New Blood Interactive is twelve years old this month, and its catalogue — Dusk, Gloomwood, Amid Evil, Fallen Aces, Ultrakill — is one most publishers would happily mortgage a franchise for. Its CEO, Dave Oshry, already knows exactly how the story ends. He just wants to be the one holding the pen.
Speaking about the studio’s future, Oshry was characteristically blunt about the two fates he refuses to let New Blood suffer: being sold, or being ground down until the games stop mattering. “If we couldn’t be successful doing it this way, I wouldn’t want to do it at all,” he said. “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.'”
What does the end actually look like?
According to Oshry, remarkably calm. “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.'” And if the studio starts to struggle before then? “I’m never gonna sell it. I’m never gonna give it to anybody else. It’ll be our time.”
Why does this hit harder in 2026?
Because the alternative keeps playing out everywhere else. As October closed, EA shut the doors on BioWare after years of mismanagement — thirty years of history dissolved. Countless studios swallowed by EA, Microsoft and Embracer met the same quiet end. Oshry wants none of it: “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.”
Key point: New Blood stays small, fully remote, and refuses to lean on endless franchise sequels — the model Oshry says is the only one worth continuing.
A band, not a machine
Oshry describes the games industry as “a machine that requires product and labour, and that’s not us”. New Blood, he insists, is a band — games as albums, tours, merchandise, everyone playing their part. Then he corrects himself: with around fifty people now on staff, the studio is less a band and more an orchestra. “We’re like the Trans-Siberian Orchestra at this point.”
When does the retirement tour start?
That is the part Oshry has thought about most. Every band gets old, he reasons; the trick is leaving the stage before the audience notices. “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.”
In an industry where studio closures are usually tragedies inflicted from above, New Blood is proposing something genuinely radical: an ending chosen in advance, by the people doing the work. Whether twenty years is the real number or just a vibe, the promise stands. The last New Blood game, whenever it ships, will also be the last one — and nobody will be able to say it wasn’t planned that way.
