According to reports, Silent Hills is in super duper early reproduction, while Silent Hill is one year and a half into it.
That means that, at most, we're getting 2 Silent Hill games in a span of 4 years between one another, and the first one comes out in about 2 years from now (March 2022?) and the next one three or four years later (2025-6?).
It's not that far fetched.
I just think that, like...
Silent Hill wasn't a blockbuster series, especially in 2013. It was a franchise long in decline. But P.T./Silent Hills was an absolute sensation that revived interest in Silent Hill. It went on to have a massive influence on gaming and set expectations for the horror genre that arguably haven't been met since. People were hungry for Silent Hills in a way they were not previously hungry for Silent Hill as a whole. People's interest in that abandoned project has remained very high, even half a decade later, and it makes sense that someone would want to capitalize on that interest and try to deliver the game we never got. It seems in this case it's Sony who is fully funding the venture, something that's a risk considering how high the expectations are. People went nuts for P.T., but we never actually saw the game Silent Hills might have been.
So considering this opportunity, wouldn't it make sense to make the "Kojima" Silent Hills project first?
Instead, they are soft rebooting the series first with what seems like an a really talented legacy team. I'm a Silent Hill fan so this is exciting and enticing to me, I'm not disappointed in this prospect at all. But what logic does it follow to capitalize on the continued interest in Kojima's Silent Hills by producing a different, unrelated game first? What if that game is not popular? And if it is popular, will people even want Silent Hills anymore?
I guess I'm not sure. It's hard for me to wrap my head around. After 7-8 years of interest in Silent Hills specifically, the first game to come out is not Silent Hills. So when Silent Hills does come out, how will they sell it? Will there be two concurrent and totally different Silent Hill series at once, like how Resident Evil does it? Resident Evil has the room to do that because they've built up an audience for both lots of different kinds of games within the same series over time. Silent Hill has not done that.
It's just not clicking for me. Silent Hills was already the soft reboot of the series that was meant to reinvigorate the brand. If you do that with a different game first, and likely a stylistically different one as well, then where does Silent Hills eventually fit in? Sony must really believe in Silent Hill to be investing this much in to the series when the market is totally untested.