Friday the 13th: The Game Gets Dragged Back to Court
Just when it looked like Camp Crystal Lake had finally gone quiet for good, Friday the 13th: The Game is back in the headlines — not for a comeback, but for a courtroom fight. Horror, Inc., the company that holds the film franchise's rights, has sued developer/publisher Gun Interactive over royalties from the 2017 asymmetrical multiplayer hit, and the filing reopens a wound horror gamers thought had scarred over years ago.
What Horror, Inc. Is Alleging
According to the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in late August 2026, Horror, Inc. claims Friday the 13th: The Game generated more than $175 million in revenue through the end of 2024 — and that Gun Interactive still owes somewhere in the range of $4 million to $4.5 million in unpaid royalties. The suit also alleges Gun lost or destroyed sales documentation, including records from Sony, that would have let Horror, Inc. properly audit what it was owed.
Gun Interactive Isn't Backing Down
Gun Interactive fired back with a public statement rejecting the claims outright. The company says it has already paid Horror, Inc. more than $18 million in royalties over the life of the game, and that Horror, Inc.'s own representatives reviewed and signed off on Gun's accounting every step of the way. Gun frames the new demand as a dispute over accounting methodology, not a case of money quietly going missing, and says it won't be "bullied by the threat of expensive litigation" into paying more.
There's a sharper point buried in Gun's response, too: the studio says it actually proposed remastering the game and giving it "a real second life" with Horror, Inc.'s cooperation — a partnership that never happened. Instead, Horror, Inc. let the game's license lapse, which pulled it from digital storefronts and shut down its servers for good, even though Gun says it was willing to keep supporting it.
The Miller Case Casts a Long Shadow
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The rights to the Friday the 13th franchise have been legally messy since 2018, when original screenwriter Victor Miller successfully moved to terminate his copyright interest in the story. Horror, Inc. appealed and lost again in 2021. Gun points to that unresolved rights fog as the real reason meaningful new content — let alone a full remaster — never got off the ground, regardless of how the royalty numbers shake out.
Why Fans Are Still Furious
For a community that has spent years begging for any sign of life from the game — mods, fan-made revival projects, remaster wishlists — this lawsuit lands as one more reminder of how tangled the underlying rights have become. Every attempt to bring the game back, official or fan-made, keeps running into the same wall: nobody can agree on who controls what, and the legal fights just keep piling up instead of resolving. Whatever the court decides about the missing millions, it's not going to untie that knot on its own.
For now, Friday the 13th: The Game stays exactly where it's been since its servers went dark — off shelves, off storefronts, and very much still tied up in court.
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