In the series of “maybe we should think about this for longer” of gaming, Konami is now saying Silent Hill will likely get a new game released each year — because that’s been working wonders for some other, major brands eh?
Speaking to Famitsu (translation via Google), series producer Motoi Okamoto, as part of the magazine annual roundup of developer interviews on expectations for the coming year, praised the success achieved by the Japanese publisher on both Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill f — both of which came out in 2024 and 2025, respectively — effectively stating that the psychological terror franchise is now “back on track”.
Then, he dropped the bombshell:
“We aim to release about one title per year, including both announced and unannounced titles. We’re not sure how far we can achieve this, but we’ll do our best as the producer of the Silent Hill series. Ideally, we’d like to keep the buzz around Silent Hill constant.”
Motoi Okamoto
Okamoto was brought in by Konami in 2019, after a very successful career that comprises the likes of Nintendo (where he worked on everything, from Zelda to Pikmin), Entersphere (which he founded and left in 2017). He was hired specifically to helm the Silent Hill franchise and, well, we can’t disagree with the man when he says the brand’s two latest outings were terrific (both the remake as well as f boasts over 90% approval on OpenCritic).
Our take: a yearly release may be a “make-it-or-break-it” for Silent Hill
Not that we’re ones to complain about more games for more games, but yearly releases are a bit of a double-edged blade — and this is nothing new: we’ve been dunking a lot on the latest Call of Duty, for instance, and the latest Black Ops iteration of the franchise was so bad it’s got even the once almighty Activision backpedalling on the “let’s put one out every time the year turns” mindset for the time being.
Before that, however, we saw the same thing happen to EA with the once-named FIFA series (nowadays, EA Sports FC) and even Konami itself, with the former Pro Evolution Soccer franchise, which is now called “eFootball”.
The point is: one game every year might hurt innovation simply by killing the needed time for proper innovation. Every single one of the aforementioned brands had to either branch out into more than one mainline (Call of Duty has “Black Ops” and “Modern Warfare”, for instance) or forced to reinvent itself under new banners (FIFA and EA did not reach a new licensing agreement and the official branding of soccer’s global governing body was dropped; eFootball decided to leave the direct competition market to focus more on the online aspects and eSports pillar of the industry). Things like these do have a habit of growing stale real fast.
Or not: it is worth mentioning that Call of Duty took a long, long time to get to the mess they’re embroiled in today. For many a year, the brand was the leading name when it came to first-person shooters and war games in general. Maybe Konami plans to do the same with Silent Hill?
If that’ll work out or not, that’s anybody’s guess. At least in this case, we have a pretty good idea of what the next pair of steps will be: way back in 2022, Konami did announce “Silent Hill: Townfall”, from from Annapurna Interactive and No Code — although the company did not offer any official updates on that, a leaked retail listing from earlier stated the project to come out between March and April, 2026.
The other is the original Silent Hill’s remake, handled by Bloober Team and developed in the same manner they did with the Silent Hill 2 Remake — which our own Phil Manzon loved, by the way. We don’t know when that one is coming out, but given Okamoto’s latest statements, 2027 might seem like a good window of opportunity for them.
