Behaviour Digital is best known for its asymmetrical survival horror multiplayer game, Dead by Daylight, which launched on PC on June 2016 and a year later, it made its way to PS4 and Xbox One. Since Dead by Daylight’s release, its popularity has been increasing dramatically, instead of, well, dying. With Dead by Daylight recently being featured as a PlayStation Plus (PS Plus) title in August 2018, and thousands of streamers streaming the game on a daily basis, Dead by Daylight is far from a dead online multiplayer game. But, how does Behaviour Digital continue to put Dead by Daylight in the spotlight?

During TwitchCon, one of our staff writers, Brad Crespo, had the chance to sit down with Mathieu Côté, game director at Behaviour Digital and producer of Dead by Daylight, Filip Ivanović, Dead by Daylight’s art director, and Behaviour Digital’s Senior PR Manager, Marie Claude Bernard, to get some insight on Dead by Daylight’s success, what’s next for the title, and Behaviour Digital’s other games.

BC: Considering the Halloween holiday, is Dead by Daylight seeing an increase in players across all platforms?

Mathieu Côté: Dead by Daylight has continued to get a substantial increase in players ever since the game released in June 2016. Right now, it has 60,000 concurrent PC players, which is incredible. For PS4, having Dead by Daylight as a PS Plus title really boosted the player base dramatically. I would say that because of PS Plus, the PS4 player base has quadrupled.

I think the Halloween holiday has also helped increase the number of players for all platforms, but Dead by Daylight has just been becoming more and more popular day after day. Because of the game’s popularity in Japan — and because Japanese players have requested this — we will release a physical edition of Dead by Daylight for PS4 and Xbox One exclusively in Japan.

BC: With other titles having similar one versus four (1 v. 4) gameplay systems, what do you think it is about Dead by Daylight that keeps players returning? Because big developers have tried this formula and it just didn’t work for them.

MC: The characters in Dead by Daylight is what makes the game so special. Each character just has such a unique personality, and fans are just connected to all of the characters. The characters stories really draw in the player. Several players have done fanart for the characters because they love them so much.

Twitch streamers have also really enjoyed playing Dead by Daylight. Scary games, in general, are popular to stream because there’s a lot of things that can happen, which makes streams of scary games like Dead by Daylight so entertaining to watch. It’s because of this that Dead by Daylight is consistently one Twitch’s top streamed games.

Also, we went outside of the competitive space for Dead by Daylight. We want Dead by Daylight to be enjoyable for anyone that plays it — and it is. Those playing for the first time can easily pick and play it and just have fun — while hardcore players can really dive deep into the game’s mechanics and play a little more competitively.

BC: I’m sure a lot of players give their opinions for what the direction of the game should take, how do you address these suggestions and are they ever implemented or do you internally already have a good idea of what you want in the game?

MC: Suggestions are completely okay, and we make sure to take all of the feedback that we receive. We’re okay talking to them [players], and on the design side, we’re very, very close to the community. We have Discord channels where some of our hardcore players are in there every day talking to the design team and giving their feedback.

And then on the art side — fanart is always amazing, and some fans will make something and go, “Oh, this is a new outfit for Jake — this is what we would like to see”, and a lot of them are interesting and really, really cool. What we’ve done in the past — in the first year, actually — there was a guy in Ukraine, I think, who drew a fantastic weapon and helmet for The Trapper, and he posted it on the [Dead by Daylight] Steam page. We actually contacted him and bought it from him, and we put it in the game. It was excellent because he was so thorough with it.

We’ve also gotten opinions on the game from Twitch streams, especially in our own streams. Two weeks ago, we had a Twitch stream that was one about the lore in Dead By Daylight, and we were answering a lot of in-depth questions about it. During that stream, someone asked about the relationship between The Trapper and Meg, and we were like, “they’re not together — there’s nothing there!” *laughs* Some people on Twitter were surprised to hear that! But, we love how passionate players are about the game, and we encourage fans to share all their thoughts and opinions with us.

BC: What’s it like trying to balance a game like this so one side doesn’t feel too empowered or is the idea to keep the killer as powerful as possible?

