New Blood Interactive co-founder Dave Oshry says Steam is far and away the most financially viable platform for the publisher's games, and that the only reason they still port games over to consoles is to please their fans.
The famously candid Oshry recently told RPG Site that porting games to consoles is "a pain in the ass" that yields "so much less" in sales than Steam, a platform that allows you to "do anything in real time compared to having to wait weeks or go through certifications." So, why bother with other platforms at all? Because you of you, dear reader. Because of you.
"We do it because our players want it, right?," said Oshry. "If we only cared about money, we wouldn't ship on anything but Steam these days, but we hate money, and we love our players. When people say, 'Please put your games on Xbox,' we put them on Xbox. When people say, 'Put them on PlayStation,' we put them on PlayStation."
Oshry added that Nintendo has provided New Blood with Switch 2 dev kids, allowing it to bring its games to the new console. Thankfully for developers and publishers like New Blood, Oshry said the Switch 2 dev kit is "not much different from the Switch 1" and that the company has managed to get "Dusk running at 120fps with mouse controls on Switch 2." He added that Dusk on Switch 2 "works great."
Call me a cynic, but I'm inclined to believe there must be some business sense in New Blood bringing its games to consoles and that, like any company, if it wasn't doing anything for that bottom line, they'd probably stop. I take Oshry at his word that Steam makes up for a majority of the publisher's sales, but even he admitted it's "always cool" to see your game on the PlayStation or Xbox store.
New Blood is primarily known for boomer shooters like Dusk, Amid Evil, and Ultrakill, but it's taking a stab at the RPG genre with Dungeons of Dusk, an RPG adaptation of, you guessed it, Dusk. The demo is available to play for free as part of Steam Next Fest, and the full game is set to launch sometime this year.
