Glenn Schofield, the creator of Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol, has announced his retirement after 35 years in the industry. In a LinkedIn video post, Schofield thanked his family, Electronic Arts and Activision, and "the people who supported us in videogames".
"The past couple of decades have been some of the greatest times in videogames," Schofield said. "Some of the best games have come out over these times, [from] some of the greatest talent in the world I've been able to work with. I thank you all. I had a front row seat to one of the greatest creative explosions in history, I think."
Schofield has been candid about the difficulties of securing funding, and getting games greenlit by publishers, amid the industry's post-COVID malaise. Following the release of 2022's The Callisto Protocol and his subsequent departure from Krafton's Striking Distance Studios, Schofield tried and failed to raise funding for "a new sub-genre of horror".
"People loved the concept," he wrote on LinkedIn in 2025. "We got a lot of second and third meetings. But early feedback was 'get [the budget] to $10M.' Lately, that number’s dropped to $2–5M." At the time, he said he may have directed his last game, and the industry has only become more ravaged since then, with huge layoffs at Xbox, Bungie, and Ubisoft in 2026.
Since shipping The Callisto Protocol and ultimately failing to make a new horror game, Schofield's focus has shifted to his visual art and AI. While he's no AI naysayer— he spent the bulk of his 2025 Gamescom Asia keynote praising generative AI as a creative tool—he was dismissive of Elon Musk's claims that xAI could generate a whole game from scratch ("he's full of crap", Schofield said.)
While Schofield is best known for Dead Space and three Sledgehammer Call of Duty games (Modern Warfare 3, Advanced Warfare, and WWII), his credits list is long and reaches as far back as 1991. As art director, he's worked on titles as varied as The Ren and Stimpy Show: Buckeroo$! and Barbie: Game Girl. As a director, he worked on Blood Omen 2: Legacy of Kain and two Gex games.
Still, it's difficult not to associate Schofield with a period of big blockbuster primacy that kicked into gear with the seventh generation of consoles. For most of Schofield's career, every year's release calendar was reliably dotted by at least a half-dozen triple A behemoths. Evidence suggests those days are not coming back, at least not for western studios: tens of thousands of development roles have been shed since 2022, as the industry is eroded by the popping of the COVID bubble, ballooning development costs, lengthening production cycles, and the delusional goals of executives.
Factor in unprecedented hardware cost increases thanks to the AI industry's leeching of RAM and storage, and you can probably imagine how difficult it must be to stay optimistic as a game developer in 2026: especially if you were commandeering multimillion sellers 10 years ago, and still can't get a project greenlit.
Still, despite all available evidence, Schofield says the future is bright.
"This is an amazing industry with so many talented people," he said. "And I know times are tough right now, but man, the future ahead is really, really bright. And I wish you all the next generation of game makers the best of luck. Explore, experiment, enjoy. And don't forget that the most important thing is the idea."
