Is the future of AAA horror bound for another recession?

For horror fans, 2024 has headlined many disappointing and worrying industry developments, such as claims of the Dead Space franchise being shuttered again or the closure of The Evil Within studio Tango Gameworks by Microsoft.

News of this kind does not portray an optimistic outlook for big-budget efforts in the genre but rather suggests a steady decline in publisher confidence for horror games to be profitable.

This is in stark contrast to only a year prior, as 2023 saw the release of games like Resident Evil 4 (2023), Dead Space (2023) and Alan Wake II, along with new entries in the Alone in the Dark and Silent Hill franchises looming on the horizon. What happened?

Reflecting on over a decade of horror

It appeared as though horror games were undergoing a renaissance not that long ago. The genre suffered from a long stagnation during the early-to-mid 2010s, during which point franchises like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame were almost entirely absent. Meanwhile, attempts at new IPs like The Evil Within stumbled, and even the genre-defining Resident Evil suffered an action-horror identity crisis.

It wasn’t all bad, though. The indie scene is filled with break-out hits like Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Outlast, Slender: The Eight Pages, and Five Nights at Freddy’s. For a time, it seemed that the future of this genre would be entrusted to these smaller, more humble endeavors.

In the late 2010s, the financial and critical success of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard and Resident Evil 2 (2019) reignited the belief that big-budget horror was commerically viable. Each sold over 13 million copies, becoming Capcom’s 3rd and 4th best selling games to date. This spurred many publishers to try and revive their own horror properties, such as Dead Space (2023), Alone in the Dark (2024), and Silent Hill 2 (2024). 

This was cause for celebration among fans of these long-dormant franchises. The unfortunate caveat to all this was the publisher’s high expectations that these IPs would produce a golden goose, which ultimately served as the undoing for at least a few of these properties.

Bright prospects cast a long shadow

Publisher Krafton Inc. and developer Striking Distance Studios invested $200 billion won ($162 million USD) into 2022’s The Callisto Protocol, aiming to capitalize on the void left by Dead Space. Ironically, neither its game nor the Dead Space remake would recapture that market, and both games would sell under expectations. The Callisto Protocol’s failure to meet sales targets led to layoffs and the departure of CEO Glen Schofield at Striking Distance Studios.

A similar fate was met by Alone in the Dark (2024), after suffering “softer-than-expected performance” in sales. Developer Pieces Interactive faced layoffs before ultimately seeing publisher Embracer Group pull the plug on the entire studio and plunging the future of Alone in the Dark into uncertainty.

The problem is that modern video games are just incredibly expensive to make. They demand hundreds of man-hours to craft intricate and detailed worlds for players to explore. Horror, in particular, requires an immersive atmosphere that has become paramount to the experience.

The catch is that a strongly performing game does not translate to immediate profit. Alan Wake II is an unmitigated triumph for Remedy Entertainment, receiving widespread acclaim and multiple awards for its achievements in story and presentation, all made possible by a budget that ballooned alongside its ambitions. Though Alan Wake II is Remedy’s fastest-selling title to date, the game has yet to break even on production expenses. If not for being 100 percent funded under the Epic Games Publishing label, it’s unclear whether the game would have seen the light of day.

Aspirations now met with trepidation 

It’s little wonder why publishers are so careful in choosing which projects to greenlight from their studios. Capcom is leading the pack in horror with Resident Evil, having seemingly found the winning formula: legacy status as a decades-old franchise, multimedia saturation with Hollywood films, investing in internally crafted technology to streamline production, and intelligent planning for development pipelines, which includes very deliberate consideration for which projects are most worthwhile to undertake. 

Unsurprisingly, the popular safe choice is now to remake previously well-received titles from the publisher’s catalog. This lets them leverage the original’s success and marketability, as well as cut down on pre-production planning by using an existing framework.

Still, it’s not a guaranteed plan. EA tried this approach with Dead Space (2023), producing a faithful remake with a familiar blueprint as a low-risk, high-yield investment. Despite critical acclaim and strong initial sales, Dead Space (2023) allegedly sold below EA’s expectations.

Dead Space is not a small IP either, spanning multiple games, animated movies, and comics at the height of its popularity. If EA truly has no current plans to continue with the series at this time, that bodes ill for the industry perception of a successful horror franchise in general. 

Microsoft’s shuttering of Tango Gameworks reinforces this notion. Tango held a strongly established survival horror IP in their repertoire with The Evil Within but evidently showed no interest in capitalizing on the property.

The dark age of horror? Not quite.

Does this leave us in a dismal future where only Resident Evil reigns supreme? There may be another stretch of time with very little competition in the big-budget horror space while publishers seek out new strategies for reproducing Resident Evil‘s success.

Instead, the future of horror appears to again be smaller publishers and developers. Newcomers Blumhouse Games – a games publishing branch of Blumhouse Productions formed in 2023 – took to the stage at 2024’s Summer Game Fest to unveil a lineup of six independent horror titles now being funded under their label.

Meanwhile, Supermassive Games has crafted numerous narrative choice-driven horror games with multiple different publishing partners, ranging from bigger budget efforts like Until Dawn and The Quarry, to their collection of shorter productions with The Dark Pictures Anthology. They’ve also inherited the Little Nightmares series after original creators Tarsier Studios ceased working on the property.

Even Fatal Frame has been sustaining itself with remastered ports of previous entries and has a new feature film on the way.

Most interesting of all is Konami’s reinvigorated approach with Silent Hill. The publisher hosted a Silent Hill Transmission video broadcast in 2022 that manifested multiple new games and a feature film after a decade-long inactivity.

Konami has cast a wide net in an attempt to recapture the market, aiming to make a splash in the high-budget horror space with their remake of Silent Hill 2 (2024) and an original title with Silent Hill: ƒ. It’s also testing smaller markets with experimental projects like Silent Hill: Townfall and Silent Hill: Ascension, as well as the free downloadable title Silent Hill: The Short Message that was released in early 2024.

If there exists any frontrunner with a chance to compete for commercial viability in the AAA horror space, it would likely be Silent Hill. A lot is at stake for the franchise this fall with the release of Silent Hill 2 (2024) in October and a new film, Return to Silent Hill, the stage is now set to see if Konami’s fan-favorite horror series can secure a sustainable future.

As publishers struggle, players still profit

In reality, the main takeaway here is that regardless of whether publishers can financially endure the big-budget horror space, the creatives behind these projects will continue to find ways to bring their ideas to life. There is a swath of talent within the indie horror market crafting innovative and evocative new ways to terrify and enrapture players. 

Amnesia: The Bunker is arguably among the best horror games of 2023, while Crow Country swiftly became a breakout hit in early 2024. The rest of the year is primed to impress with up-and-comers like Hollowbody, Post Trauma, and Fear the Spotlight, among others.

It’s also worth reiterating that Resident Evil is not going anywhere anytime soon, either, providing players with a near-annual fix for big-budget horror. So long as trailblazers exist to set the benchmark, it is only a matter of time before we see developers take another crack at producing intricate, large-scale horror games.