How Wolfjaw Studios Came to Be

It all started after a few drinks at Twitchcon in 2018. Over the previous years sitting in on conversations with game studios a common theme emerged. People who work at game studios want to make video games and all that infrastructure stuff could just be figured out later.

There are millions of game developers around the world. Each of them is either working solo as an indie developer or working with thousands of colleagues trying to create the next billion dollar franchise. They are artists who seek to spark players' creativity and challenge them. These artists rely on many tools of the trade. Things like game engines, modeling software and even organizational tools like Jira.

An industry that has grown year over year into what at some point should surpass 500 billion in annual revenue and has mass appeal with billions of people needs constant iteration to keep its player base happy.

So on that night in San Jose I sent a note to my attorney and said I want to start a company that works on online systems for games. Wolfjaw Studios was born!

Now I wish I could say I am a genius and some people that know me might say I think I am. Fueled by success stories like Destiny, PUBG, Fortnite, and other games that skyrocketed in popularity due to the pandemic there has been a monumental shift of almost all games from single player to being online or multiplayer. These successes, and our focus to not stray outside of what we know how to do, led to growth that has seen Wolfjaw grow at over 30% annually since our first day.

On top of our focus on an aspect of games that has continued to grow even in the most recent slow down, we have also embraced a culture of doing it “the right way”. We try to focus on ensuring employees have a personal life and don't worry about constant crunch. We do not over emphasize our skills in order to get work and live by the phrase “under promise and over deliver.”

The term “online system” can mean many different things. To us at Wolfjaw, we define it as the following non-exhaustive list:

• Account Systems
• Auth / Entitlements
• Inventory / Progression
• Matchmaking / Fleet Management
• Leaderboards
• Friends / Parties / Presence
• Reporting / Banning / Player Moderation
• Telemetry

Over the last 5 years we have built partnerships with amazing publishers and studios. We have had the opportunity to work on titles like NBA2K, Destiny 2, League of Legends, Among Us, Apex Legends, and several unannounced titles.

Every studio and every game is unique, but most share 80% of the same core. Game developers don’t want to worry about boring things like fleet management and other backend systems. At Wolfjaw Studios we have been able to help the best game makers in the world focus on finding the fun and help them ship dozens of titles!

Our experience in building Wolfjaw Studios has also led us to build partnerships with many third-party platforms in the games industry. Tying together the web of existing third-party platforms and legacy backend code has led to many issues. A person said to me recently that game developers are “opinionated”; I would say that’s putting it lightly.

With studios focused on the game, the backend and infrastructure is often an afterthought. As a result, much of the game is designed around gameplay, with the backend needing to be built custom to fit that game’s needs. The issue that exists with off the shelf backend platforms is that they're built in their own way that often work with some aspects of the game but require long integrations with large amounts of customization or bespoke middleware needing to be built.

At Wolfjaw we solve this problem by being the expert mercenaries that know both systems and can build out quick integrations. We have worked with third-party companies that provide platforms to help them develop better solutions for the games they are selling to. This led us to an idea. Rather than build out a competing platform why not create a series of developer focused tools.

Introducing Catena Tools

Some of the core principles with which we are building these tools:

• It is designed to have the core components, but built to be extensible and game dev friendly.
• Source code available and able to be modified in your own custom ways without having to roll back existing software at game studios that is already fully developed.
• We are bringing decades of experience and best practices to the table.
• A pricing model that mimics game engines like Unreal and only costs money when your game succeeds.
• You get the expertise of Wolfjaw without the high cost.

Now since I am not an engineer I will end it here. But we plan on posting more about what we are building and ways it can be used. We hope to build a community of online developers that can share ideas and build future products to be integrated into the constantly growing and innovating game ecosystem.

If you’d like to learn more about how Catena can empower and simplify your development process, check out our interest form here and we’ll be in touch shortly!