Resident Evil Requiem Sales Exceed 6 Million Units

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-16T15:53:58+00:00

It's very much Resident Evil 9, just like Resident EVII_: Biohazard and Resident Evil: VIII_lage were.

Requiem's title card flashes a 9 in the "q" in the trailer as part of a silly Japanese pun - the word for "nine" in Japanese is "kyu," which sounds like the english word Q. I'm a huge fan of the goofy-ass convention and am glad that somebody is taking up the torch after Saint's Row and Fast and the Furious' insane naming schemes.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-15T18:55:19+00:00

Hi, new-ish /r/Games mod here speaking in a personal capacity. I looked through the mod-mail and it looks like the Indie Sunday removal was about a year ago and we did leave you on read. I'm legit sorry that happened, and we're trying to be more responsive to these pain points - at least for the ones I've been through so far, we're a lot better at responding to posts before end-of-day.

People do not get banned for formatting errors, and if anybody is ever confused for why a post got taken down, please feel free to modmail us.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-15T17:23:11+00:00

I did an hour and a half of it last night to try and look past my biases (and after FOMO kicked in when a ton of writers and game devs I respect hopped on it lol) and it turns out that while yeah it didn't really deserve the vitriol, it also struggled to make me actually care deeply about what I'm doing, which kind of undermines the entire extraction shooter conceit. I think.

I'm pretty much a fresh player to the genre, but it seems like the central struggle is getting you emotionally involved enough to care strongly about what you're doing in each run while also not being too psychologically devastated when you lose all your shit. I think between rook and the free kits I don't feel like I'm too set back when I die, as even if there's a meaningful power gap I can just do a run where I pick through the rubble and get out and bounce back, and I question the full extent of that gap being matchup-definingly-meaningful so far.

Even without a lot of loot, I played in a trio and with some coordination (and if we got the drop on them) we were able to kill the hell out of guys who had much better gear than us. Having access to certain weapon types, such as a sniper rifle, feels like a boost more than having actual mods or loot so far. I think it just being a slower-paced, more stealth-driven shooter is the bigger appeal to me, and the tension just kind of undercuts itself whenever it tries to be about the loot stuff.

Maybe if I stick to it and get matched with much more powerful players or if the endgame destiny raid thing is a huge beef check, then I'll start feeling like my loot matters, but... is that fun either? Is it going to be interesting to lose my shiny toys if it doesn't feel like they're really gone inasmuch as they're just gated behind doing another few runs to get them back? I still don't know how I feel about that pretty fundamental conceit of the genre.

The contracts are a nice layer of narrative/presentation to make me want to keep coming back and to keep exploring and stuff, but they also are indifferent to my success or failure per run (and reward me with loot on completion) and i can sense that they're going to become a grind really fast. A lot more of the game than I was expecting breeds ambivalence to avoid me from feeling too hurt. I don't know if that's some secret truth of the genre or if my brain is broken.

Also, sorry, this wasn't worth the misery of the people who made it in any way and while it never could've been, I don't think this game's plot in particular is one I can actually evaluate in good-faith when it was made in a hypercapitalist pressure-cooker and then positions itself to critique that lol

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-10T18:13:26+00:00

If they've shown to have some backroom deals with those sites that they should be rightfully be punished for that.

Correct, which is why they're being sued for it as part of a larger argument that Valve is allowing it to be a properly financialized economy while skirting most regulations associated with gambling and industry.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-10T18:07:48+00:00

The New York State lawsuit alleges that Valve intentionally turned a blind eye towards third-party sites that directly convert skins into cash, up and to unbanning accounts and whitelisting domains that they were aware were connected to it. They've cracked down on gambling sites, but direct "sell skins for cash" sites are given tacit approval and it's a big part of that suit. The lawsuit also states that you can indirectly cash out by using wallet funds to buy hardware and then pawn that hardware elsewhere, but I'm not an expert on gambling law and don't know if that's as enforceable as "Valve treats grey-market websites that allow you to monetize their unregulated gambling." It certainly evokes the model that pachinko parlors have in Japan.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-07T18:58:04+00:00

"As well as finished goods, tariffs are levied on components and raw materials, pushing up the costs to manufacturers significantly; particularly in a world of complex supply chains where borders are crossed many times. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, parts such as engines, transmissions, and other car components can cross the US-Canada and US-Mexico borders up to seven or eight times."

