If you know a thing about modern horror movies, you’ll have undoubtedly heard of Blumhouse.
Headed up by Jason Blum, the studio quickly made a name for itself in the world of Hollywood horror. It’s produced movies such as Paranormal Activity, The Purge, The Invisible Man, Happy Death Day and 2018’s Halloween reboot, amongst many others. And now, it wants to turn its horror expertise to games. Announced today by Bloomberg, Blumhouse Games is born.
With its film business, Blumhouse has always had a keen focus on smaller budgets, leaving room for greater profits (or less devastating failures). It plans to take a similar route for games. This isn’t an indie project by any means but the studio wants to make PC and console games costing less than $10 million to produce. (For some context, the development of Cyberpunk 2077 cost over $300 million.)
The new Blumhouse Games studio will be headed by Zach Wood, a veteran of the industry who has worked with the likes of Sony Santa Monica and Sony Interactive Entertainment. He’ll be joined by Don Sechler as Chief of Finance and Operations, previously head of Business Operations, Planning and Strategy at PlayStation.
Related: The Best, and Scariest, Horror Games on PS5
Don’t expect to start seeing Blumhouse Games titles pop up any time soon, though. The studio plans to “invest in about 15 games over the next three to four years” according to Bloomberg. But it’s not unusual for a game to take three to four years – often longer – to make, so it’ll be a while before we see the studio’s work come to fruition.
We’re excited to see what sort of titles Blumhouse will work on. Being big horror fans, we’re always happy for new horror games. Will we see brand new IPs, or will the studio bring some of its cinematic universes to the world of games?
We’ve been saying for years that The Purge would make a brilliant game. We’re absolutely ready to play it. Just saying.
