A recent interview with the creators of Dead Space revealed another nuance of the horror series' development. As it turned out, the publisher, Electronic Arts, had already considered the game a failure after preliminary reviews and cut its marketing campaign.
Game director of the original Dead Space, Bret Robbins, said that reviewers had a rather cool reception to the project. Many thought that the game would only get a 70 score at release, while Mirror's Edge was predicted to get 90. Then EA decided that it would be right to spend more money on promoting the parkour action game than on the horror shooter:
They actually cut our marketing budget…and Mirror’s Edge got it all. We were releasing about the same time, and they were trying to figure out the budget for that launch window. And they did all these internal tests or whatever. Like Metacritic analysis, like mock scores, and they had Mirror’s Edge at a 90 and Dead Space at 70... They weren’t looking at an unfinished game; we were almost done, and they thought we were going to be like a 72, and they slashed our marketing budget, and they doubled down on Mirror’s Edge.
In reality, Dead Space received 89 points on Metacritic, beating Mirror's Edge by 8 points. According to the creators, the game was saved by word-of-mouth — the shooter turned out to be so exciting that gamers themselves advertised it in the gaming community. And in 2023, a remake was even released, but it did not become financially successful from the publisher's point of view.
Earlier, it became known that the development of Dead Space 4 could have begun this year. However, EA rejected the idea of creating the fourth game due to the financial indicators of the series.