Forty-one killers, 53 survivors, 61 maps, and 70 million players later, Dead by Daylight continues to frighten and delight, building out what could arguably be called the metaverse of horror for a thriving and growing fanbase.

As impressive as what it's accomplished in its first ten years is, it’s where developer Behaviour Interactive hopes to take the asymmetric multiplayer survival horror game over the next ten years that is truly astounding.

Unhinged, seemingly impossible to adapt horror icons, a movie deal, expanding on the social side of being hunted or hunting, and overhauling the look and feel of the game are all on the table.

But back in 2016, Dead by Daylight was simply the latest in-house creation by Behaviour Interactive. A title, Behaviour’s co-founder and CEO Remi Racine recently said, that was expected to sell about 300,000 copies. 

“2025 was Dead by Daylight’s most successful year so far,” Racine said in a press release, wishing the game a happy tenth birthday. “We welcomed over six million new players and delivered record performance. This growth has continued into 2026 — over the last twelve months, the game’s revenues have increased by more than 50 percent.”

A House of Horror

Behaviour Interactive started life as Megatoons in 1992. After some corporate sales, a bit of time as Artificial Mind & Movement, and a name change, the company started to expand its production from mostly work-for-hire to more original games.

By the 2016 release of Dead by Daylight, the studio was still mostly known for its work with other developers and publishers. 

While Dead by Daylight has proven to be a massive success for Behaviour, Mathieu Cote, the company’s head of partnerships, said that it still does quite a bit of work-for-hire.

“We’re still mostly a work-for-hire studio in the sense that it’s the bread and butter. It’s mostly the backbone, that’s the better expression, because it is the safety thing. Work-for-hire, co-dev, all of these things will always be extremely secure kinds of work.”

And it’s that security that allows the studio to take chances, like it did with Dead by Daylight, and Deathgarden, another asymmetrical multiplayer game it released in 2018.

With Deathgarden, a first-person shooter, the studio was trying to capture the lightning in a bottle of Dead by Daylight. At the time, the studio wasn’t sure how long DBD would last, and thought it was a good idea to try and explore other titles as well, both for “safety and fun.”

“We have a lot of developers with really cool ideas that wanted to try something, and we had the luxury of being able to do so,” Cote said.

That appetite to try things other than Dead by Daylight still exists today, he added. You can see that in the recent acquisitions the company has made. In 2024, the company acquired Red Hook Studios, makers of Darkest Dungeon and its sequel. And earlier this year, the company bought The Fun Pimps, developers of 7 Days to Die.

“Clearly, horror is our sandbox,” he said. “We want to be the house of horror, but also these are established titles with loyal fan bases and existing revenue streams.”

The company now has about 1,300 employees globally, with about 400 working on Dead by Daylight and the rest are on work-for-hire. The big difference today on work-for-hire is that Behaviour can be much more selective about what they choose to work on.

Since the release of Dead by Daylight, the company has worked on everything from Warhammer, Halo, and Assassin’s Creed games to Monopoly and Worms titles.

They do try to avoid working on other horror, though.

“We try not to step into our own yard,” Cote said. “We want to develop games or publish games that are horror, but if someone else is publishing them, we'd rather do our own.

“We’ve had people come to us going, ‘Can you do an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game for us?’ You’re the best at it. ‘ And we go, ‘yeah, no, no, we’re not doing that.’ But if you want, like, a fun shooter, or if you want us to work on Civilization, Halo, or the new Gears of War? Sure, we’re the guys.”

Ten years of scares

The first two years of Dead by Daylight remain a blur to Cote.

“We had little expertise in running a live game,” he said. “DBD was not built as a live game. It was built as a game, and then we kept it alive. That’s sort of how it happened.”

Starbreeze Studios published the game from 2016 through 2018, at which point Behaviour Interactive bought the publishing rights. Over those first two years, the game also launched on consoles, and an in-game store went live.

