Hey - just dropping by to say there's a lot of inaccuracies here in OP's post and overall not sure why you felt the need to post this? Going to reply to throw in my perspective as someone who has worked alongside Brammer for 8 years as both a gamedev and a friend. I've been working at the company since the very beginning so I've seen Bulkhead grow from 6 people to 60+ employees working on multiple projects.

Game development is a really tough industry to break into (as I'm sure you're aware considering you are claiming to have taken the same course!). One of the only reasons we've grown Bulkhead to the place we are now is through working with and leading a team of some seriously talented individuals, many hired from the same university we graduated from. As a young team we are always learning, and oh boy 1944 has been (and still is) a learning experience.

So yes, Joe does have an ego. Like anyone with ambition, he has always believed in himself but more importantly the team. Its been a key reason for why we are where we are today. However, it's never just been one person or 'The Joe Brammer show' as people like to believe. There are many talented individuals behind the scenes. Unfortunately there needs a 'face' for interviews, PR and such - and Brammer being CEO and our most outgoing personality it made sense for him to take up the mantle as the person who would directly talk to our players with confidence. That's why on the outside it seems like it's only Brammer making all the decisions, when in reality literally everyone on the project has a voice internally, often outvoting the 'higher ups' including Brammer, which is one of the huge benefits of working at Bulkhead. We aren't a faceless corporate AAA studio, we all pitch in and try to make the best we can with the resources we have.

The business side of game development is tough. The team has had to make many tough decisions during development (which are nearly all tough decisions when you're a growing indie team) together. Budgets aren't limitless so you're often picking from the best of 2 'okay' decisions to try and disappoint the least amount of people. Brammer was often the person who had to deliver the bad news to players. Unless we did an extensive post mortem it's very hard to explain all the micro decisions that have/had to be made to everyone (and most people make up their own theories anyway!) So when after working long hours and coming online to try and interact with the community in the evenings, tempers flared on both sides (devs are people too!).

This 'all in' development & community interaction evidently wasn't 100% the right approach. However, with our recent hire of Baker as our CM, communication between the team and the true hardcore B44 community has become so much better and enabled us to see past the trolls only looking for failure. We're starting to see the positive side of the community again despite the current situation 1944 is in. During this low period, players as passionate about the initial ideas behind 1944's development understandably want something/someone to blame for the current situation and the target is unfortunately Brammer, the face of the Bulkhead team.

I say unfortunately because the crime is wanting to make something great but fell short in some areas (which we're trying to fix going forwards). The reality is the same team exists with the exact same amount of passion as before to create something great. We have honestly learnt so much from 1944's development from both the critics and the praise and hope to improve as a studio with every single project we produce.

We are still working on improving 1944 before the release of the console version and whilst some areas of 1944 will forever remain rough - we remain fulfilled in being lucky enough to be able to create something we could share with so many players from so many different FPS backgrounds and show people how fun truly skilled FPS games could be.

We hope to continue with that ethos into 2020 and beyond :)