Dead by Daylight has fifty million players and now a boardgame adaptation

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The scarily popular online slasher is coming up to eight years old.

Dead By Daylight Pyramid Head
(Image credit: Behaviour Interactive)

Dead by Daylight is one of those perennially popular games that rarely seems to make the news: probably because developer Behaviour Interactive got it more-or-less right and players love the game as it is. Nevertheless it remains constantly active with new DLC and promotions and now, roughly eight years after its initial release, has hit the considerable milestone of 50 million players.

The developer announced the news with a short gif that bounces off the double Spider-Man meme.

Dead by Daylight is great fun and surprisingly inventive, one of those games all-encompassing enough to become some folks' main poison. There's no shortage of paid DLC expanding its roster either, though the game sensibly allows all players to play alongside any DLC characters and maps, regardless of what they own.

The news of 50 million players came alongside the launch of a Kickstarter for a boardgame version of DBD: after only a few days it has already, unsurprisingly, sailed past its initial target of £190,000 and currently sits on just over £263,000.

The boardgame is being created by Level 99 Games, a company that's delivered dozens of past kickstarter projects, and is a 3-5 player asymmetrical experience patterned after DBD's core mechanics. So you have a bunch of survivors, who have challenges like turning generators back on, while a killer prowls around and tries to... well, kill them.

The below video gives a primer on the boardgame.

The boardgame also comes with a tie-in promotion for some currency in the videogame: enter the code DBDTHEBOARDGAME through the in-game store for 200,000 Bloodpoints.

It's funny how, since Left4Dead, there have been so many high-profile attempts at making asymmetrical monster-vs-human games the next big hit: it seems like only yesterday Back4Blood was the latest contender. Dead by Daylight wasn't a smash hit out of the gate but has quietly grown and grown over the years, and now looms large over the competition.

Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."