Call of Duty's David Vonderhaar on stepping out of his comfort zone with new studio BulletFarm

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In August 2023, David Vonderhaar announced he was leaving Treyarch, the Activision studio behind the Call of Duty: Black Ops series, after 18 years working on the blockbuster shooter franchise. Today, he is head of BulletFarm, a new AAA studio within NetEase — but that wasn't his original plan.

"Honestly, leaving to start a studio wasn't really a consideration at all," Vonderhaar tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I was just going to leave at some point. I was going to retire, and take my RV and drive around the country. That was my master plan."

Instead, he finds himself at the helm of the ninth Western studio formed by NetEase since the start of 2022, and the latest to be targeting the AAA market. When asked why he chose to work for the China-based publisher, he pointed to the prospect of more creative independence and freedom on BulletFarm's debut game.

"Those two things are really important," he says. "You can have the best idea in the world for a game, but if your structure isn't set up for that, you'll never get that game made.

"Many new studios don't make it, but does that mean we shouldn't try? I feel like that means we should try harder"

"I was really, really impressed by the NetEase ecosystem, the totality of everything behind you that supports you. You're making the studio, you're setting the values for your studio, you're deciding the game you want to make, and then they're just there to help. That's it. It seemed a little too good to be true, so I did a lot of research, called a lot of people, spoke to other studio heads, and it's true."

This, he notes, is in stark contrast to how he's used to working, i.e. on big games in major franchises with thousands of developers and a new entry every year. Working on something different gives him — and the other people on his team, such as creative director Chris Cowell, another Treyarch veteran — a chance to "take all the lessons that we've learned from