In June this year, Behaviour Interactive’s Dead By Daylight will celebrate ten years of release: quite the feat for an asymmetrical multiplayer game that was designed with no thoughts of live service or roadmaps. The core of the game remains the same as it was at launch, more or less, but everything around that experience has been carefully built out by Behaviour over the years, and at the time of writing around 50,000 players are enjoying some grisly horror on Steam (and it’s also available on multiple consoles).
PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston had the chance to sit down at GDC with Behaviour’s Dave Richard, senior creative director, and Mathieu Cote, head of partnerships, and when he opened by remarking on those ten years, Cote immediately shot back, “It’s crazy.”
“We’re one of these stories that we arrived with the right format at the right moment, with the right people, with the right collaborator, and then with the right players and community,” says Richard. “And then a whole heaping pile of luck on top of that,” adds Cote.
“The thing also is that we didn’t build this as a game as a service,” says Cote. “That was not the intention. It sort of became that over the years, we turned the game that was live into a live game, which wasn’t really a thing or certainly wasn’t the goal at the time: we just made a game ready to walk away.
“But it worked, and people wanted more, and so we gave them more, and we kept at it, and we kept at it, and we built on it. So it’s sort of a trick question, because if we were to try to recreate the same thing, we’d probably fail: we didn’t intend to do what turned out to happen, and therefore starting with that intention would automatically lead somewhere else.”
Cote says the plan initially was just to release DBD and then move back onto the everyday job at Behaviour, “which was making games for other people.” But it very quickly became clear that plan had to change. “Literally within the first few days we realized no, no, we have to stick at this,” says Cote. “We can’t dismantle the team and move on.”
“Back in the day, battle passes, cosmetic stores, stuff like that was barely starting, so it wasn’t part of our deal,” says Richard. “We were not experiencing that either. It’s through the years that we’ve learned, seen other game studios do it as well, and learn from them, and learn from people that we hired exactly for that.”
Cote adds that DBD’s in-game store didn’t arrive until the game’s third year, and the battle pass in year four. Point being that DBD had that chance to grow and change and adapt over a long period, a luxury that many games don’t have.
“One of the stats I was reading lately is that probably something like 40 to 50% of the hours spent gaming are spent on games that are four plus years old,” says Cote. “If people play the games that they like that they’ve been sharing with their friends for years, that’s what they do. We’re lucky that we’re one of those, right?”
“We managed to get into that niche and we were the first one there successful enough,” says Richard. “Now we’ve built kind of a legacy. So yeah, absolutely there to stay forever.”
Have you planned another 10 years?
The question has barely been asked before Cote and Richard respond in unison: “At least!” The pair collapse in laughter, joking that you’d never be able to tell they work together. As for what those ten years might hold, however, they want to save the surprises for an anniversary presentation.
“There’s a big party in Montreal, we’re doing a big celebration,” says Cote. “It’s our first actual physical gathering for the 10th Anniversary. We’ll be able to drop a lot of surprises but for now, we don’t have any.”
“Oh, there’s this one killer that does the thing,” jokes Richard. “It’s really cool, that’s a great headline. The guy with the thing is coming to DBD, breaking news!”
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