Glen Schofield, the person behind Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol, says he might be done making games after struggling to find money for his latest project.

Schofield has been working with his daughter Nicole, who has eight years of game development experience, on what he calls “a new sub-genre of horror” game. The idea excited him from the start, and he felt it was something fresh that hadn’t been done before.

The team spent eight months developing the concept and built a working demo. They managed to cut their budget down to $17 million and started meeting with potential funders.  First, they were told to bring the cost down to $10 million. More recently, that number dropped even further to just $2-5 million. Last month, Schofield and his team decided to walk away from the project rather than make it with such a small budget.

“Some ideas are better left untouched than done cheap,” Schofield explained in a LinkedIn post. The decision meant letting go of their six-person team in the United States and a full crew in the UK, all of whom are now looking for new jobs. This setback has left Schofield feeling that making big-budget AAA games might be out of reach for him now.

“I miss it all – the team, the chaos, the joy of building something for fans,” he wrote. “But maybe I’ve directed my last game. Who knows? If so, thank you [for] playing my games.”

Schofield’s career includes creating the original Dead Space series and founding Striking Distance Studios in 2019. His most recent game, The Callisto Protocol, came out in December 2022 but received mixed reviews and didn’t meet sales expectations.