Silent Hill 2‘s remake has been quite successful for both Konami as well as developer Bloober Team. In a series of posts on X, producer Motoi Okamoto spoke about Konami’s decision to go with the studio behind games like Layers of Fear and The Medium for the Silent Hill 2 remake.
In his post, Okamoto spoke about how Bloober Team had plenty of experience with the horror genre, and how important this aspect was for Konami.
He mentions that this, more than having general knowledge about game design, was what drove the choice for Konami. He brings up the idea that, regardless of how good a studio might be at its game design ideas, you wouldn’t go with such a studio to make a fighting game, for example, if they didn’t have experience in making games of that genre.
Horror has similar requirements, and Konami didn’t want to work with a studio that didn’t have experience with the genre, and would have to start from scratch. “No matter how broad a game design expert’s knowledge is, they won’t be hired to work on a fighting game if they have no experience developing fighting games,” wrote Okamoto on X (translation via Automaton Media). “The same goes for horror.
But then, with companies requiring such genre-specific experience, you realize that everyone has to start out as a novice for the given genre at some point.