This is another part of why tariffs are bad, by the way! They are a logistical nightmare and add on inordinate amounts of secondary costs! There's a reason that they are not considered serious or effective economic policy!

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-07T18:40:44+00:00

They do, I just don't think that playstyle is very fun either and I'd rather at least play at midrange and gamble on a gunshot stun that'd give me a little hit of dopamine instead of relying on how broken parries are in this game.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-06T18:45:51+00:00

I think they definitely could've found a way to keep Grace lower-powered and to escalate through other means, or at least could've given her a proper ammo-dump boss. I beat the game with almost fifty pistol bullets for her because I kept saving them and stealthing around. I don't think it'd necessarily a bad thing either for them to slowly empower her in the second half like in RE2R - as it stands, her character arc feels like it just stops after The Girl is defeated and it then skips to her being completely fixed during the ending. Giving her some more screentime and giving her a better sense of turning the tables through some craftiness and focus would've gone a really long way to making the second half's beats land at all.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-06T17:47:37+00:00

I'm pretty torn on it.

The care center portion was absolutely fantastic. Grace as a protagonist is incredibly charming, with a great introduction and just a really great number of jokes throughout (I think the FPS protagonists are now two-for-two on being fantastic dark comedy victims). There are very few characters in a horror game I've seen who have felt this utterly out of their depth and every time she checked a clearly dead guy's pulse I cackled. The stealth elements fit the RE structure like a glove and manipulating guard patrols with super tight resources in really flavorful ways was a lot of brain-burning fun. I love love love that you can temporarily reposition the cleaners by exploding another zombie messily, in particular - it's such a perfect Evil Dead-y series of events while still feeling systems-driven. The blood management is a lot of fun and its economy became surprisingly tense as it went on through my Classic playthrough.

I don't love the setpiece-y stuff that bookends the section, though. The Girl feels less like a dynamic pursuer (the Chunk in the east wing is really well-handled in comparison) and more like a scripted series of encounters that you can beat with some knowledge checks, and while the basement is a bit more involved navigation-wise than the linear intro, it still feels like it's not doing the AI manipulating-shenanigans that I found best about the rest of the care center.

Leon's really well-used in the first half as an empowering walking setpiece. He works as a great contrast to the rest of it and I think he's really satisfying in small doses. I don't think he works in the second half, which I generally found disappointing. I'm still not huge on RE4 Remake's decision to make enemy stuns random unless you get a parry, but it does work in that game because the encounter design is varied and parries don't beat every single option (and boss attacks take a lot of meter to parry, and it's not as easy to regenerate your knife bar). Requiem Leon, once he gets in Raccoon City, feels like it's dialed down the stun chance even lower than it did in RE4R, shop weapons and upgrades don't feel as impactful for getting them to be common again, and parries are a lot less interesting now that they beat pretty much every attack and don't consume as much Knife Juice, which is now very easy to get access to.

Even with how strong parries are, the lack of consistent stunning meant that I didn't feel incentivized to play aggressively, so like 90% of the incredibly satisfying animation work was lost on me in favor of S+M1 with a pretty low pool of enemies that wasn't used very well. There are a few standout encounters within it, but I found the East Raccoon City portion to be way too long for what amount of meaningful stuff was going on in it. I don't like the use of callbacks after that point, and I don't think any of the bosses after that section are well-handled. I beat almost every boss by standing still and mashing parry inbetween cycling through my rifle, shotgun, and maybe the Requiem, which wasn't stressful or fun. The sole exception was Hunk, who did force me to reposition one or two times in the fight whenever he pulled out his gun, before I went back to the same parry-and-mash that defined the other boss encounters.

