Exclusive Gaming Interviews Wolfjaw CEO on Live Service Craze: “Publishers Saw Fortnite, PUBG & LoL and Decided They Needed 50 of Each” Alessio Palumbo • at EDT Add on Google In our exclusive interview, Wolfjaw CEO Mitchell Patterson explains why the live service craze exploded: publishers suddenly wanted "50 PUBG, Fortnite, and League of Legends". Today's exclusive interview is a bit different from the usual because it is focused on a company called Wolfjaw Studios that is probably unknown to most gamers but still powers many of the most played online games, including the likes of NBA 2K, WWE 2K, Destiny 2, Marathon, Among Us, and Magic: The Gathering Arena. Founded in 2019 by Mitchell Patterson (following a conversation at TwitchCon 2018), Wolfjaw was built from scratch around a single, focused ambition: to establish backend development as a distinct, mission-critical discipline within game development, rather than an afterthought bolted on after the "real" work was done. The studio's first major contracts came in 2020 with Unity and 2K, and in 2021, it was called upon by Innersloth when Among Us exploded during the COVID pandemic and urgently needed to scale its backend to handle millions of concurrent players. Related Story Epic Games Will Reportedly Launch an Extraction Shooter “Along the Lines of ARC Raiders” With Disney Characters in November 2026Since then, Wolfjaw has claimed a 29-0 record across major game launches, meaning none of the titles it has supported have gone down at launch. Across that run, the studio has served over 880 million unique players and sustained peak concurrent user counts exceeding 30 million. Its 70-person team, spread across 16 states in the US, collectively brings "more than half a millennium" of experience from some of the biggest names in the industry, including veterans of Bungie, Respawn Entertainment, Riot Games, PUBG Corporation, Blizzard, and Bethesda. I recently had the chance to interview Wolfjaw founder and CEO Mitchell Patterson to learn more about this seemingly invisible yet critical co-development team. It was a very interesting talk in which Patterson shared opinions on topics such as the backend failures that have plagued many live service games, the industry-wide rush to create even more live service games following the explosive success of a few, and the advent of AI. His words on the excessive focus on live service game development also find an echo in today's Newzoo report, which found that over 56% of PC gaming revenue now flows to games outside the Top 20, suggesting the stranglehold of the mega-game may be loosening at last. Let's start with your own background, Mitchell. How did you end up founding Wolfjaw? Mitchell Patterson: I was actually a political science and history major. I went into politics, didn't like it, moved into fundraising, and eventually found myself wanting to get into games. I started working with small studios of around 15 to 20 people, doing everything from art to websites. I helped one of them get acquired by PUBG's parent company, Bluehole. I was at TwitchCon San Jose in 2018 when Bluehole offered me a chance to come along, and I decided I'd rather start my own studio instead. My focus from the start was non-game work, specifically on infrastructure. I wanted to build the backends that game studios didn't want to deal with. Right out of the gate, we signed Velan Studios and built the backend for Knockout City. Big wins came quickly after: we signed Unity, then 2K, and since then we've been working on NBA 2K, WWE 2K, and TopSpin 2K25, among others. The goal has always been to be a boutique, high-end operation. We're not a "something for everybody" studio, but the best backend team in the business, regardless of engine or language. You've described Wolfjaw as something of an invisible developer: gamers don't know you, but they rely on your work constantly. Do you wish that would change at some point and that you would get more public recognition? It's a bit like the airbag in a car: you don't think about it until something goes wrong. We've never actually gone down, and that's probably been our worst marketing element, because most people have heard of the platforms and competitors that have had public failures, but not us. Payday 3 is one of the more famous examples: it practically killed Starbreeze as we knew it, and a lot of that came down to infrastructure that wasn't built to scale. We're the ones that have never had that conversation. At the same time, I do want Wolfjaw to be better known. Not necessarily so gamers know our name, but so that when developers and publishers need this kind of work, they know we're the right people to call. I've sat down with COOs at 2K, Sony, and other major publishers and they'll bring up a competitor, and I'll ask them to name a single AAA game that competitor has shipped. They can't. They just have really good marketing. In your slide, I noticed Wolfjaw has four core pillars. Can you outline them for us? Project co-leadership and production, backend systems architecture, server orchestration, and cross-platform authentication and entitlement. On production: I'm not an engineer, which is probably why I appreciate good project management so much. Having a strong production layer makes an enormous difference to efficiency. On architecture: whenever someone joins the team and says "I only want to work in Go" or "I only want to work on Unreal," I tell them to drop that idea immediately. We've worked on over 18 different engines and more than 20 coding languages. We know how to build a backend, not just how to scale one that was built for a specific platform. On server orchestration: games are probably the hardest environment in the world to build orchestration for. You have different platforms, different internet speeds, different geographic locations, and players who are constantly in motion — it's nothing like a static site. Achieving peak concurrencies of 2, 3, 4, or 5 million players is a completely different challenge from what most software companies ever face. On cross-platform entitlement: this is still, remarkably, something that catches major studios off guard. I've sat with engineers at Sony and Microsoft who built great single-platform or single-player games and have no framework for how cross-platform ownership works. The number one question we get is: "How do I make it so that if a player buys something on PlayStation, they have it on Switch?" It's something we do every single day, but for a lot of studios it remains a genuine blind spot. You mentioned the wave of backend failures in the live service games space. What is it exactly that goes wrong when they go down? There's no excuse, in today's environment, for a game going down on the server side. What I typically see is games built on non-scaling instances, or server orchestration tied to a single cloud provider. That works in North America and nowhere else. Brazil, Poland... Forget it. These are basic architectural decisions that get made early and are almost impossible to fix later. The deeper problem is that for about 20 years, the games industry operated in a world where titles grew 10% year over year and were considered recession-proof. Nobody built for failure. The concept was: staff up for the game, launch it, and the revenue will follow. That model stopped working, but the muscle memory of building that way persisted. The first NBA game Visual Concepts ever made cost $400,000. It now probably costs $400 million. The price of games to consumers has not gone up 5,000% in 30 years. That math doesn't work, and the industry has been slow to reckon with it. "Live service" has become almost a dirty word among hardcore gamers. Do you think that backlash is fair? The concept of live service has been bastardized into meaning PvP multiplayer competitive. But when I look at games like Roblox, Minecraft, or NBA 2K, there are probabl...
