Dredge Studio Black Salt Splits Into Three Small Teams

Black Salt Games announced a restructure into three linked studios, a Saltworks Entertainment publishing label, and Team Trifold's roguelike Nothing Lost.

Black Salt Games, the New Zealand indie studio founded in 2021 by Joel Mason, Alex Ritchie, Mikey Bastiaens and Nadia Thorne, has announced a major restructure. Rather than growing into one large company, the team behind Dredge (2023) is establishing an additional indie studio, Team Trifold, alongside a publishing label, Saltworks Entertainment, which will handle publishing, marketing, global translations and audio engineering for titles from Black Salt Games, Team Trifold and Disc 2 Games.

Black Salt is doing the opposite, deliberately capping each unit's size while connecting them through shared infrastructure. The founders said small teams making ambitious indie games that don't require the latest hardware can be 'a really resilient model for whatever the next five years brings,' letting studios share experience and support without any one studio growing beyond what it actually needs.

mxdwn Games reports that Team Trifold's first project is a 'generational action-roguelike' called Nothing Lost, already listed on Steam with no public release date. Players battle through ever-shifting dungeons, absorb the powers of fallen heroes and combine abilities to conquer the Tower of Souls. Taking heavy influence from the anime Shaman King (2021), every death is necessary to make the player stronger. Steam is currently the only announced platform.

The restructure formalizes a relationship that already existed: Disc 2 Games was founded in 2025 by three Black Salt team members who worked on Dredge. Saltworks Entertainment now oversees production across all three mini studios, meaning Dredge's success is being converted into a small publishing ecosystem rather than a single expanding developer. Whether that model can deliver a second hit is what fans and industry watchers will be testing.

Nothing Lost has no release window yet, and Black Salt has not detailed upcoming projects for the new label. The move comes as small-studio culture is under scrutiny elsewhere: according to GamesRadar+, Bulkhead, the studio behind Wardogs, screens hires' Steam accounts to confirm they are passionate about FPS games, with executive director Joe Brammer saying 'you wouldn't let me go and make Final Fantasy.' Black Salt's structure is a different answer to the same question of how small teams stay sharp and survive.