If New Blood had made Dusk 2, there'd be no Iron Lung, 'and now David Szymanski has got a movie that made $50 million'—so maybe there's wisdom in not churning out sequels

New Blood boss Dave Oshry isn't interested in running a massive studio that follows the blockbuster strategy of milking its successful games for all they're worth. The publisher-developer combo has enjoyed a string of big wins with its boomer shooters, but Oshry's plan for building on success is to invest that money into new projects.

"I think a lot of studios would have a big hit like Ultrakill," Oshry tells us, "and then they would maybe open a big office, or just milk the shit out of Ultrakill and do Ultrakill spinoffs, or use that money to make sequels. And I've decided to put that money into projects like Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, artsy projects like Tenebris Somnia. That’s what I've decided to do with our success because I can, because we're independent."

The goal, says Oshry, has never been to create "a big studio with an office and hundreds of employees … I don't know why anyone would want that". And thankfully he doesn't have to deal with shareholders and investors telling him to just keep milking and keep growing.

"The fact that we're one studio and that I control everything means that I can make those kinds of decisions," he says. "If we had publishers or shareholders or investors, they would be like, ‘No, you need to take that money and reinvest it into things that are going to make more money so we can get bigger returns.’ They would be like, ‘You need to be working on Ultrakill spinoff games. You need to be working on Dusk 2, Faith: Chapter Four. Why haven't you made a survival crafting game out of this yet? You need to be reinvesting in the IPs and making money, money, money.’ And we're just like, ‘What cool thing do we want to do? What's coming down the pipe?’"

This isn't to say that New Blood doesn't support its games or give players another taste of the things that they dig. Dusk and Amid Evil continue to be updated, and there have been conversations about a new episode for Dusk or even a proper sequel. A Dusk spin-off is in the works, too, called Dungeons of Dusk, though it's from a different developer, not David Szymanski.

But this is still a far cry from the big publisher strategy of making IPs and bleeding them dry. Like Ubisoft, for example. "Look at fucking Heroes of Might and Magic," says Oshry. "Look at what's happened to that bloody series over the years. Everybody loves Heroes 3, and that was a million years ago. Ubisoft has whored that IP out all over the place for decades, and now finally you've got someone like Hooded Horse making something like Olden Era, and people are like, ‘Yeah, good, this is what we wanted’. But it's all about IP, it always has been with AAA."

Oshry offers Wolverine as another example. "It became designed by corporate, and look what happened. I don't think it was the game they originally set out to make, but it was the game they had to ship. At New Blood we’re never putting out games because it's a game we had to ship—because we had to meet a deadline or we had investors or shareholders. We're literally just trying to make the best games we can and make as many people happy as we can."

If New Blood followed the received wisdom that Sony or Ubisoft follow, it likely wouldn't be the success that it is. "If I just forced David to make Dusk 2," Oshry says, "we never would have gotten Iron Lung. Iron Lung, Markiplier, $50 million [box office] never would have happened if I made David do Dusk 2. And now David Szymanski has got a movie that made $50 million, funded by a YouTuber. That doesn't happen if I don't run New Blood the way that I do. It works. It works for us."

Looking at the state of the industry, the failure of big games like Wolverine, the so-called 'Xbox reset', the grotesque layoffs, it certainly looks like blockbuster game development, endless sequels and an obsession with IP is unsustainable.

"As we've seen with all the layoffs, developers are disposable, whether you make a hit game or not," Oshry says. "What is a hit? Your game can sell millions of copies, but it doesn't balance the balance sheet. So everybody gets laid off. Imagine working for six years on a game, it's not the game you wanted to make anyway, and then you get laid off because it's not the game that sells. And you're like, ‘Well, maybe it would have been if it was the game we wanted to make, and not the game that had to ship, like a Wolverine.’

"People are always like, ‘Oh, the industry is dying and imploding’. We're doing fine. I guess we're the lucky ones. But I think we made our own luck by making the kind of games we want to make, and knowing that they'll sell to the kind of people who like our games."