Meet Wolfjaw, a quietly important video game company

"One of the reasons why you've never heard of us is because the games we work on….work."

Marathon from Bungie is one of the games Wolfjaw Studios worked on. Screenshot: Bungie, Sony Interactive Entertainment

The PR pitch to entice a reporter to interview Mitch Patterson, founder of Wolfjaw Studios, is that he runs what may “be the most important studio you’ve never heard about.”

To back this claim, when I met him, Patterson was able to rattle off a past or present client list that included Sony PlayStation and Bungie, Riot, Wizards of the Coast, Innersloth and Take Two Interactive. Recently, they added Krafton.

Wolfjaw, based in Troy, New York, doesn’t make video games.

They make the infrastructure for online games. They do the work of getting online account systems and in-game shops to function correctly for a given game. They smooth out inventory management for cross-platform online titles. They keep voice chat working when players hop servers mid-game. They do unglamorous online backend stuff.

“The problem is no one at those studios actually wants to do this,” Patterson told me, when we met at the DICE conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. Well, it might be a problem for the studios. It’s an opportunity for Wolfjaw, which for about a decade has been specializing in this kind of work.

“We’re the backend team for Destiny 2,” Patterson told me, referring to Bungie’s multiplayer online shooter. “We are the backend for Marathon,” he said, name-checking their newest one.

Not just Bungie. “If there’s a piece of backend software Among Us, we’ve done it,” he said, citing tiny Innersloth’s massive hit.

Not just Among Us. Wolfjaw worked on Transformers: Reactivate, Tencent’s multiplayer robots-in-disguise game that was in development at Splash Damage before it was cancelled early last year. (Patterson had played it; said it was kind of like Destiny with Transformers.)

Not just Transformers games. He said Wolfjaw worked on games for Take Two? “Yeah.” NBA 2K is listed on Wolfjaw’s website.

And he said that Wolfjaw worked with multiple studios across Take Two. Did that mean what it sounds like? “Probably yes,” he said.