UDPATE:
Wilson has since Tweeted that his initial numbers were inaccurate. Dead Space 2 had a budget of roughly $47 million, and its sales figures were only a rough estimate. In addition, he also said that the original Dead Space is believed to have had a budget of around $37 million.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE:
A former employee with the now-shuttered Visceral Games has claimed that Dead Space 2 sold four million copies, but was deemed a commercial failure.
Zach Wilson, who worked at the developer for five years, said on Twitter that the survival horror title had a budget of $60 million dollars. Furthermore, he claimed that publisher Electronic Arts was “merciless” with the budget.
Wilson further explained why Dead Space 2’s impressive sales were not sufficient to deem it commercially successful.
“Cause you gotta spend $60 million dollars marketing it and you take a huge hit from MS and retailers taking their cut.”
Dead Space 2 was released in early 2011 for the PS3, PC, and Xbox 360. Despite EA not being satisfied with sales, the publishing greenlit a sequel, Dead Space 3, which launched back in 2013.
Unfortunately, that didn’t fare much better than its predecessor, and reviewers were not particularly impressed with its more action-oriented direction. The series has been on ice ever since.
Back in early 2013, it was reported that EA had cancelled a planned Dead Space 4 due to poor sales of the third game. Later that year, EA’s Frank Gibeau said that the publishing giant would likely revisit the series at some point down the line.
“While we’re very pleased with the quality and the direction it’s going, we have no announcements right now for further Dead Space, but it’s an IP we love and the Visceral guys have done a great job with it. There’s no reason to believe we wouldn’t visit it again,” he said at the time.
Sadly, the future of Dead Space looks rather bleak, with EA confirming overnight that it has shuttered Visceral Games. Not only that, but the in-development Star Wars project headed by Amy Hennig is being taken back to the drawing board.
Source: NeoGAF