Dishonored Veterans Launch Black Pony Immersive to Carry the Immersive Sim Forward

Two of the most decorated names in immersive sim history are back with a new studio, and they are picking up exactly the kind of work Microsoft did not want. Harvey Smith and Ben Horne, co-directors of Dishonored and the creative leads behind Prey, revealed Black Pony Immersive on August 19, a 26-person Austin-based studio with one clear goal: ship the single-player, first-person, narrative-driven games that Arkane stopped getting to make when Microsoft shut Arkane Austin down in March 2024. The third co-founder, designer Ricardo Bare, rounds out the leadership trio. The reveal comes the same week Warren Spector, the Deus Ex originator, announced his retirement, so the timing is either terrible or perfect depending on how you look at it.

Black Pony Immersive has been running in stealth for a year. Smith and Horne incorporated it on August 4, 2025, after more than a year of pitching publishers and venture funds on a studio that would not be chasing AI tooling, live-service hooks, or trend-chasing genre pivots. The Game Business first reported the funding round, with the new studio backed by an unnamed publisher and additional team members drawn from Arkane, Insomniac, Epic, Avalanche, and Volition. Smith is CEO and creative director; Horne is COO and executive producer. Bare, his longtime collaborator on Dishonored 2 and Prey, is on board as a creative partner.

The Redfall lesson the founders will not stop talking about

Every interview Smith and Horne have given today keeps circling back to Redfall, and not in the deflective way you usually hear from people who worked on a bomb. They are explicit. Redfall shipped in 2023 to brutal reviews, and Microsoft closed Arkane Austin six months later. Smith, in conversation with The Game Business, called it the project where he was out of his lane and admitted that Arkane got pulled into the games-as-a-service bet because every other publisher in Austin was chasing that model. We got swept up in the games-as-a-service thing, and I had the foolish chutzpah to assume that it always works out for us. That sentence alone is the entire postmortem of the Xbox exclusive era in two clauses.

Horne, who was executive producer on Redfall, told GamesBeat that the experience gave the team permission to walk away from the live-service treadmill entirely. He also told a story that landed harder than the standard PR cleanup. After Microsoft laid off the Austin team, Smith and Horne went back to the publisher and asked if they could ship Redfall patch 1.4, the one that actually fixed the worst of the launch state. Microsoft said yes. Seven former Arkane devs came back into the building they had just been fired from, signed the paperwork, and shipped the patch. Horne called it an achievement unlocked in my career to release something after I have been fired and the studio closed down. That is the team Black Pony Immersive is built from, and it tells you exactly what kind of publisher relationship they want next time.

What Black Pony Immersive is actually making

The studio's stated mission is to design and develop imaginative first-person action RPGs set within well-realized worlds. In practice that means immersive sims with single-player campaigns, expressive emergent systems, and creative problem solving. Smith, in the studio's launch press materials, leaned on the word immersive so hard that they put it in the company name. We want to make immersive sims. We want to make single player, narrative driven, first person games where you explore and solve problems creatively. Think Deus Ex, think Dishonored, that is what we are doing. There is no announced title yet, no release window, and no platform commitment beyond the team being centralized in Austin with remote staff across the United States.

Smith was a game tester at Origin Systems, rose to associate producer on Ultima VIII, then became lead designer on Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Invisible War at Ion Storm Austin under Warren Spector. After a stint at Midway on Blacksite: Area 51, he joined Arkane Austin in 2008 and co-directed Dishonored with Raphael Colantonio, directed Dishonored 2 and Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, and directed Prey in 2017. Every one of those games is on the shortlist of best immersive sims ever made. ZeniMax bought Arkane in 2010; Microsoft bought ZeniMax in 2020 for $7.5 billion; Microsoft shut Arkane Austin in March 2024. That is the whole arc, and it ends here, in a new office, with two of the people who actually shipped the hits.

Community reaction: cautious optimism, mostly relief

The reaction on X and across the gaming press has been overwhelmingly supportive but not blindly so. IGN, GameSpot, PC Gamer, Kotaku, and GamesBeat all carried the story within hours of each other, and the comment sections read less like hype and more like a long exhale. The dominant take is that the immersive sim genre has been functionally dead at the AAA level for the better part of a decade. Arkane shipped Dishonored 2 in 2016, Prey in 2017, and then watched the studio get ground down by management that wanted it to be something else. Independent developers have kept the genre alive, but nobody has shipped a single-player AAA immersive sim in five years. Black Pony Immersive is, at minimum, a credible signal that one will arrive eventually.

The skeptical voices are real and worth naming. Some readers pointed out that 26 people is enough to make a vertical slice, not a full single-player AAA game, and that an unnamed publisher backing the studio is exactly the kind of vague funding detail that has bitten indie studios before. Others noted that the same executives who greenlit Redfall are still employed at Microsoft, and the structural pressure that killed Arkane Austin has not gone anywhere. Smith himself acknowledged the worry in his interview with The Game Business, calling out the people who told him that first-person games do not sell, or that RPGs are a niche market, or that in five years you would be out of a job if you were not building a free-to-play live-service game. He has heard all of that before, and he has heard it from smart people who were sometimes right. The pitch is that going back to what you love, with a strong vision, often works. Dishonored itself came from exactly that bet, after Arkane had four months of money left and was farming people out across nine contract projects.

Critical Pixel take

We have been waiting for this announcement without knowing we were waiting for it. The immersive sim is the most consistently review-bombed genre that still ships quality work, and the people who loved Prey in 2017 have been quietly hoping someone would pick up the torch. The fact that it is the actual leads of the original games, not some new studio that grew up admiring them from a distance, is the part that matters. Smith and Horne do not have to relearn what an immersive sim is, and they have the receipts from Dishonored, Dishonored 2, and Prey to prove they can ship one inside a publisher's budget. The risk is the same risk every new single-player studio faces in 2026: a publisher that gets cold halfway through development and starts asking for engagement metrics, monetization hooks, or scope cuts that turn the game into something else. The fact that Horne's first big public story after the studio launch is about going back into a building he had been fired from to ship a patch Microsoft did not have to let him ship tells you exactly what kind of partner relationship they want next time.

Watch this studio closely. There is no title, no trailer, no release window, and no platform list, which is exactly the way a debut announcement from people who actually ship games should look. The next time we hear from Black Pony Immersive, it should be because they have something to show, not because they have a marketing calendar to fill.