It lives in the first 50 slots of the Steam Top Sellers list, it hit its all-time peak of 120,717 players only 9 months ago, and it manages to tumble along with this healthy momentum despite being a 10-year-old asymmetrical survival horror multiplayer. For other developers, that genre marker might as well be a toe tag. But not for Dead by Daylight.
The problem with competitors is "they're not good enough," head of partnership Mathieu Cote jokes to GamesRadar+ at Game Developers Conference 2026. Or, he's at least half joking, as creative director Dave Richard adds, "We were there first!"
More soberly, Richard says, "At the same time, we had the Friday the 13th game." The cursed asymmetrical multiplayer Friday the 13th: The Game released a year after Dead by Daylight, in 2017, and it took a few spirited gulps of air before the franchise creator's legal dispute over Jason Voorhees officially rendered it comatose in 2018. It was made completely inaccessible in 2024.
2022's Evil Dead: The Game and 2023's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre – also major asymmetrical horror games – met similar fates. Evil Dead got delisted from storefronts in 2025, and, while Texas Chain Saw is still playable, it's no longer receiving updates.
"We knew, strategically, this is a hard space to create games," Richard remembers thinking about Dead by Daylight's genre, even in 2016. Now, Cote says, "We don't have the vanity to say that we figured everything out. There's a couple of choices we made that, in retrospect, we can see that they were the right choices." He thinks it helps that Dead by Daylight players can choose their own role in a match – whether they want to be a Killer pursuer, or a member of a team of Survivors trying to escape – instead of automatically sorting them into a position.
"It's not a reason [similar games] failed," he says, "but it's a factor." Other asymmetrical horror games are also usually "tied to a specific license," Cote acknowledges, "which is great, because it allowed them to really delve much deeper into a universe that people know and love. But it's also exceedingly restrictive." Dead by Daylight, in comparison, contains untold amounts of content collaborations and original stories, allowing for situations where Steve from Stranger Things is getting stabbed in the back by one-foot-tall Chucky. This makes it a ridiculous monster, but also "self-feeding," Richard says.
"We figured out a few good ways to do certain things so that people will do it even better next time," Cote summarizes. "Just… not just yet."
