As an eager crowd descends on the Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center in Boston, nothing seems out of place. PAX East’s Saturday crush is here, with everyone from the gaming curious to the hardest of hardcore rubbing shoulders as they flood the expo floor. The crowd is so thick it’s hard to escape its current, a burger costs $20, and there are at least three Cloud Strife cosplayers in sight at any given time. This is definitely a gaming convention.
But in the early hours before opening, the convention hall looks quite different. Without bodies to fill the empty space, it becomes clear how spread out the show floor has become since the pandemic. The densely packed booths of 2019 are a distant memory, and while there are still plenty of cool games you’ve never heard of, the airy expo hall sends an unpleasant message: The video game industry isn’t doing so hot.
Non-stop layoffs and studio closures have led to belt-tightening, and most of the big publishers that used to show up at the convention, like Sony, Microsoft, Square Enix, and Bandai Namco, are nowhere to be seen, taking their massive booths that doubled as landmarks with them. While the tabletop scene has filled some of the ceded space with bangers, there’s no denying that the floor is more barren than it used to be.
The show isn’t all bad news, though. In particular, there’s one slice of the struggling industry that remains healthy, at least comparatively. PAX East 2026 is all about horror. Masked faces slinking through the shadows of suburbia, sleepy farming towns accented with red, and at least one dating game involving an Eldritch abomination make it so that you can barely take a few steps without finding something freaky and bloodstained.
After talking with some of the developers behind these games, it seems like it isn’t a coincidence that the floor is filled with so many creepy experiences. It turns out that horror games are recession-resistant. Or more specifically, the genre intrinsically avoids many of the scope and budgeting problems that have been plaguing the industry. There are definitely flashy, expensive horror games, but even these tend to be a bit more restrained than the resource-burning open-world and live service titles that C-suite executives love to bet their employees’ livelihoods on.
If there’s a straightforward answer to why it’s tough to keep the lights on at major studios these days (besides specific cases of corporate incompetence), it’s that game budgets have ballooned. Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier recently estimated that AAA games now cost around $300 million or more to make, at least in the United States and Canada. Most of that budget goes into paying massive teams of hundreds and sometimes even thousands, all to keep up with ever-increasing expectations around graphical fidelity and scope. At least for those bankrolling these games, there’s an expectation that everything needs to follow the upward trajectory of exponential profits: A bigger game with better graphics means a bigger payout, right? The only issue is if it doesn’t hit, that losing bet costs everyone their jobs.
In every meaning of the word, horror games tend to be smaller. They’re frequently made by tiny teams, sometimes even by a single person. While major studios worry about ray tracing and intensive physics engines that require dozens of programmers and artists, non-AAA horror devs frequently embrace lo-fi aesthetics that abandon realism for chunky PSX-inspired polygons, conjuring dread from ambiguity like goth impressionists. In addition to complementing all kinds of unsettling subject matter, skipping photorealistic graphics saves development time and reduces the need for huge teams.
Then there’s scope, as in the size of a game and what it’s trying to bite off. “A key element of horror is the fact that you can’t just escape, and so as a result, the story is confined. A lot of times, limitations and restrictions are the birthplace of creativity,” says Joseph Hunter (a.k.a. Akabaka), the developer behind the Sucker For Love series. The setting in horror games tends to be claustrophobic and condensed; there are obvious exceptions, but the genre tends to deliver shorter, punchier experiences that avoid overstaying their welcome. After all, seeing too much of the monster kind of ruins the effect.
The reduced scope and lack of emphasis on cutting-edge graphics lead to smaller teams and, in turn, smaller budgets. Because they cost less to make, developers can afford to be more experimental with these games. Basically, horror can get weird, and the PAX show floor makes a convincing argument for this case. For instance, Grave Seasons is an unusual mashup that combines cozy game farming, like what’s found in Stardew Valley, with a supernatural murder mystery that can lead to your favorite character getting splattered across the town square. “Horror will always be a weird sub-genre that promises you something a little nefarious, a little awkward, a little messy, and sometimes it’s not perfectly executed, but you kind of know that going in because it’s horror,” Son M., co-founder of Perfect Garbage, the studio behind Grave Seasons, tells The A.V. Club. “I think that it gives us a lot of breathing room for me to make a murder mystery/romance/horror/farming sim, but still explore topics that maybe wouldn’t be allowed in a much more traditionally published cozy game.”
