Why did Silent Hill fail when Resident Evil managed to take off?

[Fiery Phoenix]

I may be making a lot of assumptions, but back in the 2000's, Silent Hill and Resident Evil were neck-and-neck at the top of the survival horror chain. As the 2010's came by, one series slowed down considerably while the other had maintained momentum even after a few setbacks.

I'm watching a longplay of Silent Hill 3 as I type this and I can't help but remember the good times I spent with these games. They truly were some of the best horror stories I've ever seen featured in a game.

 

[AVtechNICK]

Konami, that's why.

 

[Time Loop]

Konami.

 

[Bundy]

Konami. They killed the team / Team Silent. The IP was trash since then.

 

[BadWolf]

Because Konami.

They wanted Silent Hill 3 to be an on rails shooter.

 

[Dernhelm]

Never innovated in a positive manner the way RE did. Once a lot of the original staff took off, it tried to reinvent the wheel other than invent something new. Add to that Capcom treated RE better than Konami did SH.

Not that that was a flourishing path for RE, critically speaking.

 

[Master Alucard]

because one was trying to do a little more than jumpscares and zombieapocalypse. you can't always put out silent hill 2 level of content. i do think resi 5-6 deserved to fail but i guess the (at the time) new audience loved the hollywood bullshit. and the gameplay was better

 

[Deleted member 16876]

Konami but not only that, Resident Evil changed the formula when it started getting old and it helps that the change turned out to be a good thing.

 

[Deleted member 8593]

One franchise evolved with the tastes of mainstream gaming audiences, the other didn't. Konami could have had a good, moderately performing franchise on their hands but they messed it up.

 

[Innuendo84]

As much as Resident Evil series is successful none of the games are as good as SH1 and SH2.

 

[goldenpp73]

because one was trying to do a little more than jumpscares and zombieapocalypse. you can't always put out silent hill 2 level of content. i do think resi 5-6 deserved to fail but i guess the (at the time) new audience loved the hollywood bullshit. and the gameplay was better

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It helps that RE5 is one of the most fun co op games ever made, oh but it's not scary so it's garbage.

 

[Xagarath]

Silent Hill badly struggled to maintain series quality after the dissolution of the original development team. 5 was largely seen as a disappointment, Origins as playing it too safe, and by then the series had lost all momentum. It needed an RE4-style reinvention and didn't get it.

I actually think Shattered Memories would be more successful now than when it came out - that kind of gameplay-light, choice-heavy narrative branching would have tied in well with the popularity of Walking Dead or Life is Strange - but it clearly failed to make an impact at the time.

 

[Santar]

For me it was mostly that the combat felt very dull in the Silent Hill games. The gameplay in general just felt less polished than the Resident Evil games.
to me it felt like a game with just "okay" gameplay you sorta had to suffer thruogh to get to the great story. If the Silent Hill games were point and click adventure games I'd probably have enjoyed them a lot more.

 

[King Dodongo]

One was continued as a franchise, the other was relegated to pachinko.

 

[djkimothy]

Konami.

 

[TheDarkKnight]

Outside the Konami meddling the Campiness and b-horror nature of RE was always going to make it more approachable and popular than Silent Hills unrelenting ride.

It applies to the game characters, villains, etc

 

[Alienhated]

One of them is more action focused, the other is not.

 

[Net_Wrecker]

Because Silent Hill's peak was only 3 games over a 4 year span before the falloff, while RE4 rejuvinated a series that was already 9 years old and many games deep. They weren't really on the same level already, but after 2005 there was no competition. SH at it's best is also a much darker, more psychological experience- RE was more suited to for a mainstream explosion even before it became a co-op action game in 5 and 6.

 

[Goro Majima]

Because Konami can't stop being Konami for even a minute

 

[MMarston]

1. Konami being Konami

2. The games heavily relied on their atmosphere and art style, from what I've experienced. You could only stretch that so far especially in the game development world where a lot of variables come into play like dev team switches. To me, it's a series that should've never have gotten the amount of entries that it did.

 

[Dache]

Konami, mostly.

People forget that RE4 gave the franchise a huge shot in the arm, though. Before its release, I'd say RE and SH were neck-and-neck in the popularity, recognition, etc. RE4 projected its series into the stratosphere in a single go and Konami never did anything similar with SH.

 

[Deleted member 41931]

Silent Hill was a smaller series to begin. The changes to the series to make it more mainstream didn't come until after 4 and with those came a quality drop and loss,of identity due to the change if developer. Konami.

