I like to manifest Halloween year-round, what with my favourite pastimes being horror games, movies, and books—oh, and Dressmaker currently. So when Halloween actually falls upon me I like to make it something special—crack out the real horrifying stuff that'll hit even harder. One series that's always on my list is Outlast thanks to its next-level gore and perfect scares, plus if I want to drag my friends into a shared nightmare there's The Outlast Trials for all to enjoy.

"Halloween has always been—even going back to the first Outlast—one of our biggest months, and it definitely kickstarts the biggest part of the year, which is October, November, and the holidays," Red Barrels co-founder Philippe Morin tells me. "Those are usually the best months of the year in terms of sales. We don't control what other studios do, obviously, but we act as if Halloween is ours."

This year Red Barrels decided to celebrate the spooky season with a huge sale to encourage new players to enter the Sinyala Facility and give The Outlast Trials a try over the spookiest month of the year. And it worked, way beyond what they'd hoped for: The game's concurrent player count on Steam ended up capping out at 147,955 players, a hugely impressive feat for a horror game that's over three years.

"We knew with that 90% sale we'd get a lot of new players, but we didn't expect that many," Morin says. "That first week of October was pretty insane. Every day I was waking up checking the numbers, thinking okay, that's probably going to be the top, and then it's gonna start to go down, but every day it kept going higher and higher.

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