The developers of Dead by Daylight tell me they’re extremely committed to keeping the game going as long as possible with support, crossovers, and all sorts of updates. So committed, in fact, that a sequel to the game is off the table.
Speaking to me at the Game Developers Conference last month, head of partnerships at Behaviour Interactive Mathieu Cote and creative director Dave Richard chatted with me about the challenge of following up on a super successful live service game. They said that while they had thought about doing a sequel or a “remake” at different points in development, it “never makes sense for the fans” to do.
“There’s always a point where we say, okay, we could do a sequel now, and it would be far easier actually to do a sequel with a blind slate than try to fix these issues that we have, for example,” Richard said. “But it never makes sense for the fans. Never ever. They’ve invested time and money on DBD, and-
“That’s the game they want to play,” Cote said.
Richard concluded, “So, we can continue to put the effort so that they can have fun and still have value for the money.”
I then brought up live service games such as Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege, and Blizzard’s Overwatch, that have had various struggles with following up a successful original with a sequel and getting an audience to transition to the new thing. Cote brought up Payday 2 and 3 as examples as well, where both games are still being supported. However, he’s not interested in juggling two Dead by Daylights at once.
“It’s also very possible to take your game and bring it kicking and screaming into the next decade,” he said. “And that’s more what we want to do. We’re not going to do a DBD 2, that’s for sure. They’re not going to have to buy a DBD 2 and restart from scratch. But we understand that the game is 10 years old, and that’s a long time in video game years. And we want people that start today, tomorrow, next year, to feel like they’re playing a game that is current. It’s not a nostalgia token, it’s a real game that you can play today and that makes sense.”
Later in our interview, this topic came up again in a slightly different way when I referenced Xbox’s Project Helix, which the company had spoken about in a talk at GDC just that morning. Though at the time, none of us were caught up on the details of what was said in that talk, both Richard and Cote were in lockstep about the biggest issue with moving to new technology – they don’t want players getting left behind.
“So obviously, a new SKU, a new console, let’s say, a new piece of hardware that we can move on to, must support Unreal, or there’s a way to import it in some ways,” Richard said. “It’s super interesting if it allows us to get to a crowd that we couldn’t get to before. So one thing that’s interesting is that we’ve talked about the graphical rework and stuff like that, like evolving over time. And one question that we always have to ask ourselves is, when we update up to a limit, and we can have better graphics, better effects, whatever it is-
“Who do we leave behind?” Cote interjected.
Richard continued, “Who do we leave behind? Yeah. And is that something we’re willing to do? Can these people update and follow us? And it depends on the area of the world as well, right? Some people can’t easily, especially today with AI taking all of our graphics cards away, it’s so expensive to buy these new machines. So, it’s interesting, but it’s more of a challenge than it’s interesting for us at this time.”
In both situations, Richard and Cote are hyper aware of the ways in which their choices of how to continue Dead by Daylight into the future could potentially leave some of their audience in the dust, and they clearly want to avoid that as long and as much as they possibly can. So, sorry if you wanted a Dead by Daylight 2 – it’s not happening, but you can be content that Dead by Daylight itself will be around for a long time to come if Cote and Richard have anything to say about it.
I spoke to these two about other topics at GDC such as what makes a successful live service game, and what spinoff ideas they still really want to do. We’ll have the full Q&A up for you tomorrow, so keep your eyes on IGN.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
