This game honestly sold surprisingly bad though. Probably still decently and enough to make a tiny profit but still. Like I get horror games are kinda niche and Dead Space isn't an RE nor as remembered as Silent Hill but iirc Callisto Protocol vastly outsold it in many regions. Pretty sad because Dead Space is a franchise worth having around.
The main problem is that Dead Space/survival horror as a whole doesn't fit well in western publisher budgets for games like this. Budgets have been ballooning for ages and survival horror is a genre with a hard cap that lies
well below the amount of money that goes into development of an AAA game. These games absolutely have an audience (if you want proof, look at how lasting the popularity of Signalis is even though the game is in its second year - and yes this is a recommendation to play Signalis, it's really good), but it's not within the ballpark of an AAA developer.
RE gets by mostly because Capcom uses Resident Evil as the cutting edge for RE Engine, which gives it leeway in terms of sales performance since its the foundation for their more popular titles (Monster Hunter, Street Fighter, Dragons Dogma and the second Ace Attorney Trilogy all use it).
For a bit of an idea for the budget cap/what you can expect for a breakout game: Resident Evil 7 sold about 3 million at release, which was enough to recuperate all dev costs (quick math for 60 dollar copies means that the game made about 126 million post-platform cuts and pre-taxes/VAT) and it had a very strong long tail all the way in december causing it to sell ~12 million. I think you can consider that to be the market cap for survival horror games and I'll be honest, Dead Space doesn't come close to that... like ever.
Btw Callisto Protocol was
also a complete financial failure; the game had a 5 million target (which really shows how inane the budgets are), later downadjusted to 2 million and it apparently wasn't even met, causing the publisher to eat crow.
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That aside, I wouldn't be suprised if both EA and Grubb are probably right. The project was likely just never even considered because of poor sales figures, neither by Motive nor by EA; compared to Dead Space 1, remaking 2 is a far harder sell; you have sequel sales drops to deal with and 2 is still readily available on PC (as opposed to regular Dead Space which iirc got a bit rotting on PC due to software changes over the years). It's a bit annoying to see Grubb double down even when EA literally makes a public statement calling him out for being wrong though.