How horror house Blumhouse moved into games, 31/10/2024
Discussing Paranormal Video Game Publishing Activity with Louise Blain
Louise Blain discusses Blumhouse’s transition to games
Sony shuts Firewalk Studios after Concord flop
Dragon Age: The Veilguard brings fantasy magic to homes across the world
Good morning VGIM-ers,
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the letter “L”, which stands for “lock in” - something I’ve been muttering to myself all week while battering my way through a mountain of work.
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Right, admin done. Let’s get our teeth into a spooky special shall we?
The big read - How horror house Blumhouse moved into games
If you’re a fan of horror movies, there’s a strong chance that you know, and probably love, Blumhouse.
The remarkably productive production company has been responsible for a load of the biggest horror hits in history, including Paranormal Activity, Get Out and The Purge.
And now, it’s coming for the games industry.
Over the past 18 months, it has been marching towards the sector with all the inevitability of a serial killer hunting down a victim in a slasher movie.
In February 2023, the company announced it was setting up a publishing arm in games. Back in June 2024, it unveiled its first slate of game releases on stage at Summer Game Fest. And last week, Fear The Spotlight - the first game in the company’s publishing portfolio - launched across platforms just in time for Halloween.
But how has Blumhouse managed its move into games? How far has it retained the spirit of its film production arm while adapting to a new industry reality? And what is it looking for from the games it publishes?
I caught up with Louise Blain, Creative Lead within Blumhouse’s games division, to find out.
We want your Blains
Louise is a familiar face to many of us working in the games industry. Before joining Blumhouse, she was best known as a journalist who hosted BBC Radio 3’s Sound of Gaming show and wrote prolifically for GamesRadar.
But despite technically being best known for video games, everyone knew that she was a horror fanatic.
At almost every point in her career, she would bring her love of horror into her work: popping up regularly on The Evolution of Horror podcast, recording a spooky version of her BBC game soundtrack show and covering horror titles with glee when they came across her beat as a games journalist.
So when Blumhouse announced it was making its transition into video games, Louise was - naturally - intrigued to find out more. And fortunately for her, it turned out the company was already thinking about the role she might be able to play in making its fortune in games.
“In February 2023, Zach Wood [President of Blumhouse Games] messaged me online because he knew that I obviously loved horror, and I've worked a lot in horror and in the game space…it was like the middle of my spooky Venn diagram,” she explained.
“He got in touch saying ‘this is happening’. And I was trying to be cool and be like, you know, ‘if you ever want to work on anything.’ But I didn’t have to because he then said ‘you know, if you want to chat…’ and I was like ‘yes absolutely!’”
From there, Louise initially came on board as a consultant before being appointed as the Creative Lead for the company in September 2023.
In her role, Louise supports “everything creative” across the game publishing process and acts as an “extra horror brain” for Blumhouse’s partners.
And while the majority of her role focuses on much of the behind the scenes creative work that goes into game publishing, her role occasionally stretches to reassuring developers that, yes, the game they’ve worked on for many years is indeed still terrifying.
“Making horror is kind of like comedy,” she said. “Comedians will write their set and be like ‘this was funny once?’ And I think it’s interesting to look at that with horror because they [the developers] can be like ‘was this scary once?’ because you get so used to seeing something over and over. I think it’s really helpful for them to have someone that’s going ‘no, this is scary’ still.”
But while Louise is able to draw on her own decades of experience as a horror enthusiast - forged in the fires of Goosebumps, Scream and Resident Evil and honed since - to shape her work, Blumhouse’s reputation as the horror house par excellence has translated over to its games business.
This has given it the power to steer its spooky game projects successfully - allowing it to make a seemingly seamless transition into the industry.
Blumhouse of horrors
But how has Blumhouse been successfully achieving this shift? According to Louise, there have been two factors guiding its transition.
First, the company’s games team took direct inspiration from Blumhouse’s strategy within film to establish its philosophy for picking up games.
“The approach that we are taking is very similar to the approach that Jason [Blum, CEO of Blumhouse Productions] took with the beginning of the film business, which was supporting small budget, original, exciting, creative horror ideas,” she explained.
In particular, Louise said that Blumhouse Games is deliberately seeking to increase the breadth of horror games available in the market to match the range within the genre more widely.
“The thing we really want from our slate, and that I’m very personally passionate about, is that horror comes in all different kinds of flavours,” she said.
