It's pretty obvious the publisher insisted on the December release to beat
Dead Space (2023) to market and attempt to suck all the oxygen out of the room. But the game just didn't have enough of a wow factor to do that. On the other side of the fence,
Dead Space (2008) is considered a horror classic. But EA being EA, there was rather an expectation that they would screw up with the remake. They didn't. It turned out to be a fantastic product, and it ended up being
The Callisto Protocol that had all the oxygen stolen from it. A lot of dubious decisions and divisive gameplay put it on the backfoot, while
Dead Space was out there being
Dead Space with modern graphics and tweaks. The amount of bad press that TCP was getting also likely hurt it, so I'd say that the whole 2 million in sales is a good achievement giving what it was up against and how the final product just didn't connect with people as well as it should have.