The narrative around the immersive sim genre has always carried a peculiar tension. On one hand, these games—Deus Ex, BioShock, Thief, Dishonored—are cited with a reverence usually reserved for canonized art. On the other, a persistent industry whisper insists that the immersive sim is a commercial dead end, too complex, too niche, and too expensive to sustain at a triple-A level. August has become an unexpected crucible for this debate. Within weeks, a co-creator of Thief argued that triple-A immersive sim development “doesn’t really work,” and then Harvey Smith, the director of Dishonored, announced a new studio entirely dedicated to the genre. Now, Smith, alongside his fellow leads Ben Horne and Ricardo Bare, has directly confronted the core question: are immersive sims actually dead, or has the industry simply talked itself into believing they are?
Harvey Smith’s Central Question: A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?
Speaking to The Game Business, Smith met the question of the genre’s viability with a counter-question that cuts to the heart of how the industry conditions itself. “At some point you’re worried… do questions like that create a self-fulfilling prophecy?” He is not dismissing the commercial challenges. He is instead pointing out that the very act of repeatedly declaring a genre unviable can starve it of the investment, risk-taking, and marketing support necessary for it to succeed. “If you look back through those games, there are a lot of titles that people still talk about 10 or 20 years later,” Smith argued. “They have a lot of cultural cachet. And there are a few, if you look at BioShock or Deus Ex or Dishonored, that make a lot of money.”
This framing is critical. Smith is not claiming every immersive sim is a blockbuster. He is challenging the assumption that commercial mediocrity is inherent to the genre rather than a function of specific market conditions, budget sizes, or design compromises. The conversation about immersive sims has long been dominated by the idea that they are fundamentally uncommercial. Smith’s rebuttal reintroduces historical nuance: several of the genre’s defining entries were, by any reasonable standard, financial successes.
What Is the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy at Work?
The mechanism Smith describes operates on a few levels. First, there is the matter of publisher confidence. If executives believe that first-person, systems-driven games with branching narratives are a bad bet, they will allocate smaller budgets, impose stricter creative constraints, and demand features that dilute the core experience—such as shoehorning in multiplayer modes or simplifying systems to reach a broader audience. Second, there is the issue of developer morale and recruitment. Talented creators who love immersive sims may hesitate to join a project that is publicly framed as a losing proposition from the start. Third, there is the audience side: if the dominant industry story is that immersive sims are dead, new players may not even seek them out.
Smith’s experience is instructive here. He recalled hearing extremely well-compensated executives make confident predictions that turned out to be false. “Very well-paid people say things to me, going way back now, like, ‘First-person games don’t sell,’ or, ‘RPGs are a niche market,’ ‘If you’re not working on a free-to-play game now, in five years you’ll be out of a job,’ ‘MMOs are the future,’ ‘In the future, games will have live motion video sections with Hollywood actors in them.’” Some of these predictions were spectacularly wrong. “First-person games don’t sell” is a laughable statement in an era where Call of Duty, Destiny, and Overwatch have defined the mainstream. But Smith noted that some predictions—specifically the one about Hollywood actors in games—proved prescient. His point is that industry conventional wisdom is often a reflection of current trends, not a reliable guide to the future.
The Strategy of Creative Focus Over Trend Chasing
Ben Horne, also speaking to The Game Business, offered a complementary perspective that grounds the new studio’s philosophy in pragmatism. “We don’t really know what turn the industry might take, and we’re probably not going to be very good at trend chasing,” Horne said. This is a surprisingly honest admission from a veteran developer. The video game industry is notoriously fickle, and attempting to forecast the next big thing—battle royale, live service, open-world crafting, extraction shooters—is a gamble that has burned many studios.
Horne’s alternative is to double down on what the team knows and loves. “Our best shot is to rally around a creative vision that excites us as developers. It excites the audience that we know wants to play this kind-of game. That’s the best chance of making something great.” This approach is not naive. It acknowledges the commercial reality that immersive sims have a dedicated, passionate audience. That audience may be smaller than the market for a mainstream shooter, but it is also more loyal, more engaged, and more likely to evangelize a game that respects its intelligence. The strategy is not to compete for the entire market but to dominate a specific, defensible niche.
