Harvey Smith and his Arkane Austin cohort have sidestepped the post-closure scramble with Black Pony Immersive, a lean 26-person outfit quietly operating since August 2025 and now publicly committed to first-person action RPGs and immersive sims built on player choice, exploration, and emergent mechanics. Smith, creative director on Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider, and Ben Horne, Redfall production director, lead the Austin-based studio alongside familiar names like Ricardo Bare from the Deus Ex days and Monte Martinez of Ion Storm and WolfEye fame. The crew draws from Arkane, Insomniac, Avalanche, Volition, and Epic, with all full-time staff in the US and contractors worldwide, giving them the nimbleness Smith says comes from skipping layers of approval.

The timing is deliberate defiance: Smith told GamesIndustry.biz they “chose the worst time in history” to launch, rejecting NFT and blockchain pitches during a brutal fundraising stretch to keep the focus pure. No trend chasing here—just the same DNA that powered Deus Ex and Dishonored, now free of Microsoft oversight after the 2024 Austin shutdown that left 96 developers out. Their unannounced narrative-rich single-player project is already in motion, pitched before the studio even existed.

In an industry chasing live service metrics and AI shortcuts, this feels like a deliberate return to systems that reward curiosity over checklists. The name alone signals the lane: immersive sims, unapologetically. If the veterans stick to their guns, Black Pony could prove the closure was just another plot twist in a story that still has chapters left.