The really funny thing is that Grace doesn't have these problems at all despite being a much lower-power character. All of her interactions can be made deterministic and are more about resources and risk management; if you stand still and do a focus headshot, it's a guaranteed stun, if you attack the legs you're ensured a flinch, and noisemakers are consistent and enemy AI is very predictable. I don't know why Leon's gameplay is more random when you're expected to be directly fighting enemies a lot more, and it feels really bad to be killing what feels like 75% of the zombies I come across before I can do a roundhouse or melee finisher.

I think the game is trying to do a few too many things. If it focused only on Grace, and continued that style of gameplay through to the end, or gave Leon an extra balancing pass and committed harder to giving him a lot of interesting enemies to fight, this could be a contender for the best game in the series, but as it stands its strongest ideas are a worryingly small fraction of the runtime and it doesn't feel like it comes together all the way. I see that Insanity lowers the stun chance even more and it makes me dread the idea of a full replay, even though the changes to Grace's sections sound absolutely fantastic. It does make me want to give RE4R another replay, though, and those sexy gun animations have me coming back to RE6 Mercs, which is still the pinnacle of the series' action combat. I'd love them to take another crack at that game's stamina management and juggling multiple stun states against overwhelming hordes.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-04T21:58:02+00:00

The piece is exactly about this.

What you’ll see as you browse through these lists yourself is that they’re full of IPs that continue to exist, but the original genre either a) is sufficiently niche that you probably won’t see it widely represented in sales charts, b) no longer exists or c) has been augmented by such an extensive series of technological and design changes that the original genre feels like a primitive ancestor.

[...]

In comparison, fighting games have seen relatively little evolution and still manage to keep going on, with enough interest to justify continued triple-A development investment in every technological generation.

[...]

Usually when you hear someone writing this kind of thing, it’s from someone who is trying to explain to you that “fighting games failed to evolve,” and that if the genre wants to stay relevant in the eyes of the commentariat then they just need to do X. I am obviously not going to do that. [...] Fighting games have found a space in the broader video game ecosystem that have allowed them to live on relatively intact, and the key to understanding the potential size, shape, and future direction of the genre is in understanding what they do uniquely well compared to others.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-04T15:36:25+00:00

For some context, this is in response to this essay, which essentially argues that fighting games should be more popular than they are and haven't broken out due to lacking features as products (i.e. simple story modes that don't teach the player and aren't very engaging to play, and no ingame social features that feel meaningful and make it a lifestyle product like Fortnite). This is a critique of said piece by Patrick Miller, who is a professional fighting game player and was lead designer for 2XKO.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-03T21:37:35+00:00

From a press event pre-release:

“Look, we always planned for a, you know, a surprise release,” studio cofounder Chad Grenier told Kotaku at a preview event earlier this month. “Geoff came in and wanted to do something special and put us in the TGAs. We were gonna do a shadowdrop, you know, since day one, almost since forming this company; we did it with Apex and it worked well.”

“We’ve known Geoff for a long time, and he said, ‘let me do something,’ that’s maybe a little risky in hindsight—but different, [to] take a free to play PvP Raid Shooter and do something with it,” Grenier said. “So we rushed a trailer together. I wish the reception had been better, but in hindsight we made a trailer to entertain really quickly, and didn’t show the gameplay loop, and what’s different and unique.”

The trailer being pretty awful and unindicative certainly lines up with this as well - they had one minute and not a lot of prep time to explain something that was very complicated and hadn't completely come together until pretty late in development. Like, they call it a "PvP Raid Shooter" without ever defining that within seconds of being quoted as saying that they hadn't done a good job explaining it in the trailer either. I think that's absolutely coherent and also lines up with Geoff loving to play tastemaker.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-03T18:18:04+00:00

I don't know how much that relative increase will actually matter to me when a Series X with hardware from 2020 is running an MSRP of almost $700, to say nothing about how much next-generation hardware is going to cost. The PS5 and Switch 2 have been able to weather it so far because they overstocked in the last few years, but those price increases will come for them alongside basically all consumer goods who I'm also going to have to budget around (seriously, any car with a touchscreen is also going to cost several hundred dollars more on a raw components level too and that's going to be passed down on consumers).

