10 Times The Games Industry Had No Idea WTF It Was Doing

8. Assuming There Was No Market For Horror

SILENT HILLS pt
Konami

Sometime in the late 2000s, video game publishers decided that horror games were dead.

Without seemingly any evidence pointing towards the genre's unpopularity - or, you know, without ever trying to sell players a good title to check whether they were right or not - publishers pulled the plug on new AAA horror games and started turning their biggest horror franchises into bombastic action titles.

For years, the biggest companies insisted that there was no market for horror experiences, all the while a little platform called Steam was seeing a huge boom in independent genre releases that were completely tearing up the charts.

Even then, publishers were still slow to accept that there was any demand for scares, and it's only been in the past few years with releases like Alien: Isolation and Resident Evil 7 that they've realised, despite what they thought, the market for good horror games never went away.

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Josh has over 11 years of experience as a published writer, having worked nine of those years as a full-time content producer at WhatCulture. In that period he has created hundreds of articles, videos and podcast episodes for multiple WhatCulture channels, specialising in gaming, horror and film & TV. He now primarily works as a senior content producer and presenter on WhatCulture Gaming where he co-hosts the WhatCulture Gaming Podcast, a top 3 UK most listened to gaming podcast that he co-created in 2018. Over the years he has reviewed several high-profile gaming releases, covered industry events with on-site reporting, opined on breaking news, and even kicked off his interviewing career by chatting to childhood hero, Tommy Wiseau.