The really shit demo I think sunk a lot of opinions of the game pre-release (including mine). No idea what they were thinking with that. Alone in the Dark was also a very dormant IP that not a lot of people remember. The publisher could have done a lot more to get the previous games out into the public awareness. Even though this game looked AA quality (in a AAA price tag, which was another problem), it's still a big gamble to go from basically irrelevance to that.