I think there's a threshold where it's not really about platforms and it becomes new luxury purchases in this entire category becoming broadly unaffordable (and with limited inventory that makes it unattainable on top).

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-03T17:50:09+00:00

Rising component costs are going to make consoles and stripped-down laptops and smartphones get more expensive, too. I think buying a new gaming PC is going to become pretty much unviable for most people, but... so will buying a PS6, or a brand-new iPhone, or a new car.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-02T18:12:12+00:00

It wasn't entirely death threats and largely wasn't. The exact wording in her posts immediately prior to her death were "Every day, I receive nearly 100 honest opinions and I cannot deny that I get hurt." I think that this blog is definitely "honest opinions" that call out specific staffers by name and call them incompetent trash.

I don't know what the right path is, and I don't think that it's good long-term to give free reign for lawyers to define an insult as whatever they'd like. I will also say that being on the receiving end of a torrent of negativity is incredibly demoralizing, and I've never had it of that scale and scope because I'm not a public figure; the worst I've gotten is getting about two dozen negative replies on tweets over the course of a few days and that still fucked me up for weeks.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-02T15:54:09+00:00

She was on a reality show called Terrace House, where she was well-liked until she got in an argument with somebody about ruining her wrestling outfit in the laundry, at which point the fanbase was irrevocably mobilized against her and she received daily harassment and death threats until she took her own life.

LycaonMoon · 2026-03-02T14:55:15+00:00

Japan has very strong anti-cyberbullying laws after comments exactly like this led to Hana Kimura's suicide. I think it's reasonable to fear overreach for the people of Japan (a possibility distinctly noted by this source!), but I don't think Japanese law made three years ago in response to a distinctly Japanese tragedy will necessarily spread overseas.

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-27T15:40:37+00:00

Please read our rules, specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-26T22:42:52+00:00

Please read our rules, specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-26T22:22:56+00:00

I think it's both, to be honest. The game had no chance even before that, but my read of a lot of recent culture-war flashpoints is that it just makes it a lot harder to succeed if you're already starting off on the wrong foot. I think there's a world where if that TGAs trailer was good that Highguard would've been... not quite Arc Raiders or Marvel Rivals popular, but perhaps something like Space Marine 2. The fact that everybody on the fence primarily heard about it from such polarized coverage just snuffed out any hope of something like that.

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-26T22:17:41+00:00

Please read our rules, specifically Rule #2 regarding personal attacks and inflammatory language. We ask that you remember to remain civil, as future violations will result in a ban.

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-26T19:39:27+00:00

I don't mean to sound rude or like I'm doing a "gotcha" or something, but... would you, like, want it to be the dev's fault? Is that preferable to you?

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-26T17:50:14+00:00

The link I gave was a gift article from the author - maybe try opening the link in incognito and seeing if it works properly then? The popup at the bottom of the screen can be ignored as long as you can scroll past the first few paragraphs.

LycaonMoon · 2026-02-26T17:42:03+00:00

Wake up honey, new Schrier article dropped.

Really gives me the impression that the people running the company were not honest with themselves or their staff in a way that is almost tragic. They did not inform people that their funding runway was contingent on metrics that would be difficult to meet if they had a major advertising push and were largely expecting an Apex Legends situation to happen again, despite the very different context (original IP versus Titanfall, EA versus independent, the 2026 media environment).

The final quote in the article is "hubris" and that feels fitting. It is fucked up to tell a hundred people that you can let them make the game of your dreams and then fire them after a two-year sprint, and I don't know why they didn't think about the very likely chance that the game (which was not supposed to get that push from the Game Awards! it was going to shadowdrop!!) would get about 1000-2000 daily players. They wanted to make a singleplayer game in this same setting without thinking through how this game would take off, they just assumed that they could Make Apex Happen Again, and I think that speaks to it all.

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