The story of Dead Space never fails to break my heart. When the first game launched back in 2008 for the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC, it felt like the start of an ambitious multimedia empire. It spawned a feature-length animated prequel, novels, comics, a rail shooter spin-off on the Wii, and two eventual sequels that gradually exchanged survival horror for all-out action.
Once upon a time, Electronic Arts was confident Dead Space would become the next big thing. Visceral Games was entrusted to shepherd this series forward, while other single-player efforts like Mirror’s Edge, Dragon Age, and Mass Effect helped round out its array of story-based offerings. It was a great time to play video games, but it unfortunately only took a few years for corporate greed to seep into everything that made this horror epic so good.
Dead Space 2 would introduce a pointless multiplayer mode that nobody played, while the third game would surrender to focus testing and industry trends as it traded the horror that players loved from the first two games for increased action and a focus on co-op play. But chasing the hot new thing didn’t translate to increased sales or better reviews, and so the series was deemed a failure and quietly put to rest. Years later, it remains a mammoth case of lost potential that even an excellent remake couldn’t salvage.
The Dead Space Remake Should Have Changed Everything
Released in 2023 and developed by Motive Studio, I still believe the Dead Space remake is the definitive version of an already fantastic game. Yes, making Isaac Clarke a spoken hero when his silence was such a defining part in the original was a huge risk, but it only ensured that his relationships with other key characters were deeper than ever before. He no longer felt like an errand boy waltzing into his own death time and time again.
It was not only a retelling, but an expansion of the original narrative that set up foundations that could have been expanded upon in future remakes. Unfortunately, and despite positive reviews, it only sold a couple of million copies and conceptual plans for a remake of Dead Space 2 were reportedly shelved. I’m not in a position to speak about whether the remake ended up making a profit or not, but for a game to sell over a million copies and still be considered a failure feels like a damning sign of how triple-A development costs and resources have all but ballooned out of control rather than the potential of the game itself.
In the eyes of Electronic Arts and other major publishers, a high-budget single-player title like Dead Space probably needs to live up to and break massive, often unrealistic, expectations if it truly wants to stick around. In a landscape where games like FIFA, Call of Duty, and Fortnite are striving to make all the money in the world, why bother investing in a relatively niche thing like Dead Space at all?
I imagine this is why they walked away from the franchise to begin with, as the publisher was, at the time, focusing on a smaller yet more lucrative selection of safer titles with more multiplayer monetisation instead of being experimental. Fewer risks and greater profits have become the core focus while also trying to create a live service destined to become the next big thing.
But when the remake of Dead Space was first announced, it felt like a defiance of that status quo. For once, Electronic Arts was treating it as a very big deal. A comeback of an icon that was finally going to get the respect it deserved in the modern era. Not only that, the talent it had assembled to bring it to life knew where the series had gone astray in the past and had plans to correct the course. It sucks we will never see how this horror-focused direction may have evolved in remakes of the other two games.
But Now It Will Never See The Light Of Day Again
On a recent episode of the FRVR Podcast, former writer and producer Chuck Beaver talked about the potential future of Dead Space and how he believes another game is probably not going to happen in today’s landscape:
“Any of the Resident Evils are selling around seven million, that’s a pretty good number," Beaver said. "But, you know, companies now are looking for the next Fortnite. They need something that is a perennial moneymaker […] Something like a single-player package game with no live-service offering, it’s just a dinosaur fossil of a business model."
He’s right. A lot of developers and publishers aren’t willing to take chances on games that might only sell a couple of million copies because there are bigger fish to fry. Putting all your resources into the vain hope that you might release the next Fortnite is more important to corporations than giving creatives what they need to make interesting art.
“Horror games have a bit of a ceiling, and I think the number back in [former EA VP] Frank Gibeau’s day was five million units to keep going on Dead Space," Beaver continued. "I think the number is like 15 million units now, given the cost of things," he added, before joking that it was "a sadness in capitalism for all of us to suffer, until AI makes it apparently easy for you and I just type 'make Dead Space 4’."
Some of these numbers seem a tiny bit exaggerated, since only a handful of games over the past decade that aren’t major franchises or annual installments have managed to surpass 15 million copies sold, let alone something like Dead Space, which managed smaller numbers by comparison. But restricting an entire genre in the triple-A space to just a couple of beloved series like Resident Evil and Silent Hill feels inherently limiting, and it sucks that many big players have already decided that survival horror simply isn’t worth their time.
EA certainly isn’t interested, having already rebuffed advances from series creator Glen Schofield after the failure of The Callisto Protocol. But just because Dead Space failed to make ends meet as a triple-A blockbuster doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist in other forms.
I mean, Konami is already proving that with Silent Hill as it strikes a balance between high-budget remakes and more experimental projects that push the property to new places. It might be worth considering whether our current perspective on survival horror is outdated when every major company under the sun believes it isn’t worth their time.
Dead Space is dead, and I struggle to envision a future where it comes back to life unless something incredibly drastic happens. Hell, maybe EA will sell the rights one of these days.
Dead Space
- Released
- October 14, 2008
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
- Visceral Games
- Publisher(s)
- Electronic Arts
- Engine
- Frostbite
- Franchise
- Dead Space
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Survival Horror
