No publishers wanted Outlast because they'd 'rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games' so Red Barrels relied on public investment programs and their own savings instead

Outlast has long since established itself as a horror gaming staple with an impressive track record of two mainline games, a DLC, and an online multiplayer game that still scares the bejesus out of me. So it's hard to believe that there was a time when developer Red Barrels was unsure whether or not it'd even be able to get it out of the door.

After trying and failing to convince Ubisoft to let him make a horror game and just generally feeling like it was time to move on, Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels decided to leave and form a small 10-person team with developers from other big-budget studios. Their first pitch: a horror game.

“We thought at first that we’d come up with the pitch within three or four months and shop it around to a few publishers," Morin says in an interview with GameSpot. "And we’d find out pretty quickly if it works or not." Unfortunately, it turned out to be the latter, at least at first.

Morin explains how many of the publishers they approached would “rather invest $50,000 in 10 mobile games than $500,000 in [Outlast].” This was likely equal parts because of how obsessed everyone was with mobile games back then and thanks to how niche the horror genre was perceived as. 13 years later the horror genre is still perceived as one of the smaller areas of interest in gaming, despite all of the amazing games released and the revival of two staples, Silent Hill and Resident Evil.

“We were experienced game developers,” Morin says. “But we didn’t know much about that side–publishing and marketing and sales and all that. So we had to learn on the fly.”

Red Barrel finally had to turn to a publicly funded investment program, the Canada Media Fund (CMF) to finance Outlast, with a whopping $1 million dollar investment. But even that wasn't enough. The developers had to take money out of savings, credit cards, and leverage home mortgages to get the project over the line; a huge financial risk. “Everything was pretty much on the line,” Morin recalls. “Of course, it meant working very long, long hours. We were in a sprint to release the game before running out of money.”

Luckily this story ended well, very well actually. After just five months Red Barrels managed to hit the goal of 400,000 copies sold and while not all of them were at full price after sales it was still enough for the team to get some "pretty significant bonuses."

Outlast would go on to sell 15 million copies as of 2018 and spawn three other games, the final being the recent multiplayer horror game The Outlast Trials which achieved an all-time concurrent player count peak just 11-days ago of 147,955. Pretty solid for a multiplayer survival horror game.