MC: Oh, it can be a nightmare. *laughs*

Filip Ivanović: It’s a never-ending process that literally never, ever stops. It’s almost like a chemistry project where you’re trying to figure out what mixes well together.

MC: It can be difficult because every three months we bring in a new Killer, that comes with a new powerset, and three new perks that hopefully will change the whole game. We also bring in a new Survivor, with three new perks. Every player out there can combine all these new perks in different ways with all of the already existing perks — that can work against every other combination. Just the numbers for everything in the game can just be a little tough to figure out.

Fortunately, we have a highly active community, so people will test all of the new features and try to break them. We listen to our community very closely, and we also have a big team now of just data analysts that look at how people are playing and how things are going.

There are always three ways to go about learning what to tweak. First, there’s feedback from the community, which is so important, but some players might not understand the new mechanics and have to take the time to play differently. Then you have the pure data that we get, but data is nothing if it’s not properly put into context — which we’re getting better at that. And the third one is your gut. We’ve been making the game pretty much with us going, “Yeah, I think this is going to be good!” We mostly make good decisions on that front so we need to keep trusting each other that we’re going to continue doing good things. So, those are three different ways we look to sort of calibrate how to balance the game.

BC: How do you get community feedback for Dead by Daylight?

MC: Official forums. On our website, we have a lot of forums, which people put a lot of info in. Reddit, while it can be filled with just about anything you can imagine, it does help us get great information. The Discord channel is a big community, and basically, nobody on that channel has less than 1000 [playtime] hours in Dead by Daylight. So it’s filled with people who have played A LOT.

When you think about streamers, especially those that play the game exclusively, they play for eight hours a day. Their feedback is extremely valuable, too. But with these hardcore players, we always have to remember that they represent a small percentage of the population — most players will not have intimate knowledge of the game and a high level of skill — so we want to make sure all players are enjoying the game.

BC: Do you feel like a Dead by Daylight sequel is necessary or what do have planned for the future of the title?

MC: So the team has grown so much, I mean we started almost three years ago with about 35 people and now there are about over 100 people on the team — and we keep hiring. We’re just starting. We were saying that we were having our best year so far, but the month of October has broken records.

We’ve talked about a sequel — and maybe someday it’ll happen — but right now, it makes no sense for us to make one… to stop focusing on what we are doing. Obviously, we’re going to keep innovating, keep making Dead by Daylight better. Maybe in two years from now, there’s going to be a huge graphics upgrade or something, but we see at least… five or seven years for Dead by Daylight before we stop. It’s a live game and we’re going to keep putting our love into it.

BC: This is kind of a personal question, but what’s up with Naughty Bear?

MC: We both we’re on Naughty Bear!

FI: Yeah, we were!

MC:Yeah, we both did voice-overs for it, and I was one of the producers for the game and Filip was the art tech lead for it. We actually have a lot of members on our team now that worked on Naughty Bear. That game is like the ancestor [of Dead by Daylight], and we were kicking around the idea for it for such a long time to make a game where you play as the villain in a horror movie. Naughty Bear was funny, just pure funny.

I mean you could grab anything and grab someone and barbecue them, throw them, put them on a bamboo stick, anything you want really. We could go really super far in the graphic nature because, you know, when you get hurt in the game, fluff comes out — it’s just a teddy bear.

You probably haven’t heard the last of Naughty Bear because it’s an IP that we own, and we had an external publisher for it, but the IP is still ours. It didn’t get in as many hands as we’d like, but the Wiki for the game is surprisingly still very active. There are still a few hidden things in Naughty Bear that have not been found.

Naughty Bear was a special project for us. We’re focusing on Dead by Daylight and Deathgarden right now — which is currently available as a Steam Early Access title. Deathgarden didn’t get the reception we wanted, so right now, we’re changing things for Deathgarden before it’s official release.

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Dead by Daylight is available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Behaviour Digital recently released the Shattered Bloodline DLC for Dead by Daylight. Shattered Bloodline is a brand-new chapter for Dead by Daylight, which includes a new map, a new Killer, a new Survivor, and an exclusive item for the new Survivor. Screenshots of Shattered Bloodline were included throughout this article.