“If you watch horror movies they come in very different sub genres. You've got your found phone footage, psychological folk horror, cosmic slashers, all of those things.”
“I think sometimes when people think about horror games, they think about Resident Evil or they think about Silent Hill. And they maybe think that they don't want to play those games because - even though they’re great - they maybe don’t want that specific survival horror experience. They want to, you know, read a ghost story under a blanket.”
This appetite for what I’m glibly calling ‘something else’ presents in Louise’s words an “incredible opening” for the business and the genre.
And with games such as eerie card battler Inscryption and eldritch fish ‘em up Dredge showing already that there is appetite for a wider range of horror in games, Blumhouse hopes that its slate will capitalise on untapped appetite in the market.
But to grasp the opportunity, the company recognised that its philosophy needed to be adapted to the reality of the games industry.
So the second way that Blumhouse made its transition into games as simple as possible was to hire experienced industry experts to bring the division to life.
At this point, a number of you will be sitting here going ‘well, duh.’
Yet despite it seeming like an obvious point, there are plenty of tales in games industry history where a transmedia property has either not hired industry experts to lead the team or have undermined games expertise when it has tried to lead the business forward - such as Disney’s approach to its games division in the early 2000s.
Blumhouse hasn’t made the same mistake. From the outset, the company has stacked the team with enough industry expertise to immediately make waves in the sector.
For example, Zach Wood, the aforementioned Blumhouse Games president, and Don Sechler, the company’s CFO, both come equipped with years of industry experience amassed at places such as Midway, PlayStation and Arkane Studios. This experience also includes working extensively with, and within, the independent development scene that Blumhouse wants to tap into.
And perhaps even more importantly, Louise says that the games team has been handed the freedom to exercise their expertise in the way they see fit.
“They're [Blumhouse] very much trusting us to be like, ‘okay, you know games, you do your thing.’ I think that's always a good thing.”
This allows Blumhouse to successfully trade upon its wider reputation while reassuring game developers that it really knows what it’s doing in the business.
And that, according to Louise, gives developers the confidence to pitch the publisher spectacular ideas: helping everyone in the process.
“It tends to be that when people pitch us a horror game, it’s their passion project. It's what they've always wanted to work on,” she said.
“And I think that's a real benefit for us, because it means that people get to explore really cool, creative things that they're really passionate about.”
In the spotlight
So, has it all been plain sailing for Blumhouse’s games team so far? I’d say that despite making excellent progress since it was announced last Spring, it is still early days for the company’s publishing team.
Despite being a part of the industry for nearly a couple of years, Blumhouse’s first publishing project Fear the Spotlight - a game with extensive stylistic nods to 1990s survival horror games like Resident Evil - only released last week.
This means it will, inevitably, take more time to see how its strategy plays out and whether or not it delivers upon its early promise.
However, the initial signs are good for the business. While Louise admitted that the wait for the review embargo on Fear the Spotlight to drop was ‘intense’, the company’s first published game launched to critical acclaim - with The Guardian’s Keith Stuart praising it for having “an emotionally resonant story” at its horrifying heart. And overall, this is good news for pretty much all involved with Blumhouse’s work.
For the company, it’s a welcome proof of concept for its thesis that the horror genre in games is ready for the kind of innovation seen within the cinematic space - something that will likely prove reassuring for other games on its slate such as Crisol: Theatre of Idols (a first person shooter where you sacrifice blood for bullets) and Sleep Awake (a psychological first person experience where if you fall asleep you disappear).
More broadly, the early success of Fear the Spotlight looks like it could be great news for both players who love horror games and creators who are looking for publishers willing to back spooky ideas.
According to Louise, Blumhouse’s ambition is to eventually build on its first six published titles by supporting a few upstart horror games every year.
For players, this means that there will be a steady stream of intriguing independently developed horror games to pick up.
And for developers thinking about pitching such a game, Blumhouse’s appetite for exciting independently developed content opens a high profile door that simply wasn’t there before.
So if you’re a developer reading this and thinking about pitching a horror game to Blumhouse, make sure you do.
Louise recommends that you “make that thing that really excites you” and “don’t be afraid to be a bit weird” when pitching the company to grab their attention.
And for everyone else, the lesson to learn from Blumhouse’s entry into games is the importance of finding the sweet spot between what your organisation wants to achieve and what lines up with industry reality.
