Publisher Dusk and Blood West Is Not Afraid of "Dead" Genres — Games Are Released out of Love for Gamers
The boss of New Blood Interactive, Dave Oshry, says sales for Dusk and Blood West have topped roughly 500,000 copies, and ULTRAKILL in early access is creeping toward the million mark. He walked back through how the studio started (short version: late nights, stubborn tastes, and a desire to resurrect a particular shooter vibe).
Back in 2012 the market felt saturated with shooters aping Call of Duty — even Duke Nukem Forever leaned into pared-down loadouts and stamina bars. Oshry and his group, fed up with that, set out to revive the older, faster kind of shooting that fans now call the "boomer shooter." It was less a business plan then and more "let’s make the game we want to play," if you ask around.
New Blood isn't a one-trick pony. They pick at neglected corners of gaming, the niches where a dedicated crowd keeps asking for more. So you'll see projects like Gloomwood and Fallen Aces coming out of their orbit, made by friends and funded privately (i.e., no outside investors — w/out the usual strings). They claim they enjoy doing it this way, and for now, that’s the setup.
On the docket now: a dungeon crawler spun off from Dusk, a retro-flavored RPG that nods to Fallout, and a racer that borrows from Twisted Metal. Oshry isn’t fazed by so-called "dead" genres; in fact he’s already comparing the new racer — tentatively — more favorably than the recent Carmageddon: Rogue Shift. The team talks up the story, the voice work that aims to land funny beats, and controls that won’t get in the player’s way — but, well, it’s early, so take those promises as early notes, not final specs.
Oddly, they don’t plan to start publishing third-party projects en masse anytime soon — most upcoming titles are made by pals inside the fold. Still, Oshry watches the wider scene: he mentioned Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun as an example of a game that seems built for fun rather than pure profit, and he liked that impulse.
Their dev process is a little unconventional. Each project has a lead designer, sure, yet teams under the New Blood umbrella regularly swarm each other's work — swapping notes on recoil, level pacing, enemy placement, voice lines, whatever’s bugging them that week. Those conversations actually change things; people argue over tiny, specific stuff because nobody wants to ship a game with wonky reloads or a bad health bar. Not lofty aims — just nitpicks that matter in play.