Bulkhead

Bulkhead is a British independent game studio based in Derby, England, founded in 2015 by five graduates of the University of Derby who formed the studio days after graduating and immediately began work on the first-person puzzler Pneuma: Breath of Life for Xbox One. The studio was formed through the merger of two companies, Deco Digital and Bevel Studios, who had been sharing an office prior to incorporation. Led by CEO Joe Brammer, Bulkhead has grown from its five founding members into a team of over 100 people across a decade of development. In December 2022 the studio was acquired by Splash Damage, the London-based developer behind Brink and Dirty Bomb, which itself operates under Tencent, and rebranded from Bulkhead Interactive to simply Bulkhead in 2024.

The studio's back catalogue includes The Turing Test (2016), a narrative first-person puzzle game published by Square Enix, and Battalion 1944 (2019), a World War II multiplayer shooter funded via Kickstarter in under three days and published by Square Enix Collective. Bulkhead has described its explicit ambition as shaking up the FPS genre, and WARDOGS, their most ambitious project to date, is the fullest expression of that goal. A large-scale 100-player tactical shooter published by Team17 and entering Steam Early Access on 10 September 2026, WARDOGS draws on the studio's decade of multiplayer FPS development to carve out space between Battlefield and Arma in a market dominated by battle royales and extraction shooters.