EA’s Scrapped Dead Space 3 Would Have Been AMAZING
"Horror Games Don't Sell"
The issue is, though, EA didn't just want multiplayer this time around, they wanted multiplayer that could sell. It's an infamous part of gaming history that the company essentially set the third game up to fail, making it clear before launch that it needed to sell a minimum of five million copies to be considered worthwhile. To put that number into context, the far more mainstream Mass Effect 2 only sold four million copies for EA, while the highest-selling Resident Evil game is Resi 5 with just over 7 million copies sold, and that's a sequel that benefitted from nearly two decades of audience building.
To hit that target they needed the game to appeal to as many people as possible, but they couldn't market the developer's original idea for Dead Space 3. After all, the entire appeal of its co-op was built around not knowing what was real and what wasn't, as well as a late game twist. Its biggest draw was something that would be butchered if revealed in trailers.
In the end, according to Wanat, EA opted for something far more conventional. This asymmetrical framing was all but ripped out, while Shadow Isaac was replaced with a generic soldier called Carver. It's unclear how late in development this was, but considering how little this second protagonist factors into the plot, often disappearing during pivotal moments, it's not unfair to guess that it was quite late. Likewise, other systems were retrofitted to suit EA's needs, including altering the crafting to include microtransactions for the raw materials.
The game was also made to be more action-focused, under the assumption that horror games don't sell. Apparently, that was a fact lamented within Visceral itself. In 2017, an ex-Visceral level designer explained in an interview: "Horror games in general are expensive to make and hard to sell," seemingly backing up EA's claims.
However, the 4 million copies Dead Space 2 sold is nothing to sniff at, and the justification probably shouldn't be "horror games don't sell" but rather "horror games don't sell as much" as other genres.