 

[Meia]

Silent Hill got it's team dismantled and the IP outsourced, so yeah. Konami.

 

[Robsolete]

Because the only thing Konami hates more than video games are the people that produce amazing video games on their behalf. Team Silent was a rag tag bunch of independent thinkers comprised of folks who didn't fit in elsewhere in the corporate structure. They were tasked with making a Resi clone and wound up making something radically different but within the same genre. After the second game performed poorly initially they were forced into making 3 a straight sequel to 1 and the beginning of the end was in sight. The team was broken up and the lightning was let out of the bottle permanently.

They were replaced with groups of good little employees who did what they were told, how they were told, when they were told and as a result, the series fell off a cliff creatively. Until one of Konami's other independent thinkers took a swing at returning the series to glory and... well, we all know how that turned out.

 

[skeezx]

for what it's worth Silent Hill was/is still pretty huge all things considered. very few IPs wind up big as RE

 

[Escaflow]

Silent Hill formula is very different than RE . It relies heavily in the design , writings and atmosphere . If you take away the creative team behind it , which is Team Silent , the series will lost all its charm . I seriously believed that had PT been green-lighted for full development , we might have one of the best horror game ever .

 

[Ridley327]

Konami, mostly.

People forget that RE4 gave the franchise a huge shot in the arm, though. Before its release, I'd say RE and SH were neck-and-neck in the popularity, recognition, etc. RE4 projected its series into the stratosphere in a single go and Konami never did anything similar with SH.

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SH never came close to the commercial heights that RE had already achieved. If I'm not mistaken, RE2 on PS1 sold better than the first three Silent HIll games combined.

 

[Dr. Caroll]

Resident Evil was a flexible IP that from its inception copied from successful horror and action IPs around it, remaining relevant in changing market conditions. Silent Hill was Jacob's Ladder fan-fiction with core game mechanics that were really not very good-slash-outright terrible, but said mechanics formed the series identity. This made innovation and mechanical improvement extremely difficult.

It's jarring to realise that Metal Gear Survive copped a huge amount of shit over the "poking zombies with a stick" thing, but that was much of what Silent Hill consisted of. (Masahiro Ito did the monster designs in Survive, incidentally.) Silent Hill was a game series where you just mashed buttons to hit enemies with a blunt object until they died. Or you ran away from them with clunky controls and an awkward camera. The fanbase rationalized this with, "Oh, but the combat is meant to be dogshit because tension!", but this was extremely unhelpful for designers trying to make Silent Hill feel competitive. At least Silent Hill never stooped to the same awful depths that Rule of Rose did, granted.

They wanted Silent Hill 3 to be an on rails shooter.

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Because Silent Hill 2 tanked in Japan. It sold poorly and audiences disliked it.

 

[Mr.Deadshot]

Drop in quality was the main reason.

Also Resident Evil became an almost pure action shooty shooty bang bang game, even with coop. It went with the times. Something that probably would not have worked out for Silent Hill. On the other hand The Evil Within merged Silent Hill and Resident Evil concepts pretty well, so who knows if it could have worked? And then there was P.T. aka Silent Hills which jumped on the scary walking simulator hypetrain. That could have worked out, but we will never know.

 

[CalamityPixel]

Konami and Team Silent being dismantles and the IP being thrown to western devs

 

[Hydeus]

Resident became a boum boum game.
Silent Hill never was. Psychological horror doesn't sell in this world. Surprise.

 

[Fancy Clown]

Silent Hill is pretty disturbing and weird scary, not fun scary, and it's also not nearly as fun to play. There's no core satisfying gameplay, and even the level design and enemy placement feels haphazard in comparison. There's a reason RE had developed such a huge speed running community.

 

[hey it's that dog]

Silent Hill is weird and confusing by design. RE is easily-grasped schlocky horror (which is fine, don't get me wrong). There will always be a bigger audience for the latter.

Edit: ^^^ also what Fancy Clown said. SH managed to be extra clunky in a genre that was already the clunkiest.

 

[Bansai]

RE took some massive risks [transition to action RE] and it paid off big time while SH quality was in freefall with each entry after 3?

 

[jsnepo]

Because Milla Jovovich.

 

[Jawmuncher]

Silent Hill was always tougher sell than RE for mass consumption. You look at the film Jacob's Ladder and realize how despite it being a direct influence for the SH it never got out of its cult status either. Basically tells you everything you need.