“By year three or four, we had a much better sense of where it could go, and if it kept going and if we played our cards right, where we could end up,” Cote said. “But I don’t think anybody could have confidently said we would end up here. We sort of said in presentations that ‘the next five years are going to blow your mind,’ and they did, but I don’t think we were believing it as much as we made it sound like we did at the time.

“It was an ambition.”

This weekend, that ambition can’t help but feel met as the company celebrated the tenth anniversary of Dead by Daylight’s release with a public birthday bash in Montreal.

The event featured panels, meet and greets, gaming stations, an art exhibit, killer immersive areas, a Jason’s Cabin Escape Room, merch, food, and lots and lots of news.
The event kicked off with a recap of the game’s upcoming Chapter featuring Friday the Thirteenth’s Jason Voorhees, which hits on June 16. They also announced that Shane Wiigwaas, the game’s first indigenous Survivor, will be coming to Dead by Daylight: The Life Road on June 25.

Art the Clown, the gory, indie black, white, and often red clown of the Terrifier movies, is also set to arrive in The Fog this November. Other announcements include news of the August release of Dead by Daylight: Chorus of Sin, the game’s first-ever Chapter developed in collaboration with its community, and the coming of a Chapter adaptation of The Casting of Frank Stone, Dead by Daylight’s first-narrative driven standalone title, in 2027.

The team behind the game also gave fans a sneak preview of several upcoming Collections for the game. The Black Banquet Collection will give players some party-appropriate formal wear, while the Sunflesh Collection is desert-themed. 

A new Eddie Legendary Outfit for The Huntress, in honor of Iron Maiden’s 50th anniversary, was shown off, as was an Ice Nine Kills collection, inspired by the heavy metal band that debuted their new Dead by Daylight-themed track and music video at the event.

The Walking Dead Collection will add Glenn and Negan as Legendary Outfits for Rick, while a new Silent Hill Collection Legendary Outfit for Cheryl will transform her into Shimizu Hinako from SILENT HILL f, the psychological horror game by KONAMI.

Perhaps most exciting (for me) was the news that a Diablo Collection is hitting this October, and the game will be getting a Scooby-Doo Collection.

Killers and Survivors

While by most accounts, community is the secret sauce to Dead by Daylight’s thriving success, the constant stream of new killers and survivors, either created by the team or plucked from famous works of horror, is the game’s bloody backbone.

But I was curious how the team decided what to include. Putting aside Dead by Daylight’s original creations, typically drawn from world mythology and ghost stories, the horror genre has a movie history dating back to the early 1900s, and every year we see more and more creations pop up, sometimes grabbing the zeitgeist, as with Sinners, Weapons, or this year’s Obsession.

 So why Art the Clown?

While Damien Leone’s psychotic black and white-faced clown has been making a killing in the Terrifier movies, he’s still the product of indie, low-budget horror.

Art first showed up in two shorts, 2008’s The 9th Circle and 2011's Terrifier, before making his feature-film debut in the horror anthology All Hallows’ Eve in 2013.

It wasn’t really until the 2016 Terrifier movie that he started to grab some mainstream attention.

“One of the things that I find the most fascinating about Terrifier is that it did not exist when we launched Dead by Daylight,” Cote said. “But today, by many lists, it’s considered part of the legends of horror. And so it’s really interesting to have been there before it existed, and now today it’s considered a part of history. So it felt right to bring him in.”

There are, of course, many other considerations when considering a piece of horror for Dead by Daylight. Is the character visually striking? Is it unique in the sense that the developers can build some cool gameplay mechanics around it?

“We want to be able to portray the character in a way that will be an homage to the source material, but also it needs to add gameplay mechanics that players will find interesting,” Cote said. 

Jason is a great example of this. While arguably one of the most famous killers in horror history, the studio launched Dead by Daylight with their own take on his style of killing: The Trapper.

