After last year's well-received Dead Space remake, one might've expected EA to put a team at developer Motive on a remake of Dead Space 2. It doesn't look like that's happening, though, because EA announced this week that the Dead Space remake's leads are now gathering a team to work on the Battlefield series.
Another team at Motive continues to work on the studio's Iron Man game, and unless it's a big secret, no one there is remaking Dead Space 2.
According to Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb, EA and Motive had planned to remake Dead Space 2, but the project was canceled due to poor sales of the first remake.
"They were working on Dead Space 2, and they are no longer working on it," said Grubb on today's episode of Game Mess Mornings. "It is on the shelf because the first game had lackluster sales, is how it was phrased to me."
Without specifying exactly what about the claim isn't true—that a Dead Space 2 remake was ever planned at all, or that it was cancelled, or that it was cancelled due to lackluster Dead Space 1 sales—EA has denied Grubb's assertions.
"We don't normally comment on rumors but there is no validity to this story," an EA spokesperson told IGN.
Grubb stands by the information. "Dead Space 2 was definitely being planned," he tweeted. "It had a code name. And they aren't making it now."
I don't have any inside information on what EA is or was planning, but I think we can safely assume that, at the very least, it considered the possibility that it would remake Dead Space 2 if the first remake did well. The thought would've been unavoidable. How much thinking about doing something is required before you're "working on" it might be what's up for debate here.
According to Bloomberg's Jason Schreier, Motive did consider starting a new Dead Space project, but it was "never really a Dead Space 2 remake." He reported that "a small team" at the studio actually kicked around ideas for a brand new Dead Space game, but didn't get far, and has been doing other things for almost a year.
Regarding the remake's success or lack of it, we don't have definitive numbers. The Dead Space remake was mentioned once during EA's Q3 2023 earnings call, just after it released, when EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that it had "earned high praise from fans and critics alike, being dubbed a new benchmark for remakes and even one of the best games of all time." The remake isn't mentioned in the transcript of any subsequent EA earnings call.
On Steam, the Dead Space remake has over 33,000 user reviews which average to a "very positive" rating. The PC version is also available from the Epic Games Store and EA App, and there are Xbox and PlayStation console versions of the game.
