Hello. Horror games are an interesting trend in the gaming industry, which does nothing but try to scare you in various ways. However, due to the abundance of games in this genre recently, there are fewer and fewer quality scares. Today I want to talk about how phasmophobia has put horror back on its pedestal and put itself at the head of the table for true horror game development.
STORY
It all started in 2019 when Daniel Knight created Kinetic Games. At first, he worked alone on the team, working on the early development of Spectrophobia since 2018. The game even reached alpha in December 2019. On March 3, 2020 the game was renamed Phasmophobia and the studio name was changed to Kinetic Games. What the studio was called before is unknown.
Until mid-2021, a person https://davincisgold.co.uk/withdrawal/ known as Botsero on the official Phasmophobia discord was the main tester and idea curator for the game, although he was not technically considered a member of Kinetic Games. On June 18, 2021, Daniel announced the addition of two people to his studio, namely Corey Dixon as lead 3D artist, and Benjamin Lavender as senior programmer. On May 16, 2022, in the second sneak peak, the developers announced the addition of 3D artist Jack to the studio, which made it possible to create maps in parallel with other content. On April 2, 2024, 2 more people joined the studio: Louise as an artist, and Christina as a sound engineer.
As we see, the team is gradually growing, which is good news, since more people will allow us to create cooler elements in the game.
SUDDEN GROWTH
When the game was released, the developers believed that there would be about 500 people online and they would leave early access after releasing a couple of maps and ghosts.
Phasmophobia, released into early access on September 18, 2020, gained sudden and unexpected popularity on Twitch and YouTube in early October, thanks in part to popular streamers and let’s play from these platforms – in particular, it was played by Pewdiepie. By October 7, it became one of the top five most-watched games on Twitch, and its cumulative audience exceeded 80 thousand viewers, more than the then popular games Among Us, Fortnite Battle Royale, FIFA 21 and Genshin Impact. On Steam, the game was among the best-selling games and by the end of October topped the sales ranking on this platform, overtaking pre-orders of Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur’s Gate III; At the same time, the number of simultaneous players in the game exceeded 85 thousand. According to the developer, Phasmophobia sales exceeded 2 million copies by the beginning of November 2020.