People like Louise are the kind of horror fiends who know, love and admire the work that Blumhouse has done on the big screen.
But by respecting the knowledge, expertise and experience of people like her within games, the famous production company has been able to quickly, and effectively, establish itself within the industry’s publishing space - putting it on course for some seriously scary success in the future.
News in brief
Fire’s out: Sony Interactive Entertainment has confirmed that it is shuttering Firewalk Studios, the company responsible for the development of mega-flop Concord. In a statement released earlier this week, SIE’s Hermen Hulst said that the studio was being taken to the farm up the road where all our childhood pets live along with the company’s Helsinki based mobile game studio Neon Koi. Sigh.
This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both of Us: The Harris presidential campaign has launched a map in Fortnite in an effort to woo young voters before the US goes to the polls next week. According to The Hill, Freedom Town, USA allows players to enjoy an experience designed around Harris’s key campaign pillars “including tax breaks for small businesses and affordable housing.” Stop, I can only get too excited.
Passing out parade: Physical sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 dropped by 10% year-on-year, after sales on Xbox fell through the floor as a result of the game appearing on Game Pass for the first time. We (or, more accurately, I) will be watching Microsoft’s next set of financial results with interest to see if COD prompted a big uptick in subscribers to the company’s ‘Netflix for Games’.
The History Noise: Game preservation efforts have taken another hefty thwack on the head over in the United States after The US Copyright Office denied a request for DMCA exemption to allow libraries to remotely share digital access to preserved video games. The Video Game History Foundation says that 87% of all games released in the US before 2010 are out of print and therefore game sharing is, well, fair game. Game publishers say no because there’s a small chance they could be monetising those dusty old games at some point in the future. Lads. Come on now.
Command and Conquering: The US Air Force is preparing for the next generation of global conflict by playing video games, the feckless layabouts. Yes, Task and Purpose - your one stop shop for military news - reports that the Air Force’s internal network has been updated to allow able airmen to play a game called Command, described by its developers as the “legendary game of modern cross domain operations.” Up next: the people who handle the country’s nukes to be handed copies of DEFCON so they can sob at their desks between war game exercises.
On the move
Paul Fogolin is back in the games biz, having been appointed President and CEO of ESA Canada…Tom Orry has been appointed as Editorial Director over at Eurogamer…Kelsey Christou is the new Senior Gaming Projects Manager at Charlotte Tilbury (slay)...Lucy Boxall has been given a job bump to become Vice President Strategy and Communications at Creative Assembly…And Ronan Patrick has kicked off a new gig as Management Consultant over at data boffins Newzoo…
Jobs ahoy
Ever wanted to be the Deputy Editor, PC Gaming Show at Future? Now you can…Google would love you to be its new Director, Games, Play Partnerships, EMEA...Ubisoft is hiring an Associate Manager, Community Team up in Newcastle…Activision Blizzard is hiring for the longest job title I’ve seen in a while: Social Media & Digital Publishing Specialist, Call of Duty, Germany…And Discord is hiring a Creative Director - Copywriting Brand Team in SF, if you fancy West Coast living…
Events and conferences
AI and Games Conference, London - 8th November (SOLD OUT)
PG Connects, Jordan - 9th-10th November
G-Star 2024, Busan - 13th-17th November
Slush, Helsinki - 20th-21st November
The Game Awards, Los Angeles - 12th December
Games of the week
Dragon Age: The Veilguard - It’s good! The new Dragon Age is actually good! Rejoice!
REDACTED - It's Hades, but with a different setting and more liberal use of the word ‘wankers’ in the voice acting.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure - Solve a supernatural murder in time for Halloween. DO IT. DO IT NOW.
Before you go…
Do you like Guinness? Have you any fondness for World Records? And would you like to try to set a video game related one that isn’t about speed running?
VGIM reader, celebrated author and possessor of pizzazz Alice Bell is editing the Gamers Edition of the record loving tome and wants to discuss fun world record ideas that are FAMILY APPROPRIATE (i.e. no ‘fastest person to shag the man bear in Baldur’s Gate 3’ records, please).
Drop them an email here if you’re up for becoming a world record holder at some point.
A good read about Blumhouse's move into the very competitive horror game space. But lest we forget, this same studio thought the new Halloween and Exorcist movies were good.