Back when Behaviour Interactive commissioned mock reviews for Dead by Daylight, the feedback they received led them to forecast the game would sell just 300,000 copies over its lifetime.
When the asynchronous horror multiplayer title launched into the market, it sold that number in just three days. To date, it has sold more than 60 million copies.
The project emerged from a game called Naughty Bear that Behaviour was working on for 505 Games (back when Behaviour was named Artificial Mind & Movement). As was a common tactic at the time, in an era when publishers were desperate to avoid seeing their titles quickly shoved onto the used game market, 505 Games asked for the inclusion of four multiplayer modes very late in development, one or two months before production ended.
“One of them was called Jelly Wars,” recalls senior creative director Dave Richard in a chat with GamesIndustry.biz at GDC Festival of Gaming. “The idea was that one player would play as Naughty Bear, trying to kill the other cuddly bears that were played by players as well, and the other three or four bears were trying to create desserts at stations.
“The asymmetry of it created all of these very interesting scenarios. When we finally got the chance internally to prototype things, we wanted to go back to this idea, because we knew it had potential, and we knew that there weren’t any other games that had tried this. We knew it was going to be really tough, but that the risk was absolutely worth it.”
The project was initially intended as something to fill time between work-for-hire projects. Back then, Behaviour was around 275 strong, with 30 people working on Dead by Daylight; now around 400 people are working on the horror hit, with the company as a whole having grown to 1,300 people over five studios around the world.
Yet Despite Dead by Daylight’s stellar performance – something that head of partnerships Mathieu Cote says is “100%” the core of Behaviour’s success – work-for-hire is still “the bread and butter” of the company.
“It will be the backbone in the sense that we have the luxury of being able to work on this game and taking chances,” he explains. “It’s an investment, and we’re gambling, whereas the rest of the company is doing the day-to-day boots on the ground work that brings in money that makes sure that everybody’s going to be paid, and we’re fine.”
Pick your project
While co-development or work-for-hire helps keep everything going, Dead by Daylight has also been a massive help for Behaviour; it’s helped open doors that were previously closed to the Canadian studio.
“The reach of Dead by Daylight has changed some of the conversations that we’re having,” Cote says. “It has changed some of the partners that we can talk to, and our decisions have been a little bit different.”
The horror hit also allows Behaviour to be a bit more choosy when it comes to selecting projects to work on. Cote says that before Dead by Daylight’s success, the company was in a position where it had to take “any project”.
“Nowadays, we have the luxury of saying: ‘You know what, maybe we’ll wait and get a better project, a bigger project, or just a better-suited project or more interesting or with a company that we have the potential to do more things with’,” he continues.
To start with, Dead by Daylight wasn’t a live-service title. Per Cote, it was a “fire-and-forget” with local servers for multiplayer. Behaviour had plans to bulk out the offering with new narrative-driven chapters, as well as killers, survivors, and maps, but at the beginning, there wasn’t even a store in the game.
“Nowadays, if you’re launching a live game without a store, that’s not a live game,” Cote says. “Nobody does that without a battle pass – that came in year four for us.”
Live service was something that the company had to learn as went along. After all, when Dead by Daylight launched, games-as-a-service was a relatively new business model; people were starting to talk about it, but “it was not a big thing,” says Cote.
Free for all
The ethos that Behaviour says it has adopted is having a low barrier to entry to bring new players on board, as well as making sure its audience doesn’t feel nickel and dimed.
“It was always about making sure that we don’t gate or [gate] as little as we can behind a paywall,” Cote explains. “The game is $20 bucks, and nobody pays that for it anyway. It’s always on sale or part of PlayStation Plus or something. Whenever we release a new killer, for instance, you will experience that killer. What you’re buying is the opportunity to play as that new character, but you will encounter them, and you will play in the new map. The maps are always free. We’re trying to be as generous and add to the world constantly. And we’re essentially telling people you’re giving us your time; we’re very happy, and we’re appreciative of it. If you want, you can also pay to show off your bragging rights, just to enjoy it, or to delve deeper, but none of it prevents you from enjoying the end.”
Behaviour has already started to explore what it can do with the Dead by Daylight franchise outside of the core game. Already there have been spin-offs, such as dating sim Hooked on You and an interactive drama title, The Casting of Frank Stone. There’s a film in the works and a comic created in partnership with Titan; the first issue of a second series is set to launch in April 2026.
“|Transmedia] is really core to the vision,” Richard says. “And it has been for a little while. The core team that’s on Dead by Daylight is talking daily about these other projects because, of course, we’re aligning ourselves with the right partner. Because we take the licenses of others and put them in our game with great respect, and that’s what we want others to do with our brand.”
After ten years, you might expect a game like Dead by Daylight to have a dedicated audience, but not necessarily much of an ability to attract new players. Yet a decade on, Richard says the game is “very healthy” and “still growing”. Now, the task is to make it even easier for newcomers to join in the fun.
“We’re not at a plateau,” Richard says. “We’re still seeing new players coming in, and we’re actively working to add these new players to an old game, which is a challenge by itself. Our game has become really dense; it’s complicated to learn. There are lots of characters, lots of abilities. We want to continue to work on that game as long as we can. Let’s say another ten years at least. So one of our objectives, and we started this year, is all about quality of life, making the game more accessible, understanding it clearly so that more players can come in.
“But our grand goal, really one of our pillars, is to be part of pop culture and impact culture in a positive way. We want to create more of the Dead by Daylight universe than the core game.”
He concludes: “We will support Dead by Daylight as long as we can.”
