10 years later, one of the only live-service horror games still standing learned how to win the "hellish" attention war: "We didn't create a live game. We created a game that sort of lived"

Dead by Daylight.

It doesn't matter if they're AAA or indie; third-person or first-person; dystopian, militaristic, or horror, live-service games keep meeting Highguard's fate – arriving in a gorgeous bubble of hype only to get popped and delisted. But not Dead by Daylight, whose developer Behaviour Interactive is now celebrating 10 years of the asymmetrical multiplayer's success at Game Developer Conference 2026, where creative director Dave Richard and head of partnership Mathieu Cote tells GamesRadar+ the secret.

The secret is… "Everything's tough. It's a hellish landscape of challenges," says Richard. Actually, that's not a secret, it's reality. Cote adds that, "A lot of people ask, 'What's the recipe? How do you create a live game?'" But "our recipe was, 'Don't do that.' Literally. We didn't create a live game. We created a game that sort of lived, and then we supported it, and we grew it."