, Bulkhead is not simply looking for people who can say they like shooters. The studio wants developers who spend enough time playing them to understand things such as weapon feel, movement, balance, pacing, and the smaller decisions that FPS players tend to notice more readily.

Brammer compared the approach to asking him to make a game in a genre he does not understand. He used Final Fantasy as the example, arguing that his lack of familiarity would make him the wrong person to make that kind of game:

I wouldn’t be able to do that. I wouldn’t know what we’re talking about. So to pretend that they’re in the same industry sometimes is a bit silly. So we just prioritize hiring FPS developers.

This approach is certainly more specific than the usual “passionate about making games” line found in developer job listings. Bulkhead is essentially asking potential hires to show that passion through something far less polished than a resume: how much time they actually spend playing FPS games.

WARDOGS Is Leaning Into Old-School FPS Ideas

That hiring philosophy also makes more sense when you look at some of the decisions Bulkhead has made with Wardogs, as well as their roadmap ahead. The game launched into Early Access on September 10, 2026, with community servers and a server browser, two features that have become increasingly uncommon in large multiplayer shooters.

Bulkhead recently admitted that it had not given community servers enough attention and released Patch 0.11 to improve the experience. The update separated Official and Community servers, added better filters and search tools, and gave community servers persistent IDs.

— WARDOGS (@WARDOGS) September 12, 2026

The studio described community servers as “the lifeblood of FPS games like ours” (via Steam), which says quite a bit about the kind of shooter Bulkhead is trying to make. It is a pretty direct statement of intent from a developer that clearly wants its games to be shaped by people who understand why these features matter in the first place.

Would you want a game developer to have thousands of hours in the genre they are working on? Does playing an FPS game extensively actually make someone better at understanding what players want? Let us know in the comments below!