The Outlast franchise has crossed 60 million players since the first game dropped back in 2013, Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin revealed in a new interview with GameSpot. That number is staggering for a series that publishers once treated like a radioactive sandwich. Who in their right mind would have bet on a Canadian studio that almost couldn’t even get its first game funded?
A Pitch Meeting Straight Out Of A Nightmare
Picture this: you’re a small developer pitching a horror game set in a grimy asylum where you can’t fight back, and your only defense is a camcorder with a dying battery. Potential publishers looked at that and said, no thanks, we’d rather sprinkle 50 grand apiece across 10 mobile games than hand you half a million. Morin told GameSpot that’s close to word for word what he heard: partners would “rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast].” Somebody sat in a chair, looked at Outlast, and chose 10 throwaway phone games over it.
I think about those people sometimes. Do they lie awake at night? Do they see the 60 million number and feel a little twinge? I hope so. The Canada Media Fund eventually kicked in $1 million, which means Canadian taxpayers helped fund one of the most disturbing games ever made. Even that wasn’t enough, though. Morin said the founders threw in roughly $360,000 from their savings and credit cards and leveraged their home mortgages to get the game across the finish line. God bless Canadian arts funding, and God bless whoever approved those mortgages.
The Camcorder That Launched A Thousand Screams
Outlast sold 400,000 copies in its first five months, hitting its year-one goal before the year was even half over. Red Barrels followed it up with Outlast 2, which traded claustrophobic hallways for cornfields and open sky, because nothing says horror like agriculture. Morin pushed back on the idea that the sequel was a misfire, saying both games were “pretty profitable” and the studio just learned some things it would do differently.
That’s the most diplomatic way anyone has ever said, “Yeah, we fumbled a couple of things.” The studio grew to 45 people and burned through six years of prototypes before landing on The Outlast Trials, a multiplayer take that sold half a million copies in its first week of early access. So the franchise went from a single-player panic simulator to a cooperative panic simulator. Growth.
The Gore Was Never The Plan, Apparently
Morin insists the studio didn’t sit around brainstorming ways to make the grossest game on the market. It just sort of happened organically, the way mold grows in a damp basement. He remembers the scriptwriter saying early on, “There’s never too much blood.” That’s a real quote from a real human being who works in games. And the content has left scars.
During one playtest, a person ran out of the studio after a couple of hours to go cry outside and never came back. Just left. Gone. Morin didn’t say which game she was testing, and honestly, does it matter? They all qualify.
The studio always makes sure job candidates know what they’re signing up for, which makes sense because you can’t just spring this stuff on a person during their first week. Even that doesn’t catch everyone. One employee started on a Monday and was gone by Thursday, citing discomfort with the religious content. They knew about the gore and violence going in. The theology was the dealbreaker. So the blood was fine, but the scripture was a bridge too far. People contain multitudes.
Sixty Million Players And Counting
The 60 million figure covers everything from the original asylum nightmare through the rural horror of the sequel and into the co-op chaos of The Outlast Trials, which alone accounts for nearly 19 million lifetime players. Red Barrels completely changed its format and the audience it scraped together from nothing followed it anyway. That’s either loyalty or Stockholm syndrome, and with this fanbase, I’m not ruling out either one.
Red Barrels hasn’t formally announced a third mainline game, only that it wants to make one eventually. For a franchise that almost died in a pitch meeting because some publisher preferred mobile games, hitting 60 million players is a pretty loud response to everyone who passed. I choose to believe at least one of them still thinks about those 10 mobile games and stares at the ceiling.
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