The horror genre has roots that go back decades in gaming. The early titles in the genre did a lot of heavy lifting with creepy atmosphere and underlying scares, using rudimentary graphics and game design to deliver unsettling stories the best they could. With every generation of games, technology improves and immersion gets more impressive — and yet, despite major success stories, the genre never really felt like the dominant force in the mainstream compared to other genres like platformers, shooters, or open-world sandboxes.
Things have shifted, though. In the modern era, Let’s Plays of horror games draw in millions of views. Inventive approaches to horror meld sudden jump scares and creepy narratives for great effect. Horror games like Exit 8 and Five Nights at Freddy’s are making the leap to other media, with the latter turning a fairly one-note premise into an entire expansive franchise. The genre feels like it has captured the attention and imagination of the mainstream in ways it hadn’t before — and the proof can be found in the massive success of two of the genre’s oldest hits.
Horror Games Are Bigger Than Ever
The massive success of Resident Evil Requiem and Silent Hill f highlights just how popular the horror genre has become in mainstream gaming. There’s always been a place for horror in the gaming space, but it’s rarely been the primary driving force of the mainstream. That’s typically a place occupied by platformers for all-ages, immersive Rockstar dramas for mature audiences, and whatever style of shooter is dominating the conversation at any given time. However, horror has seen a lot of big successes with two major enduring franchises landing some of their biggest hits ever in the modern environment.
Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry in the 30-year-old series, sold over 5 million copies in less than a week. By comparison, other recent entries in the series took weeks or even months to reach those numbers. This comes on the heels of Silent Hill f‘s release last year, which sold millions of copies in a single day and quickly outpaced the rest of the entries in the series in terms of raw sales. These are two of the biggest franchises in the genre, so it’s no surprise that they sold well. Resident Evil even had the benefit of building off the recent success of that franchise’s remakes and sequels, which had been largely successful.
However, the fact that both of these success stories were so big, came about just a few months apart, and were assisted by plenty of solid indie horror titles doing good numbers as well, highlights just how well the genre is landing with modern audiences. Whereas horror had previously been something of a niche market in gaming, the modern era has been perfectly positioned for scary stories to become a truly dominant force in the industry.
Why Horror Is Having A Moment In Gaming
This is notably far from the only time horror games have been big, but the dual success of Silent Hill f and Resident Evil Requiem suggests that the genre has broken out in the mainstream in a way that it hadn’t before. That might have something to do with the developing fandom for the genre among younger gamers, many of whom grew up with the likes of Five Nights at Freddy’s. That jump-scare-heavy series became a smash hit and generated a massive multimedia franchise that also helped convince a generation of gamers to dive fully into a world of scary lore and frightening creatures. It builds on an era where gamers were seeing horror elements incorporated more heavily into other genres, from the scary storytelling of RTS games like Diablo IV to the monstrous elements of shooters like BioShock. Indie horror games have likewise been finding a lot of success, with developers like Bloober Team finding success after success through their releases. Horror has never been better positioned to dominate the attention of gamers.
Those legacy franchises have always been successful, but they’ve also had to go through lots of reinvention. While there’s a shared formula behind many of the biggest horror games of the modern era (such as the third-person perspective and balance of combat with stealth), they’ve also highlighted how differing styles and formats can make the genre feel even bigger. Silent Hill f had the brand recognition but told an entirely new story in a setting divorced from the history of the franchise. Resident Evil Requiem blended a new character and emphasis on survival-horror, with fan favorite Leon Kennedy getting to deliver some big action set pieces. The indie space has been great for horror, with plenty of unique approaches to the genre paying off with a hungry player base. Horror in gaming has been doing better than ever, with two major blockbusters proving the genre has made itself a major part of the mainstream.