Philippe Morin, co-founder of Red Barrels, looked back on the early days of Outlast. The title faced difficulties in securing funding and failed to find a publisher, yet it reached 400,000 copies sold within five months of release, achieving the team's original first-year target ahead of schedule.
Red Barrels was founded by developers who had previously worked at Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, and Naughty Dog.exe. Outlast was released in 2013 with a team of just ten people. They designed the game as a first-person horror title where players cannot fight back directly, but must instead run and hide, with night-vision camcorders serving as a distinctive visual feature of the work.
Morin stated that he and David Chateauneuf had pitched a horror game concept to Ubisoft as early as 2008, but the company showed little interest, primarily due to financial considerations. The team then spent 18 months reaching out to potential partners but still failed to secure a publisher, as some investors preferred to spread their funds across multiple mobile games.
The project later received $1 million in support from the Canada Media Fund. The founders also invested $360,000 of their savings and credit lines, putting their homes up as collateral to assume the risk. Drawing on the market performance of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, the team set a first-year sales target of 400,000 copies for Outlast.
Outlast reached this milestone within five months of its launch. Halloween promotions, television exposure, and inclusion in PlayStation Plus further expanded the game's reach. The night-vision mechanic, the inability to fight back, and the explicit depiction of gore collectively established the series' recognizability.