Updated

Updated · The Game Business · Aug 19

Black Pony Immersive Launches With 26 Staff to Build Single-Player Sims After Redfall Fallout

Updated

Updated · The Game Business · Aug 19

Black Pony Immersive Launches With 26 Staff to Build Single-Player Sims After Redfall Fallout

Q: After rejecting restrictive deals, who is secretly backing Harvey Smith's ambitious new immersive sim studio?

An unnamed publisher is secretly funding Black Pony Immersive. Reporting from GamesIndustry.biz and The Game Business says Harvey Smith and Ben Horne spent months pitching the studio in a very difficult funding climate, rejecting deals they felt would compromise the company’s direction, including proposals tied to NFT or blockchain ideas. After turning those down, they secured backing from a publisher whose identity has not been publicly disclosed. What is known is that the funding has allowed Black Pony Immersive to quietly operate since August with a team of about 26 people, including longtime Smith collaborators such as Ben Horne, Ricardo Bare and Monte Martinez, plus veterans from Arkane, Ion Storm, WolfEye, Avalanche and indie teams. Smith has said the studio wants to minimize top-down interference, offer better continuity and benefits for developers, and stay focused on single-player immersive sims. So the key answer is that Black Pony does have outside financial backing, but the backer remains undisclosed.

3 articles · Updated · The Game Business · Aug 19

A 26-person Black Pony Immersive has been operating for a year with backing from an unnamed publisher, with Arkane veterans Harvey Smith, Ben Horne and Ricardo Bare building new immersive sim games.
Smith and Horne said the studio is deliberately returning to single-player, first-person, narrative-driven design after Redfall's failed live-service push showed the risks of chasing industry trends.
Redfall still shaped the new venture: Smith said six or seven former staff returned after layoffs to ship patch 1.4, capping a project disrupted by COVID, turnover and Arkane Austin's eventual closure.
Black Pony plans a small-core model that scales with external partners, arguing leaner teams protect creative focus while avoiding the boom-and-bust staffing pressures that have battered game studios.
The launch comes as immersive sims face doubts after years without major series entries and fresh industry cuts, but Smith argued Dishonored delivered a four- to five-times return on a reasonable budget.