Is Shadow Complex 2 happening?

Often times the simplest answer is the right one. When it comes to Epic making another Shadow Complex, the answer is not until Fortnite becomes old news and that doesn’t appear to be happening anytime soon.

One of the first Xbox Arcade hits was Shadow Complex from Epic Games, more specifically developed by ChAIR after they were acquired in 2008. Shadow Complex released the following year and was a stand out Metroidvania title. The title sold fairly well moving approximately 200K units in the first week of release according to 1UP and according to Gamasutra by the end of 2011 had sold approximately 600k. When speaking with GameSpot back in 2010, the devs talked about how the sequel was already in development.

After Shadow Complex, the team at ChAIR moved onto Infinity Blade on iOS, which was released in 2010. They followed it up with two sequels, with the first released in 2011 and the second sequel released in 2013. It makes sense why ChAIR stuck with Infinity Blade over Shadow Complex as the studio announced that in 2012, Infinity Blade had made 23 million in revenue. Pretty impressive for two exclusive iOS games, especially back in 2012 when mobile gaming was still evolving. If you compare this with the sales figures we know from Shadow Complex at the $15 price point the game sold at you have around 9 million dollars minus development costs.

Shadow Complex didn’t go forgotten because in 2015, ChAIR released Shadow Complex Remastered for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 but that is all we have on the series since 2015. It’s possible that was a temperature check for the market.

Combine the success of Infinity Blade, the founder of ChAIR getting promoted to Worldwide Creative Director of Epic in 2016, and Fortnite BR releasing in 2017 and it seems pretty easy to figure out why we haven’t seen a sequel yet and might not for a while.

The glass half full says that in the past decade, since the release of Shadow Complex, we have seen the popularity of Metroidvania’s go way up meaning that there is a bigger potential market for a sequel. Digital downloads are also much more common place than they were back then, thanks to the advancements in hard drive size and internet speeds. Finally, Epic could give the sequel a head start if they put the main character in Fortnite, which would give the title a lot more awareness.