“He is our homage to Jason, the guy with the mask and the big lump of steel,” he said. “So it was important to find the right twist to put on it to showcase some aspects of the character that are unique to it.”

The same was true for Art.

The decisions are also driven in part by the community and regular surveys the company puts out to see who they want in the game, which can have as many as 100,000 responses. And sometimes, it’s just a killer or survivor that someone on the team wants in the game.

Take the Cenobite from Hellraiser.

“I fought a lot to get the Cenobite in the game,” Cote said. “Younger people that I was dealing with on the team were like, ‘Who’s that guy? He’s not relevant. I’ve seen his face somewhere, but I’ve never seen the movies.”

The team ended up bringing him to the game anyway and that seemingly drove a lot of players to go watch the Hellraiser movies.

The team also only releases about two licensed characters a year to the game, so they have to be selective. 

With Art and Terrifier, the community call for his inclusion was so strong it was an obvious choice, said Jose Ramos, VP and executive producer on Dead by Daylight.

While the game is best known for its growing list of famous and infamous killers, the developers also sometimes take big chances on what to include in the game. For instance, in 2024, they decided to release a Chapter based on Dungeons & Dragons, not the first thing that pops into your head when you’re thinking of horror.

It turns out that isn’t even the craziest idea the team has discussed.

When I asked if Dead by Daylight could ever see something like Jaws in the game, where the map was an ocean with set pieces like a beach and a sinking ship, they didn’t say “no”.

“Oh yeah!” Cote responded enthusiastically. 

“Oh, we’ve thought about going even more creative,” Ramos added.

Cote said that the game’s creative director has discussed how to bring two Stephen King book creations -- Cujo (a rabies-infested Saint Bernard) and Christine (a possessed car) -- into the game.

“So that's a little out there,” Cote said. “Jaws has been discussed at length internally. How could we make it happen? The great thing is that because of the way we built Dead by Daylight, the way the universe works — it's a nightmare — it doesn't need to make perfect sense. It's okay for things to be weird. You could be running around and feeling like you're in molasses because you're underwater. It doesn't matter. You don't need to breathe. You don't need any of that. You could be chased by a shark. Like there are ways we could do that, I think. And especially because every single killer can sort of bring his own rules, right? When you play a game against a certain killer, the game is slightly different. The rules are slightly different, and we could push that. We could make a killer where the rules are very different. 

“As long as it's fun to play, and as long as it's fun to play against, it'd probably be okay.”

Ramos added that something else he’s been thinking about recently is how horror comedy hasn’t really been represented yet in Dead by Daylight.

“It has a little bit, in some aspects, but something we think will be really, really fun, especially during events, is if something very, very cute has a horrific version. I think that’s something which we will mine eventually.”

Dead by Daylight 2036

The 10-year birthday bash for the game also touched on where the game will be heading as it evolves over the next ten years.

Perhaps the most impactful will be a massive visual overhaul targeted for rollout in 2027. The update will introduce new character model reworks with expanded animation capabilities, alongside realistic facial animations that bring greater expression and nuance to characters. Maps and environments will also receive significant upgrades, including enhanced lighting, shading, and textures, improved Fog and Mist effects, a stronger Entity presence, and the addition of dynamic weather systems featuring light rain, heavy rain, and storms. New voice lines for all applicable original characters will additionally be recorded and introduced over time as part of the initiative.

Dead by Daylight will also be getting a wider selection of new Game Modes over the coming years, including a 1v1 Mode and a Zombie Mode.

The team also announced that the game will be officially opened up to curated modding. The team is currently working on a suite of tools to put in players’ hands sometime next year that will give them everything they need to cook up and share new Maps, Modes, and everything in between, according to the company.

As the game continues to break records, it’s drawn a lot of attention from outside video games, leading to board games, comic series, and, coming full circle, an upcoming film adaptation. 