There are plenty of other unique angles at the expo. Horripilant is part incremental game (think Cookie Clicker) and part Vermis-inspired dark fantasy hell. In the visual novel Runt, you play as a younger brother navigating a post-apocalyptic world full of murderous shadow creatures and family abuse. Inkblood casts you as an Inquisitor solving murders as you use retrofuturistic technology to take photos of the past. Joseph Hunter’s third game in the Sucker For Love series, Crush Landing, has the player romancing an alien presence that leaks out of a meteor.
“I think horror is a space that is more conducive to people trying weird things. I feel like, if you say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this game where you have to romance Cthulhu,’ people might be willing to hear you out instead of immediately saying, ‘This sounds too weird for me.’ The weirdness almost seems to be an attracting factor, and so you see all of these different subversive techniques,” Hunter says. “If you’re a horror dev, it’s as good a time as ever to try something really weird, and have it be beloved, because you’re seeing all sorts of crazy titles coming in and then taking the world by storm.”
“I think there is kind of a rebirth and rise in small indie games right now. You see it with things like Buckshot Roulette, Mouthwashing, or No, I’m Not A Human,” says Alexandre Declos, the lead developer behind Horripilant. “These are short experiences made by small teams that people are really enjoying. I think there is definitely a need, because of AAA fatigue due to live service games and the regurgitated franchises you see every year. I feel like players are kind of itching for something new, something different. That’s not predatory towards their wallets or their time.”
Buckshot Roulette is about the unpleasant process of “playing Russian Roulette with a pump-action shotgun,” as the trailer says, and it sold eight million copies as of late 2025. While the game only costs $2.99 on Steam, those are still very impressive sales, especially considering it was largely developed by a single person, Mike Klubnika. Part of the game’s appeal likely stems from its intensity and concise premise, as each pull of the trigger puts you at risk of ending up in a body bag. “What drives me to horror is that in and of itself, it is impossible to divorce horror games from strong emotions,” says Hunter. “If you have a horror game that is boring, it’s not really horror. Horror, in and of itself, is meant to surprise. It’s meant to evoke an emotional response, an intense emotional response, and that keeps things feeling very fresh and exciting.”
As the industry trudges through another year of mass layoffs, it feels like the bleeding has to stop, that an alternative process for financing and developing games needs to become the norm. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Xalavier Nelson Jr., the head of studio Strange Scaffold (El Paso Elsewhere, I Am Your Beast, Clickolding, etc.) likened the modern game industry to “organized gambling.” He criticized how teams of all sizes were developing in an unsustainable way, aiming to create super-games rather than pursuing a clear, concise focus. Horror games obviously don’t have a perfect track record, but many of the best ones tend to be very focused (on scaring the shit out of you).
“It would be beneficial if more publishers were like, ‘Okay, let’s just split into a bunch of small teams and go create,’” says Declos. “I think giving power to smaller teams, to do more experimental stuff, I think that’s where you’re gonna see more creativity shine through. You kind of see it with AA teams backed by big publishers, stuff like Dave The Diver. We don’t need big companies, but if big companies want to invest in these games, I would like them to be investing in smaller teams and more experimental stuff.”
Maybe it’s a bit utopian to hope that one day, executives at Sony, Microsoft, and Ubisoft will wake up, play Mouthwashing, and call a truce in the ongoing game graphics arms race. They’d rein in scope and budgets to greenlight smaller, more daring projects that wouldn’t make as much as Fortnite, but that also wouldn’t go up in a mushroom cloud after unsuccessfully chasing the live-service model. Or they could bankroll another open-world game that takes seven years and several hundred million dollars before getting canceled before it’s even released. Scarier than any horror game is how easy it is to predict which option they’ll choose.
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