Bloober Team, the studio behind Layers of Fear and the upcoming Xbox console exclusive The Medium, wants to be known as the Blumhouse Productions of the video game industry.
“From the first day we talked about [making] horror games, we said we wanted to be the Blumhouse of the games industry,” Bloober Team founder Piotr Babieno said in an interview with GamesIndustry.Biz.
According to Babieno, prior to Layers of Fear, Bloober Team abandoned “the ambition to create huge [narrative] horror games” as investors wanted the studio to tackle projects “that would bring in money.” However, following the poor critical reception to 2014’s Basement Crawl, Bloober decided to forgo trying to make commercial hits to instead pursue the horror stories that the team wanted to tell, regardless of how much money they would ultimately make.
“Finally, we decided ‘no’,” Babieno said. “We would like to do projects which we are proud of, the stories that we want to tell. We went to our investors and said it was a turning point… Even if they fail from the financial point of view, we want to sign those projects with our names.”
Blumhouse is a film and television production company that’s made a name for itself by producing horror films that have gone on to be quite popular. This trend began with 2009’s Paranormal Activity and has gone on to include 2013’s The Purge, 2015’s Unfriended, 2017’s Split and Get Out, 2018’s Halloween, and 2020’s The Invisible Man.
Likewise, Bloober Team has found success in recent years by exclusively pursuing horror experiences, developing 2016’s Layers of Fear, 2017’s Observer, and 2019’s Layers of Fear 2 and Blair Witch. The studio’s next horror game, The Medium, puts you in the shoes of Marianne, a woman who can see and explore both the physical and spiritual worlds. You’ll be able to switch between the two realities at will, harnessing this ability to solve puzzles and deal with supernatural threats.
The Medium (which is available for pre-order) is scheduled to release for Xbox Series X/S and PC later this year. It’s a bit of a standout in Xbox’s library of upcoming games, exclusively releasing on next-gen consoles. Most of the games scheduled to come out on the Xbox Series consoles at their launch will also release on the current-gen Xbox One. Xbox head Phil Spencer has even said that Xbox won’t force you into next-gen, with all first-party Xbox games releasing for both this and the next generation of consoles.
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