Following the news that EA Motive’s team responsible for last year’s Dead Space remake would work on the Battlefield franchise going forward (alongside the previously announced Iron Man game), fans of the horror franchise were left wondering whether a Dead Space 2 remake would still happen.
Yesterday, during Giant Bomb’s Game Mess Mornings stream, Jeff Grubb claimed Dead Space 2 had been in pre-production at EA Motive but was shelved because of lackluster sales of the original. However, Electronic Arts quickly responded with the following statement shared with IGN:
We don’t normally comment on rumors but there is no validity to this story.
The truth is often in the middle, and that seems to be the case here as well. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has since clarified that Motive did have a small team working on ideas for a new game (not a remake of the second entry) in the franchise, but the project never received the green light from EA and any further Dead Space plans have been put on hold for about a year now because of the remake’s lower than expected sales. Motive had been working on entirely different ideas since last Summer. Schreier chalked Grubb’s mistake to the fact that the ‘Dead Space remake’ team used the same code name to describe any project they were working on.
Of course, this doesn’t mean a Dead Space 2 remake will never happen. Chances are another revival might happen at some point, but it won’t be any time soon, given that Motive is going to be busy for many years with the aforementioned games.
Dead Space 2 launched in 2011 to high praise from critics, achieving an average Metascore of 90. However, EA CEO Andrew Wilson later revealed it didn’t sell enough to recoup its budget. The game sold around four million units, around the same as the predecessor, while costing more (an estimated $60 million) to make.
