'Maybe I've directed my last game,' Dead Space creator Glen Schofield says after being unable to secure funding for his new project: 'With the industry on pause, AAA feels like it's a long ways away'

After a long career in videogames that took him from Ren and Stimpy and Rocky and Bullwinkle to Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol (seriously, check his credits), Glen Schofield might have finally reached the end of the line. In a message posted to LinkedIn (via VGC), Schofield said he'd been working on a new idea but "decided to walk away" after he couldn't raise the funding he was looking for, and admitted that "maybe I've directed my last game."

Schofield said he'd been "quietly" working on the project, which he described as "a new sub-genre of horror—not just horror, but something more" for the past eight months. A development budget of $17 million was set, "a small, talented crew" put together a prototype, and Schofield "started taking meetings."

"People loved the concept," he wrote. "We got a lot of second and third meetings. But early feedback was 'get [the budget] to $10M.' Lately, that number’s dropped to $2–5M.

"So last month, we decided to walk away. Some ideas are better left untouched than done cheap. We had a team of six here in the States and a full crew in the UK. Now, everyone’s looking for work. They're all talented folks—if you're hiring, let me know."

You might think that as the head guy on Dead Space, Schofield would have no trouble scrounging up a few million dollars for a new horror game. But the industry has changed over the past few years, which is to say it's been ruthlessly hollowed out in an all-consuming pursuit of slightly higher share prices and AI panacea. Even strong bets are on very shaky ground these days: Recall, for instance, that earlier this month Romero Games lost funding for the new FPS it was working on. If John Romero can't get backing to make a new shooter, what hope do any of the rest of us have?

And, in all fairness, the bloom may be off Schofield's rose at this point. Dead Space remains a seminal horror game but The Callisto Protocol, released in 2022, landed with a thud thanks to technical problems and, amusingly, a little too much in the gore department. Publisher Krafton took a hit on it, and while a story expansion dropped in mid-2023, layoffs at developer Striking Distance Studios inevitably followed. Schofield himself left the studio in September 2023.

"I've worked on games of every size," Schofield wrote. "From two of us to over 300 devs. Spent the last 15–20 years making big AAA titles with great teams. That's what I do. That's what I love. But with the industry on pause, AAA feels like it's a long ways away.

"So I'm back to my art. I miss it all; the team, the chaos, the joy of building something for fans. I'm still around, making art, writing stories and ideas and still cheering the industry on. But maybe I've directed my last game. Who knows? If so thank you for playing my games."

It's not known how many developers have been left unemployed by the decision to stop work on the project, but Schofield said his daughter Nicole—who actually came up with the idea for the new game—was among them. She was previously employed at Striking Distance, where she worked as an environment artist on The Callisto Protocol and the top-down shooter Redacted, which launched in October 2024.