More than 60 million players have entered the Fog of Dead by Daylight, developer Behaviour Interactive announced Tuesday. That means the asymmetrical multiplayer horror game has grown by 10 million players since March 2022.
Dead by Daylight launched on PC in 2016, and reached 12 million players by 2019, thanks to subsequent releases on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Since then, the game has also come to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, as well as mobile platforms.
Mathieu Cote, producer and head of partnerships at Behaviour, credits Dead by Daylight’s success to a couple factors: listening to its players and making the right game at the right time.
“We got lucky to a certain extent,” Cote said in an interview with Polygon. “We get credit for [doing] some [things right], but we got lucky; we released at a time when people wanted what we had to offer. We’ve always tried to be as generous as we can with our monetization. We have 300 people working every single day on that game. We always made sure that people would have a choice to pay or not and to pay in a way that is showing their commitment, [and] showing their desire for the game to continue to be more interesting to be deeper.”
“We certainly are not perfect,” added Cote, “but we do better every single time. We listen to people. And I think we’ve kept some form of humility [over the years]. But it never stopped us from taking big swings. And that’s important.”
“We knew there was a space there to explore,” said Dave Richard, senior creative director on Dead by Daylight. “Definitely being there at the right time helped, but keeping it fresh, continuing to add to it, and putting our passion into it, I think is what is the reason its successful today. We are [looking] far ahead in the future, and what we’re preparing is […[ really, really exciting. So I think we’ll still have success in the future.”
Some of Behaviour’s future plans have already been revealed, including a new board game adaptation, new spinoff games, and a Dead by Daylight movie.
“There are so many more stories we want to tell,” Cote said. “We’ve already announced new projects in the world of Dead by Daylight: We’ve talked about a movie coming with Blumhouse and Atomic Monster; we’ve talked about a game being worked on with Supermassive Games; and we’ve talked about a brand-new game that we’re developing internally that’s a co-op experience in the universe of Dead by Daylight. There’s quite a lot that’s going to happen in the Dead by Daylight universe in the next few years. Hopefully, people keep that healthy appetite for it.”
