It has been 13 years since the release of the first Outlast game. Over the years, the franchise has attracted tens of millions of players, yet no fully fledged counterpart to the horror title has ever emerged on the market.
A PC Gamer journalist wondered why Outlast has no copycats. He noted that there have been gory projects, such as Capcom’s Resident Evil 7 Biohazard, Harvester, or Agony, but “none of them managed to both out-gross Outlast and achieve that level of sustained success.”
He decided to ask this question to the creator of the original Outlast, Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin. As it turned out, even he does not understand why his project has no imitators. He keeps track of new releases, but so far none have lived up to expectations:
Honestly, I don’t know [why there are no Outlast copycats]. Sometimes I wonder myself. But I’m glad our games still stand out, because standing out can be very tricky. Every year, thousands of games come out on Steam. So people have a huge choice of what to spend their time on. Sometimes a game appears on the horizon, and we think: “Okay, this one might be the next Outlast,” but so far [none of them have become one].
Philippe Morin also noted that the creators of Outlast are comfortable working within their niche and have no desire to turn Outlast games into mainstream projects:
[…] Internally, we don’t talk about needing to make the game more mainstream or reach a broader audience. Of course, we want as many people as possible to play it, but we don’t want that to dilute the essence of the game or distract us from what makes Outlast what it is. If we ever decide we need to reach a more mainstream audience, we’ll simply create a new franchise or release a game under a different title.