Black Salt Games, a “small indie studio from New Zeland,” has just announced plans to establish both a publishing label and an additional indie studio. Black Salt Games was created in 2021 by “three game developers and a studio manager:” Joel Mason, Alex Ritchie, Mikey Bastiaens, and Nadia Thorne. Currently, the studio has only released Dredge (2023), but has indirect plans to release more to kick off work for the new label, Saltworks Entertainment, and studio, Team Trifold.
Saltworks Entertainment will take on titles developed by Black Salt Games, Team Trifold, and Disc 2 Games. Before the official Saltworks Entertainment publishing label, Black Salt and Disc 2 were heavily intertwined, with Disc 2 being founded by three Black Salt team members who worked on Dredge in 2025. For now, Saltworks Entertainment intends to handle publishing, marketing, global translations, and audio engineering, on top of overseeing production for all three mini studios.
As for why, exactly, Black Salt Games has chosen to focus on mini studios rather than grow into a larger, but still independent, studio is fairly simple. To quote the founding team members,
We believe small teams making ambitious indie games that don’t require the latest and greatest hardware can be a really resilient model for whatever the next five years brings. By connecting these studios, we can share experience, infrastructure and support across teams without any one studio growing beyond what it actually needs.
Team Trifold’s first project has also been announced. It is a “generational action-roguelike” called Nothing Lost, and does not yet have a public release date. In this game, players “battle through ever-shifting dungeons, absorb the powers of [their] fallen heroes, and combine their abilities to conquer the Tower of Souls.” Death is a core mechanic in every roguelike game, but Nothing Lost, taking heavy influence from the anime Shaman King (2021), takes it a step further, with every death being necessary to make the player stronger. Nothing Lost is currently on Steam, and it is currently unknown wether it will be releasing on other platforms.