New Blood Interactive has been around for more than a decade—it's celebrating its 12 year anniversary, in fact—and is still going strong. Dusk, Gloomwood, Amid Evil, Fallen Aces, Ultrakill—it's got an enviable catalogue that continues to grow. But CEO Dave Oshry is still imagining how it might end.
By keeping the studio relatively small, letting everyone work remotely, and not putting all its eggs in a franchise basket and spitting out endless sequels, it's been able to keep doing its thing. And that's the only way Oshry wants it to work.
"If we couldn't be successful doing it this way, I wouldn't want to do it at all," he tells us. "Rather than scrambling to find publisher money or investor money, I'd rather just shut it down and be like, 'We tried, we did our best, we made some cool games, that was it.' And I still want to do that. People are like, 'What's the end look like?' And I'm like, 'In 20 years, we're done. I'm gonna say goodbye, shut it down. Thanks for playing our games. That was fun. I'm gonna go fishing now.'"
Should New Blood start to struggle, Oshry has no interest in selling it to keep it alive. "I'm never gonna sell it. I'm never gonna give it to anybody else. It'll be our time." He'll be content, he says, if people remember its games fondly. "I hope people remember us like their favourite game studios from the '90s or 2000s. Except I don't want us to have the shitty ending like a lot of those studios had, where they got acquired or they went out of business. I want us to have a happy ending. I want us to go out on our terms."
It's a promise that hits a lot harder these days, with so many studios getting gobbled up and then being tossed aside. As October came to a close, EA killed off BioWare after years of mismanagement. 30 years down the drain. Like countless studios that have been acquired by the likes of EA, Microsoft and Embracer, there was no happy ending.
Oshry describes the games industry as "a machine that requires product and labour, and that's not us". Instead, he prefers to think of New Blood as a band.
"Our games are our albums. We tour, we sell merchandise, and everybody plays their part. We're like an orchestra now, actually, more than a band. Because we got a lot of people, and a lot of musically inclined people. We're like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra at this point.
"Eventually the band's gonna get old, and we're gonna get tired, and we're gonna do our retirement tour, and we're gonna call it a day before we get sad. Before we're on stage and people are like, 'Ah, they're getting a little long in the tooth. They can't hit those high notes anymore.' So before that happens, I want to shut it down and enjoy my life."
