Wolfjaw CEO on Live Service Craze: “Publishers Saw Fortnite, PUBG & LoL and Decided They Needed 50 of Each”

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.

Since 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 probably 700,000 people playing NBA 2K right now, and only about 200,000 of them are playing basketball. The rest are in the open world city. People want to go online. People want community. That's not the problem.

The problem is that publishers saw the success of Fortnite, PUBG, and League of Legends and decided they needed 50 of each. I was in a meeting in 2021 with the leadership of a major publisher. They told me they make 8–10 games a year and wanted to do 30 in four years. I told them: I can play maybe five games in a year. In four years, I'll still play five games in a year. You just tripled your production cost and cannibalized your own market.

What actually works is making a game and letting it find its audience. Dave the Diver was great. Dredge was great. Those aren't PvP shooters; they're just good games that people played and stuck with.

You confirmed Wolfjaw is working with Rockstar. Can you say anything more about that partnership?

You're the only people we've told that Wolfjaw is working with Rockstar. That's already more than we've told anyone else. They're probably the most secretive client I've ever worked with in my life.

Fair enough. How many people does Wolfjaw currently employ?

We're around 70. About a third of the staff is local to our Troy, New York base; the rest are spread across 16 different states. We've been fully remote since before COVID. My rule has always been: be nice to everyone and get your work done. As long as you can do those two things, it doesn't matter where you are.

The next big expansion will likely be global. North American software engineers are priced significantly higher than peers elsewhere in the world, and the skill gap is not what it once was. We're looking seriously at Latin America and Europe.

During my usual pre-interview research, I found this website called Catena Tools that promotes a game dev backend toolkit made by Wolfjaw. Is this still being developed?

The concept behind Catena is that AAA backend infrastructure tools are expensive, not just for big studios, but especially for indie developers, who end up reinventing the wheel constantly. Catena is a suite of tools that allows teams to quickly integrate matchmakers, account systems, and multiple hosting services — Azure, Google Cloud Platform, on-prem bare metal — without locking themselves into any single ecosystem. You can swap components without tearing everything else out.

We haven't had the time to invest in it the way I'd like, partly because the client work has kept us so busy. But something interesting has started to happen: publishers are beginning to pitch the idea back to me. They're starting to realize that every studio building its own backend, every publisher maintaining its own central tech stack across 20 different backends for all their studios, is an unsustainable web of complexity. Simplify the foundation, and then invest your real creativity in the things that actually differentiate your game, such as a sophisticated matchmaking algorithm or a compelling progression system. You don't need to reinvent account systems from scratch every single time.

Where does AI fit into all of this, from your perspective?

AI is going to make good developers great. It won't make bad developers good. It's only as effective as the understanding you bring to it. We're already using it, and the impact is real.

My concern isn't for myself or for Wolfjaw. It's for the pipeline. Almost all the tasks that would have gone to a junior developer two years ago can now be handled by Claude or similar tools. The same is true for QA and localization. I worry about what the entry-level path into this industry looks like in five years.

That said, I've been coming around faster and faster the more it advances. The pitch I've been making for years, that we shouldn't have 5,000 people building a game, we should have 150, AI is now making that genuinely achievable. Smaller, more focused teams partnering with specialists and using AI to reduce overhead: that's the future of game development. I think people will come around to it. AI shouldn't make the game. But it absolutely should be a tool that brings the cost of making a game down, so we can make more of them, faster, and cheaper.

Thank you for your time.

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