Silent Hill’s website finally updated with a special message for fans
If you’re a longtime Silent Hill aficionado who keeps checking for any scraps of new information on the series, the “official” website at silenthill.com has an interesting new message for you.
As a Silent Hill fan myself, I can definitely sympathize with Mr. Ito’s exasperation. What started as an awe-inspiring new lore aspect to the series has absolutely been run into the ground at this point by people who just can’t get past nostalgia.
…so, okay, I know a lot of you may be wondering what in the world is going on at this point.
While it should be pretty obvious just from looking at it, silenthill.com is definitely not an official website at this point. And—either shockingly or not shockingly, depending on how you see the current era of the company—Konami doesn’t even own the URL anymore at this point.
At least as of late 2019, the URL came up for sale for the bargain price of $9,835. Honestly, if I’d had that kind of money just laying around, I’d totally have bought the URL myself. At only $11 a year from there to renew, that’d be an easy keep once the initial investment was out of the way.
I also have to give a special callout to how the site was advertising that it was for sale, because it’s a fine piece of marketing:
The domain name silenthill.com is for sale.
Silent Hill: An evocative name with a slightly eerie, placid vibe.
$9835 USD
After being purchased, the website seems to have sat dormant for the entirety of 2020. Then, in early 2021, it was updated to show the following:
From there, the site sat quiet until just a couple days ago, when it was updated with its current design.
There have been a lot of rumors in recent years about one or more new Silent Hill games supposedly being in development, with everyone from Bloober Team, to Sony, to Hideo Kojima said to be involved in those plans. If there are actually any such plans in the works, it sure seems weird for Konami to have let their ownership of the URL expire like that—especially given how little cost it would be for a company to keep hold of a URL like that.
Mollie got her start in games media via the crazy world of gaming fanzines, and now works at EGM with the goal of covering all of the weird Japanese and niche releases that nobody else on staff cares about. She’s active in the gaming community on a personal level, and an outspoken voice on topics such as equality in gaming, consumer rights, and good UI. Check her out on Twitter and Mastodon.