How Does This Strategy Address the Financial Risks of Immersive Sims?
The practical challenge is scale. The Astounding success of games like Baldur’s Gate 3 has demonstrated that deep, systems-driven, choice-heavy games can achieve enormous commercial success. But Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive project with a long development cycle. The immersive sim genre, by contrast, has often been associated with mid-tier or triple-A budgets that required high sales volumes to break even. Smith, Horne, and Bare are tacitly acknowledging that the way forward may not be to try to replicate the budget and scope of a blockbuster but to design at a scale that matches the genre’s natural audience.
This is where the observation from the original Thief designer becomes relevant: triple-A immersive sims may not work because the cost of production outpaces the addressable market. But a smaller, more focused immersive sim—one that prioritizes systemic depth over graphical fidelity or sprawling map size—could be eminently viable. The passionate reception of games like Gloomwood, a self-described immersive sim in the tradition of Thief, demonstrates that a hungry audience exists for well-crafted, smaller-scale experiences in this vein.
What Are the Defining Characteristics of an Immersive Sim?
To understand the persistence of this genre—and the industry hand-wringing around it—it helps to define what an immersive sim actually is. The term typically refers to a game that emphasizes player agency through a set of interconnected systems. Instead of scripted sequences with one solution, an immersive sim presents a problem—a locked door, a guarded room, a target to eliminate—and offers multiple approaches. Stealth, combat, hacking, persuasion, environment manipulation, and emergent physics all serve as tools the player can combine in creative ways. The “immersive” part refers to the feeling of being inside a consistent, reactive world rather than a series of linear challenges.
Classic examples include the Looking Glass Studios titles—Thief, System Shock 2—and their spiritual successors: Deus Ex, BioShock, Dishonored, Prey (2017), and the more recent Weird West. These games share a design philosophy that prioritizes player expression. They are often first-person, though not always. They tend to feature dense, interconnected level design rather than wide-open spaces. They reward exploration, observation, and lateral thinking. They also, historically, require significant investment from the player—both in time and cognitive effort—which can be a barrier in a market increasingly dominated by frictionless, instantly gratifying experiences.
The Industry’s Historical Misreading of Market Trends
Smith’s recollection of poor predictions from “very well-paid people” is more than just anecdotal color. It reflects a persistent pattern in the video game industry where executives, analysts, and even prominent developers mistake a current trend for a permanent shift. The rush to free-to-play in the mid-2010s is one example. The belief that single-player games were dying after the success of multiplayer-focused titles like Fortnite is another. The assumption that first-person games could not sell outside of the shooter genre has been repeatedly disproven by games like Portal, The Stanley Parable, and indeed Dishonored itself.
The Hollywood actor prediction is a fascinating counterpoint. Smith acknowledged that executives were right about that one. The proliferation of celebrity voice actors and likeness rights in major releases—from Keanu Reeves in Cyberpunk 2077 to Pedro Pascal in the upcoming The Last of Us game—validates that particular insight. The lesson is not that industry executives are always wrong. It is that they are often wrong, and their confidence frequently exceeds their accuracy. Basing long-term creative strategy on the hunches of people who are incentivized to avoid risk is a recipe for a homogenized, trend-chasing industry.
Why Does the Immersive Sim Genre Struggle with Perception?
Part of the problem is that immersive sims are difficult to market. They do not have a single, easily communicable hook. A game like God of War can be sold on its cinematic spectacle and emotional story. A game like Call of Duty can be sold on its competitive multiplayer and visceral action. An immersive sim requires explaining the systemic interactions, the freedom of approach, and the emergent possibilities—all of which are abstract and hard to convey in a 30-second trailer. Players often discover the depth of an immersive sim only after they play it, which means word-of-mouth is critical. If the initial sales are weak because the marketing struggled to communicate the value proposition, the game is quickly written off as a commercial failure, reinforcing the narrative that the genre does not work.
