In With The New Blood - An Interview with Dave Oshry

INTERVIEW | ISSUE EIGHT | SCREENS

Written by James A. Glass (he/him) | @magicalflamebow | Contributing Writer

In today’s video game climate with big studios pressing down on consumers, it’s important that we champion independent creators and studios. I talked with Dave Oshry, CEO and co-founder of New Blood Interactive (NB) where he discussed how the studio operates, what he considers indie, and the current game dev landscape in Aotearoa.

James: How does New Blood support developers?

Dave: Financially, with our time, money, development tools, and everything they need to finish games and bring them to market.

James: With a few titles such as Ultrakill, Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, they’re released in early access and then built up over the years. How does this model compare to releasing a game with all of its content complete?

Dave: We like doing it as it allows us to build the game people want while we’re making it. We’ll have that feedback loop of releasing something and they’ll tell us if it’s good or not, and then we’ll fix all the bugs so when the games are done they’re basically perfect. If you just make a game and complete it, you only get that feedback loop once, you just hope that people like it when it comes out. As much as you think you know what people want or when you think you’ve found all the bugs or issues people might run into, it’s a lot more different when there’s tens of thousands of people playing your game all at once.

James: It’s kind of like large-scale playtesting in a sense.

Dave: It’s exactly that. We have our own internal quality assurance team and stuff, lots of friends and family to play our stuff, but that’s no substitute for tons of people and actual consumers playing your game.

James: Part of your slogan is “we hate money”. Why is that?

Dave: Obviously we don’t actually hate money; we like to eat and buy things, but we don’t chase trends or do things for the money, we do things because we think they’re fun and cool. If we cared about making money we’d be making survival crafting rogue-like deckbuilders that were co-op friendslop. That’d be easy money, but we make games that don’t make money like immersive-sims and retro first-person shooters.

James: Speaking of money, the New Zealand games sector recently surpassed one billion dollars in revenue.

Dave: It did! I remember we were on the road to a billion and now we’ve passed it and it was all thanks to Abiotic Factor and Dredge - and actually, it’s literally all Grinding Gear [developers of Path of Exile], let’s be real.

James: In your time living here, how much has the game dev landscape shifted?

Dave: A lot more indies since I got here, there have been big studios that have shut down. There’s been lots of indies coming out of universities that started with smaller teams. There’s very few big studios in NZ, there’s PikPok, RocketWerkz, Grinding Gear…

James: Ninja Kiwi.

Dave: That’s all the ones that come to mind! There was some smaller, mid-sized studios but I can’t think of where they’ve gone. There's Balancing Monkey here in Dunedin but they’re relatively small.

James: Have there been any devs in Aotearoa that you’ve considered reaching out to and asking if they’d like to do anything for NB?

Dave: Not really, we do everything in NB internally, so we don’t really go looking for games to publish. If any new game pops up at NB it’s usually someone who has been hanging around for a while who goes “hey can we make my game now?” and we go “sure”. We’ve got a NZ branch of NB, me and [Aaron Alexander, New Blood co-founder] both live here but there’s not a lot of Kiwi stuff happening to be honest. We’re fully remote and we’re international, I’d say in NZ there’s four of us, in Australia there’s a bunch, most people are in the States or Europe.

James: That’s cool how it’s both remote and international.

Dave: I mean it works. During the pandemic when everyone was freaking out because they couldn’t go to work we were fine because we’d never gone to work.

James: What do you consider to be indie?

Dave: Indie means independent, which means you have nobody, but to a lot of people indie means “vibes”. I’d say we’re independent because we don’t have any funding or publishing, but at the same time we’re a publisher, we work with developers in our studio so some people would say we’re not indie. Some people would say Devolver Digital is indie despite it being a multibillion publicly traded company. Larian could be considered indie since they’re completely independent; they’ve got funding but they don’t have a publisher or anything, but they’re a hundred-person studio that makes hundreds of millions of dollars, but they’re still technically indie. To answer your question it means nothing, it’s a vibe.

James: The rest of 2026 for NB is fairly packed with the releases of Tenebris Somnia, Dungeons of Dusk and Fallen Aces episode 2. Is there anything else?

Dave: Big updates for Gloomwood and maybe some Ultrakill stuff. The big focus for 2026 is Tenebris Somnia because it’s one of the rare games we’re making that’s not early access and it’ll be the first thing we launch on all platforms day one. We’ve gotta make sure we get that right because we’ve never done that before. We usually just put it out on PC first and consoles later but we’re trying to be a big boy studio.