Harvey Smith Launches Black Pony Immersive Studio

Harvey Smith announced his new studio on August 19, 2026: Black Pony Immersive. The company is based in Austin, Texas, and it already existed before this announcement. Since August 2025, Harvey Smith and his team had been working in silence, without a single leak getting out.

Harvey Smith founded the company with Ben Horne. He holds the role of CEO and creative director, while Horne serves as chief operating officer and executive producer. The two men have worked together for more than eight years, most recently at Arkane Austin.

Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin on May 7, 2024. About 96 people lost their jobs that day, Harvey Smith included. The closure came a year after the May 2, 2023 release of Redfall, a co-op game that critics and players alike met coldly. Tango Gameworks and Alpha Dog Studios closed in the same wave. A fourth studio, Roundhouse Studios, escaped closure: Microsoft folded it into ZeniMax Online Studios.

Harvey Smith, a Career Built on the Immersive Sim

Harvey Smith co-directed development on the first Dishonored, an immersive sim (a genre that lets the player freely choose how to move through a level, through guile, force, or stealth, rather than forcing a single path). He then served as creative director on Dishonored 2 and on Dishonored: Death of the Outsider. Before that, he was lead game designer on Deus Ex, one of the genre’s founding titles.

This history carries weight. An immersive sim is costly to design: its systems have to interlock, not simply follow a script written in advance. It is exactly the kind of game major publishers have stopped commissioning in recent years, for lack of predictable returns from one title to the next. The industry’s next big showcase, gamescom 2026, has not listed a single Black Pony Immersive project so far.

26 People and a Publisher Keeping Its Name Secret

Black Pony Immersive employs 26 full-time people, all based in the United States, supplemented by contractors and outside developers spread around the world. Ricardo Bare joined the team as design director: he was creative director on Redfall and creative lead on Prey’s Mooncrash expansion. Monte Martinez, who passed through Ion Storm and then WolfEye Studios, followed. Other hires come from Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche, and Volition, four studios with very different cultures, spanning third-person action, proprietary engines, open worlds, and licensed IP.

Twenty-six employees is a small number for a genre known to be costly to produce. Immersive sim levels demand lengthy testing: every room must stay traversable in several ways, and every system must keep working when another one changes. Ricardo Bare already lived through that constraint at a large scale on Redfall, before facing it again here with a team nearly four times smaller.

The studio secured funding from a publisher whose name has not been disclosed. Ben Horne described a difficult fundraising climate:  » We turned down some deals that just didn’t feel right. You know, ‘hey, if you guys are willing to maybe think about this NFT blockchain situation…’ As much as we wanted to get this off the ground, let’s try to do it the right way.  » Ben Horne and Harvey Smith therefore turned down blockchain-linked money to fund the studio.

Harvey Smith summed up the choice of an independent structure in one sentence:  » We don’t have to seek much approval from anyone else, and that makes us very nimble.  » The point lands with particular weight as Supermassive Games cuts up to 75 jobs, proof that a studio backed by a major group is never safe from a brutal cut.

A Closure That Cost 96 Jobs

Arkane Austin’s closure is not an isolated case in the industry. Six weeks after its game launched, Netflix shut down Night School Studio, proof that a lukewarm reception can wipe out a studio almost overnight.

Arkane Austin formed, alongside Arkane Lyon, the two halves of the Arkane studio. Lyon developed Deathloop and stayed with Bethesda after the 2024 closures, but its future remains uncertain: Microsoft announced a divestment process for Arkane Lyon on July 6, 2026, during a wider wave of Xbox layoffs, while the studio still works on Marvel’s Blade, a game not yet released.

Harvey Smith Bets on an Independent Structure

Black Pony Immersive states it is building single-player, narrative, first-person action RPGs set in richly crafted worlds, with systems that let the player choose how to solve problems. The studio’s name carries the word « Immersive » outright, and its site cites Looking Glass Studios as a direct reference, the studio behind Thief and System Shock.

The first project was conceived before the company’s official creation, and the team is already working on it. Nothing has leaked beyond the broad strokes: no title, no date, no confirmed platform.

The contrast with the rest of the industry is stark. At EA, bought out by a Saudi consortium, the announced bill reaches 700 million dollars in cuts. Twenty-six people, funded by a publisher that prefers to stay anonymous, are attempting the opposite: producing, with no shareholder to convince at every step, the kind of game major studios have stopped commissioning since Prey and Deathloop.