[UPDATE April 12th, 2024: In light of the fervent discourse ignited by Grubb’s initial report, an EA spokesperson has since denied that the company was working on a Dead Space 2 Remake, telling IGN, “We don’t normally comment on rumors but there is no validity to this story.”
Notably, in corroborating this claim, Bloomberg video game reporter Jason Schrier acknowledged that “a small team at the Electronic Arts subsidiary Motive spent a few months conceiving ideas for a new entry in the series,” but they “were never given a greenlight and fizzled before they could get very far.”
To this end, while the Dead Space 2 Remake may have never entered full development, it does appear that, as Grubb reported, the game was at one point in pre-production.
The original story follows below.]
In delivering an Isaac Clarke-level stomp to the fan-favorite franchise’s future prospects, due to finding the sales of the first Dead Space Remake to be “lackluster”, EA has pulled the plug on an upcoming remake of the series’ second entry.
Word of the franchise’s latest loss of life support was first raised by noted video game industry insider and GiantBomb contributor Jeff Grubb on the April 10th episode of his Game Mess Morning podcast.
Cutting between the lines of EA’s recent announcement that a number of developers who worked on the 2023 remake of the space horror title had been variously reassigned to both the Battlefield series and Iron Man development teams, Grubb explained, “[EA has] said [Motive Studio is] going to be a two project team going forward, and that is going to be Iron Man and Battlefield. What does that leave out? Maybe a Dead Space game?”
[Time Stamp: 00:12:15]
In proceeding to provide the answer to his own question, he then elaborated, “So, they were working on [a remake of] Dead Space 2 and they are no longer working on it. “
“It is on the shelf because the first game had lackluster sales, is how it was phrased to me,” he continued. “So, if you were looking forward to a [remake of] Dead Space 2, it’s bad news. It’s just straight up bad news.”
Moving to answer the anticipated fan question of “Does this mean it never happens?”, Grubb ultimately concluded, “I don’t know if that’s the case, but as it stands right now, they were working on it, it was in the concept phase – It was definitely in pre-pro – and now that work has been put on the shelf, and they are done with it, and this studio is now making Iron Man and Battlefield.”
Notably, as per EA’s aforementioned announcement, the Motive Studio shake-up will see “the directors who delivered [the] Dead Space Remake in 2023, Philippe Ducharme (Executive Producer) and Roman Campos-Oriola (Creative Director)” assigned to “build a team at Motive to work alongside the Battlefield studios around the world creating what’s next for Battlefield– a universe across both multiplayer and single-player experiences.”
As of writing, EA has not publicly released the official sales numbers for their Dead Space Remake.
However, thanks to previous reports, it is at the very least known that the game managed to take second place in the January 2023 sales charts, losing out only to Activision Blizzard’s 2022 reboot of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II.
To this end, while an exact determination can not yet be made, an educated guess suggests that the Dead Space Remake‘s sales number were somewhere between decent-to-good.
Unfortunately, while such results would once have been enough for a company to attempt to continue building fan momentum with a follow-up release, in a day and age when the Western video game industry considers any title that doesn’t immediately sell gangbusters and recoup its budget to be an abject failure, the Dead Space franchise sadly never stood a chance at staving off a second death.
