A Year of Silence Before the Reveal
Black Pony Immersive opened its doors in Austin, Texas on August 4, 2025, with no public name, no funding announcement, and no game to show press or players. The studio only confirmed its own existence on August 19, 2026, more than a year after it started paying salaries out of an office nobody outside the team knew about.
Co-founder Harvey Smith has described the funding behind that year as staged and tied to development milestones rather than a single windfall. "We're not in the situation where someone just handed us a giant trunk of money," he said. That structure, not a headline check size, is the detail worth reading closely.
Same People, New Building, One More Try
Harvey Smith, the studio's CEO and creative director, spent three decades on Deus Ex, Dishonored and Prey before Arkane Austin closed around him. Co-founder Ben Horne ran production on Redfall and had worked alongside Smith for eight years before that; designer Ricardo Bare, who shipped work on Prey, Dishonored and Deus Ex, joined as a creative collaborator.
The roster now stands at 26 full-time staff spread across Texas, New York, Seattle, Portland, California and North Carolina, with additional contractors working internationally. Beyond the Arkane alumni, the team includes people who previously worked at Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche and Volition, four studios that have all absorbed layoffs or closures of their own since 2023.
The Redfall Shadow Still Hangs Over the Genre
Microsoft closed Arkane Austin in March 2024 after Redfall, a live-service shooter the studio was never built to make, sold poorly and drew some of the worst reviews of any Arkane release. The closure ended a 24-year-old developer responsible for Dishonored and Prey, two of the immersive sim genre's defining single-player games.
Smith has said funding dried up for studios chasing narrative single-player work while capital moved toward pitches built around live-service engagement loops instead. The pattern is not confined to one publisher or one studio; a major platform holder has also pulled back this year from at least one of its own live-service bets, the same retrenchment cutting from both directions at once.
What the Quiet Year Signals for Anyone Financing Games
The detail that matters most for anyone reading this as an industry signal is not the studio's name, it is the year that came before the name became public. A publisher agreed to carry 26 salaries, office costs and a year of pre-reveal development on an unannounced concept, backed by nothing but the founders' track record and a stealth pitch.
That is a different bet than a live-service roadmap with engagement projections attached, and the staged, milestone-based structure shows the publisher was not writing a blank check either. For studio founders courting funding and for publishers weighing where to place narrative bets next, Black Pony is a concrete data point that reputation and craft can still open a checkbook, even if that checkbook now opens slower and in smaller stages than it once did.
Read next: Makers Fund Hits $1.5bn AUM as Majors Consolidate | A Chip Shortage Built for AI Data Centers Just Delayed the PlayStation 6
