"We chose the worst time in history" – Harvey Smith on starting his own studio after Arkane

Harvey Smith and Ben Horne have launched Black Pony Immersive, a new studio formed after the closure of Arkane Austin left 96 developers out of work in May 2024. The company has been operating quietly since last August and now counts 26 people, including a mix of Arkane veterans and newer hires from the indie scene.

Smith is framing the studio as a return to the lane that defined his best-known work: single-player, narrative-rich games with exploration, player-driven pacing, and creative tools that leave the player slightly underpowered. He’s not naming the project yet, but the genre is unmistakably in immersive-sim territory, and he says the pitch existed before the company did.

The timing is rough, and Smith says as much, pointing to a brutal fundraising environment and a willingness to turn down deals that didn’t fit. Black Pony is remote, with full-time staff based in the US and contractors elsewhere, and Smith says health coverage was a non-negotiable even for a small startup. The studio’s pitch is as much about structure as it is about genre: fewer layers of approval, more autonomy, and a team that already knows how to work together under pressure.

For developers, the interesting part is less the nostalgia and more the operating model. Black Pony is trying to rebuild an experienced immersive-sim team without the overhead that often comes with larger publishers and internal studio bureaucracy. Whether that translates into a sustainable business is the real test, but the studio is clearly betting that shared history and a narrow creative focus can still beat the...