This is the self-fulfilling prophecy in action. A game like Prey (2017) was critically acclaimed and developed a passionate cult following, but its sales were considered disappointing relative to its budget. The conclusion many drew was that “immersive sims don’t sell.” An alternative reading is that Prey’s marketing failed to capture what made it special, and its name—shared with a completely different earlier game—created confusion. The game itself was a masterpiece of systemic design. The commercial outcome was a function of context, not genre.
Harvey Smith’s New Studio: A Practical Experiment in the Genre’s Viability
The decision by Smith, Horne, and Bare to found a new studio dedicated entirely to immersive sims is therefore a high-stakes test of these competing theories. If they can deliver a commercially successful game that honors the genre’s traditions while reaching a sufficiently large audience, it would deal a serious blow to the narrative that immersive sims are unviable. If they fail, it will be taken as further evidence by the industry that the genre is indeed a dead end.
The studio is not starting from zero. Smith directed Dishonored and worked on Deus Ex. Horne and Bare are Arkane veterans with deep experience in systemic game design. They are not novices trying to revive a forgotten genre; they are among the foremost living practitioners of it. Their credibility is a significant asset. When they speak about the genre’s potential, it carries weight. When they commit their careers to it, it signals confidence. The question is whether confidence, talent, and a niche audience are enough to build a sustainable business in an industry that increasingly consolidates around a few blockbuster franchises.
What the Success of Gloomwood and Other Indie Immersive Sims Suggests
The indie space offers a useful data point. Gloomwood, developed by New Blood Interactive, is an overt homage to the original Thief games. It is early access, relatively low-budget, and visually retro. Yet it has attracted a devoted following precisely because it understands what made the classic immersive sims work: dense levels, sound-based stealth, resource scarcity, and a world that reacts to player choices. Gloomwood does not have Hollywood actors. It does not have cutting-edge graphics. It does not have a massive marketing budget. What it has is design purity and a clear understanding of its audience.
Similarly, games like Shadows of Doubt, a noir cyberpunk immersive sim about detective work in procedurally generated cities, and even the surprise hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance—which shares some of the immersive sim’s values of systemic interaction and player agency—suggest that the appetite for this style of game has never disappeared. It has simply shifted to platforms where smaller budgets make the financial math work.
Is the Future of the Immersive Sim Small-Scale and Digital-Only?
It is plausible that the immersive sim’s future is not at the triple-A tier but at the mid-tier or indie level. Just as the point-and-click adventure genre, once a triple-A staple, retreated to a smaller but sustainable niche after its commercial heyday, the immersive sim may find its home in games that cost a fraction of a Dishonored or Prey to produce. This would not be a death. It would be a transformation. The genre’s core ideas—systemic design, player agency, immersive worlds—would live on, but they would be delivered in packages that are better matched to their natural audience size.
This is the strategic insight underlying Smith’s new venture. He is not trying to build a studio that will compete with Rockstar or Activision. He is building a studio that can sustain itself by serving a passionate, specific audience with integrity and craft. That is a different kind of ambition, but it is no less valid. And it may well be the smartest bet for the genre’s survival.
The Broader Implications for Game Development
The debate around immersive sims is, in many ways, a proxy for larger questions about how the video game industry innovates and takes risks. The dominant business model increasingly favors sequels, live-service games, and proven franchises. That model is profitable, but it also leads to stagnation. Genres that require creative risk-taking, that demand player investment, and that do not fit neatly into marketing categories are systematically undervalued.
Smith’s self-fulfilling prophecy argument is a warning. If the industry constantly tells itself that certain kinds of games cannot succeed, it will stop making them. It will stop investing in the talent that knows how to make them. It will stop cultivating the audiences that love them. And then, one day, it will be true—but only because the industry made it so. Breaking that cycle requires not just passion but conviction. It requires developers willing to bet their careers on the idea that audiences are smarter and more adventurous than the market research suggests.
The evidence from the past twenty years supports that bet. Deus Ex, BioShock, and Dishonored made money. Thief and System Shock defined genres. The audience for these games exists. It is not always the biggest audience, but it is an audience that remembers, that returns, and that rewards respect. The question Smith is asking is whether the industry has the courage to serve it.