The film, which was first announced in 2023, is being produced by Jason Blum and James Wan through Blumhouse Productions and Atomic Monster. Earlier this year, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (The Conjuring 2, Insidious: Out of the Further) and Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Maniac) were hired to write the script. 

On Sunday, Behaviour Interactive Executive Vice President Stephen Mulrooney and Blum announced that the screenplay is already completed and that Thordur Palsson (The Damned) will be directing the film, which is coming out at the end of 2027.

Palsson might seem an unusual pick for bringing such an unwieldy franchise to film — the Icelandic director has only made one movie to date — but Cote said that he came highly recommended by Blum and Wan.

“I think that there is a very strong wave right now of brand new people with very, very short resumes that are given the opportunity to do something cool in horror and that they deliver. We’ve seen it quite a few times recently with big movies that made it. So it feels very exciting, and also scary.

Palsson “doesn’t have a large resume, but he certainly knows how to make people uncomfortable, how to create a mood, how to show you scenes that are intense. And the thing is, we have a really cool script, and we need someone who is going to make this story intense and scary.”
 

Metaverse of horror

Dead by Daylight had a brief moment in the Summer Game Fest show earlier this month, but it wasn’t to announce anything, not really. Instead, it was a short video meant to celebrate the idea of Dead by Daylight and invite people to the stream of their birthday bash.

I saw it as a sort of video mood board for the game.

Cote said it was meant to be a reminder to people that, beyond everything else, their game is meant to be frightening.

“It’s fun, you can run around and see all those silly things together, but this is about horror. We’re also going to scare the shit out of you. That’s very important for you to remember. That and that it’s fun.”

The homage of dark horror tropes in the one-minute video, featuring a cabin in the woods, abandoned houses, rivulets of blood, and the sing-songy whisper of happy birthday, made me think about how, perhaps without realizing it, Behaviour Interactive is creating its own dark take on the metaverse. A place populated entirely by nightmares pulled from urban legend, mythology, books, television, games, and movies.

I asked if the team ever thinks about that, and what they think the implications that might have on the game.

Ramos said it reminds him of the respect that the team has to pay to characters they’re throwing together in their game.

“I think one of the superpowers of Dead by Daylight is this ability to be very respectful to the license, to the wish of the licensor, but also to the identity of the brand and what it represents in the eyes of the people who grew up to love those licenses,” he said. “So I think it comes with a certain form of responsibility to make sure that we just don't add names and we don't check boxes, but we respect each and every one of them.”

Cote added that he doesn’t think there are many games that do what they do.

“That takes characters and brings them in a way that we're folding them in like you're making a soufflé, right?” he said. “They cannot just become a skin on existing stuff in our game. This is the place where you can live the fantasy of being Pinhead. Like nowhere else can you do that. And you're Pinhead chasing the kids from Stranger Things. And all of this needs to be coherent and work within the world. We need to create a full character and gameplay mechanics around it, a mood and intention, and even the alternate outfits, all of which are unique.”

With all of that created, and a growing community that loves all of these aspects of horror, it almost feels like a waste not to allow people to do more than play through the game together. I asked if the team had ever considered broadening out the experience so people could interact with one another in an environment that wasn’t the chase-and-hide gameplay of Dead by Daylight.

‘Like a lobby or something like the party islands in Fortnite?” Cote asked.

Ramos said that was one of the original intentions for the game. To have a 3D lobby and be able to be more interactive.

“The only thing I can say,” Ramos added, “ is eventually in this game, it will be a thing. We do want the social space. We want that element of interaction.”

Ramos said one of the things that blew his mind when he joined the company in 2022 was seeing the numbers behind Dead by Daylight and how social the game is.

“The percentage of people playing with at least one friend is insane,” he said. “I’ve never seen that before. It’s crazy. So for sure, that’s something that we want to push, not to create something which doesn’t match our identity, but something which pushes the immersion. I think it’s something which can be really, really fun, and that’s something we are exploring.”

Pick up Dead by Daylight today on Epic Games Store.