Harvey Smith named his studio Black Pony Immersive to make its focus impossible to miss

Harvey Smith, the director behind Dishonored, has co-founded Black Pony Immersive with fellow Arkane veteran Ben Horne — and the name is entirely deliberate. Smith wanted the studio's identity to be unmistakable from the start, so nobody would show up pitching projects outside its lane.

Speaking about the name, Smith explained that during Arkane's independent years the studio was constantly approached to work on games that had nothing to do with immersive sims. People pushed DLC work for third-person action shooters, warning that turning down paid work would sink the company. Arkane said no anyway and kept betting on the genre it knew. That stubbornness paid off — Arkane became the defining immersive sim studio. Smith also recalled a moment when the studio was financially desperate and ended up lending level design director Christophe Carrier and a team to BioShock 2, purely because the industry already associated Arkane with that style of game. The detour that eventually broke the pattern was Redfall, the vampire-themed multiplayer shooter that Smith now says Arkane never should have touched. "That was a game that did not come together, and we never should have been working on a games-as-a-service game, to be honest," he said.

Redfall's failure led directly to the closure of Arkane Austin. Arkane Lyon survived only because French labour laws made a swift shutdown legally complicated, though the studio's long-term future remains uncertain under Xbox. Black Pony Immersive is positioning itself as the antidote to that trajectory — a small, independent studio with a locked-in creative direction and no obligation to chase trends or take outside contracts.

Smith's closing argument for the approach is straightforward: "There are many ways to fail, many ways to succeed. But specialising in what you love is not a bad path." For a studio that has put the word "immersive" right in its name, the message is hard to misread.