For the team leader of New Blood, it is more comfortable and rewarding to run a small collective of about 30 people without a physical studio because they are not as affected by the state of the games industry as other, more prestigious studios.

PCGamer interviewed members of the New Blood team. It’s a publisher, and they’re behind the release of David Szymanski’s hugely successful retro FPS Dusk, for example. The team is headed by Dave Oshry, and he was quite likeable. They have no say in what their developers want to do, and he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for a game enthusiast to end up at a major (AAA) studio/publisher, but he can’t talk at the Game Developers Conference about how to build a successful game company, for example, because New Blood can’t really be called a company. He thinks we should work with our friends and treat them like our friends…

“We’re not beholden to shareholders or investors or anything like that. We can make what we want – our whole motto is ‘we hate money’. We don’t actually hate money, money is great, but if we wanted money we would make a Dusk survival horror crafting game. An open world survival horror crafting deck builder roguelike Dusk. The games we make, we make for ourselves. It just so happens that other people want those kinds of games as well. I personally take care of our developers and everybody who works at New Blood, making sure that everybody’s happy and having a good time, and making sure that everybody’s voice is heard, as opposed to “more people, more game, more stuff, more features, more loot box, more transaction, more money, more line go up” [as seen in big studios].

People often ask me, “Dave, if I want to get into games, how do I start? And I say don’t. Quit. You should have started five to ten years ago. Go to trade school, get a real job. Become a plumber. People need them. You don’t want to be employee number 356772 reporting to someone who reports to someone who reports to someone who makes the decisions. That sucks. The magic is gone. You will not enjoy video games anymore if you work in a big game studio. Since everyone seems to be asking how we continue to do so well when the whole industry seems to be falling apart – there are actually a lot of companies doing well, you just don’t hear about them in the news with all the doom and gloom,” Oshry said.

Dave “Garumin” Bonin, who created Dusk HD, admitted that he stayed out of the game industry for more than a decade because he was waiting for an opportunity like New Blood. He says the industry is a profit-driven revolving door, and he wasted his time on pharmacy stuff instead. If something is a waste of time and only done out of necessity, passion projects are done with much more fervor…

Source: PCGamer