Brace yourself. Dead Space, well, it appears to be dead again. Yep, EA’s reportedly put the series “on hold” for the second time, though, it does at least seem like some ideas for a new entry were briefly considered early last year, though none of them were actually given permission to become a thing.
This news follows a chain of events which began with Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb reporting that a Dead Space 2 remake was in development, before being canceled. EA quickly responded to that, sending a statement to IGN which said “We don’t normally comment on rumours, but there is no validity to this story.” Now, following some digging, it seems that the remake was one of a couple of ideas that were briefly explored, before EA opted to put the series on pause.
That last part’s according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who’s reported that EA elected to put Dead Space back on hiatus “as early as last spring”, with any desires from developers to make a new entry apparently being “derailed after sales of the remake missed the company’s expectations”.
Though, it does sound like ideas for both a fresh Dead Space game and a remake of the second game were at lease explored following the release of the Dead Space remake – which we really liked – in early 2023. Schreier cites the “chief hope” as having been for the new entry in the series, rather than a remake, but none of the ideas pitched for the former were seemigly given the green light and “fizzled before they could get very far”, with EA then having made the ‘no more Dead Space for now’ call.
Since that point, lots of members of the team that was working on Dead Space have moved on to working on other projects, such as Battlefield, which it was recently announced Dead Space remake executive producer Philippe Ducharme and creative director Roman Campos-Oriola will be doing.
If you’re wondering why there was so much confusion around whether Dead Space 2 was actually getting remade, Schreier says it could all be down to EA using the same code names to refer to certain things, no matter how much what they are actually changes. More silly code names can be good, the lesson we all thought we’d learn from this.