The Death of Propnight

On December 12th of 2023, Fntastic announced that it had ceased operations after the failed release of The Day Before. While many people were outraged by the poor release of this title that was at one point a highly wishlisted game on Steam, another game was caught in the crossfire that no one seemed to cover, Propnight.

Propnight was a game released all the way back in November of 2021. In fact, it was one of the first games that I ever reviewed as part of Phenixx Gaming. While the game had a massive surge in the beginning, it definitely struggled over the years to maintain and grow a loyal fanbase. Though Propnight was always installed on my computer, I never had the motivation to open it more than once every two months. Many of my friends had moved on to other games and it seemed to suffer with long queue times that constantly plague asymmetrical horror titles.

Ten days after the announcement of Fntastic’s closure, a post was made on X that the Propnight servers would be shut down on January 22nd, 2024 and the game would be pulled from Steam. While the Discord community that existed attempted to plead with the developers over the last month about handing the game over to the community, in a similar way to how Video Horror Society was, these pleas fell on deaf ears. Those very voices were also silenced since the developers seemingly took it upon themselves to delete the Propnight Discord server on the same day they shut the game’s servers down.

When I saw the Discord server shut down, I was fully expecting for everything else to be deleted. Surprisingly, the website, X page, and Steam page all still exist as of January 23rd. Looking at the lifespan of Propnight, it does make me concerned about the vitality of the asymmetrical horror genre. While there are a few new games that appear to be entering the fold within the next year and Dead by Daylight remains the king of the genre, things are certainly not looking up.

Propnight joins Video Horror Society and Friday the 13th in being asymmetrical horror games that have relatively perished, and one of them wiped out its development studio.

While Friday the 13th is a unique case, these will probably end up giving pause to anyone who is looking to invest in the genre; having developers second guess whether they will be able to make it out alive by making a game.

As Dead by Daylight continues to churn out new chapters every three months, Behaviour Interactive potentially runs the risk of having licensing fees that outweigh the profits that such chapters and characters are bringing to the game. Most other asymmetrical horror games have started offering free DLC and content updates to their games to entice players to keep coming back. The only two significant games in this genre that are putting prices on their DLC are Dead by Daylight and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

From all the information that I can gather, I would not be surprised if the asymmetrical horror genre is dead by 2030. Between the dwindling number of players on every game in this genre, according to Steam Charts tracking information, it seems like the craving for such a horror experience is low.

From looking at all of the complaints that exist on every forum I could find, it seems like there isn’t a single game that has been made yet that has an acceptable power balance between the monsters and the survivors. While it remains to be seen if Killer Klowns from Outer Space or Carnival Hunt are able to provide such an experience, both of these games will be under great pressure to achieve a long-term plan to stay alive in this arena.