SH sadly never got the chance like RE where it was able to change things up and gain interest again with a new fanbase either to carry through what some companies deemed as the "horror is dead" gen.

What SH offers now is definitely worth coming back and as PT showed, something akin to it is really wished for. But for when and how it died, it doesn't come as a surprise and this is from someone who enjoyed the western titles out of the series.

 

[Sgt. Demblant]

They were never neck and neck in terms of sales. RE was always far ahead on that front.
And remember that there was a bit of fatigue around the 3 / Veronica / Zero era.
But RE successfully reinvented itself with 4, which Silent Hill never quite managed despite some noble attempts like Shattered Memories.

The thing is, RE being more action-oriented and b-movie-like was a huge advantage. Those games are fun and crazy roller-coasters of horror. The type of psychological horror at the core of Silent Hill is tougher to market and tougher to iterate on. That's why over the top horror movies are easier to sell than stuff like The Witch.

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

They turned Silent Hill into a dungeon crawler esque with loot. That should be enough to know Konami doesn't care anymore.

1-3 were fucking brilliant though.

 

[EndlessNever]

There's a lot of factors, but the two main ones are that Resident Evil is more action based game than Silent Hill. So it'll typically do better sales wise, but the other factor is Capcom cared and wanted a long term successful franchise that they cared about.

 

[MysteryQuesadilla]

I think they're fundamentally different game types with RE moving towards more of a horror/action hybrid game between 4-6 and SH still being a sort of mix between horror/action/adventure which felt sort of "art house" in comparison which doesn't move units.

 

[Miao]

i really wanna a SH2 remaster, i was too scared to play it when released.

 

[Velezcora]

I feel like Resident Evil was always an action game first and survival horror game second. The only thing you really had to worry about was limited saves and conserving ammo. But most of the game was just an action game about shooting monsters. Resident Evil 4 just improved the action way more.
Resi was more like a cheesy hollywood action horror movie than Silent Hill which tried to be more of a genuine psychological horror. Those two attract different audiences.

 

[ISOM]

I don't think SH allows for as much creativity as Resident Evil. Resident Evil can be action or horror and both work great. I think SH is limited creatively.

 

[Adamska]

I mean, did you play the last few SH titles? They're not very good.

Also, SH did stay mostly true to its horror roots during the first few titles. By RE4, the RE series started to become pure action and managed to amasse huge sales, while no SH title, AFAIK, had the same success.

Edit: also, if you think about it, there's an argument that maybe the series did not have to be dragged as much as it did. Like, they had two, maybe three great stories (across SH1/3, SH2 and SH4), but after a while the concept of revisiting the town kinda starts to run its course.

 

[Skeleton]

It was managed really badly. The franchise wasn't respected and you can only do so many shit games before fans say you know what it's dead.

silent hill pachinko

 

[Booker.DeWitt]

As much as Resident Evil series is successful none of the games are as good as SH1 and SH2.

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You are goddamn right.

SH2 is a masterpiece.

Back to the topic, SH is a more complex game. deals with emotions, psychological traumas, guilt.
Not easy to completely understand by the regular gamer that sometimes just wants to shoot zombies.

The plot of resident evil is like popcorn movie. Plus the gameplay of RE is way better. That means more appeal to masses

 

[Leviathan]

Resident Evil is more than its gameplay and horror. I dislike the genre but I love the franchise because of its lore and characters.

 

[Aurc]

Maybe they should've kept Team Silent together, instead of whoring the property out to American developers that fundamentally misinterpreted its identity, resulting in such games as Shattered Memories and Book of Memories.

Maybe they should've made sure the PS3 HD collection was the best remaster it possibly could've been, instead of creating two janky, buggy, ugly, generally bad versions of what were phenomenal PS2 games.

Maybe, years and years later, they should've realized what potential a Kojima directed, modern take on Silent Hill could've had, and done what they could to make that happen.

It's a frustrating blend of mismanagement, incompetence, and a series of very unfortunate occurrences. Silent Hill would absolutely have remained the pinnacle of survival horror, had it gotten the respect and reverence it deserved from Konami.

 

[The Praiseworthy]

Konami just put the series in the back seats of the priorities over time... and then it was neglected till to the point they stopped giving a damn about it.

 

[Nezacant]

Konami, that's why.

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One and Done.