Sometimes all you can do is take a struggling project back to the drawing board. Unfortunately for Dead Island 2 publisher Deep Silver, that's a decision that meant adding eight years and millions of dollars to the sequel's development time (via GamesIndustry.biz).
In a talk at British game dev conference Develop:Brighton, former Deep Silver head of comms Martin Wein says the call to delay and overhaul Dead Island 2 was the right one, because releasing the version of the game that had been developed for its original 2015 release date would have flushed the whole series down the toilet.
Asked at the end of his Develop:Brighton talk called "Product/Market Fit – What Does it Mean and How Do We Achieve it?" Wein was asked whether market or player research had ever saved a troubled project he'd worked on. Wein said player research was crucial for the eventual success of Dead Island 2, but it meant he and the development team "caused about an eight-year product delay."
The development of Dead Island 2 was infamously messy. If you can still recall events from the Before Time, you might remember its slickly-produced announcement trailer that aired at E3 in the distant past of 2014. If you do, you may have grown increasingly confused when it launched not in the original 2015 release window, but in April 2023.
According to Wein, that eight year delay was the product of "horrific" player feedback during playtests in the weeks after the big E3 reveal. Despite the devs making their best effort to tinker the game into something more enjoyable, a second round of playtests produced similar reactions, with player feedback indicating "this is not fun, this is not engaging, this does not feel like the Dead Island that I played."
Based on what Wein called "a clear divide between player expectation and motivation and the direction that game development had taken," Deep Silver junked the early version of Dead Island 2. "We could have, at that point, put out a shit game," Wein said. "It might have made some money, but it would have killed the franchise."
In the following years, Deep Silver shifted Dead Island 2's development—originally being handled by Spec Ops: The Line developer Yager—to Sumo Digital. In 2019, Deep Silver brought the sequel's development in-house, shifting it a final time to its internal developers at Dambuster Studios.
It's worth noting that, in 2020, that original version of Dead Island 2 leaked into the wild. I've only got foggy recollections of the 15 hours Steam tells me I spent with the first game, but the gameplay footage from that leaked alpha looks pretty similar to what I can recall. It's hitting zombies with machetes that you taped junk onto. Maybe I'm not an expert.
Yager managing director Timo Ullmann told GamesIndustry.biz in 2015 that the cancellation of its version of Dead Island 2 was "a catastrophic event on so many different levels" that led to the closure of Yager Productions, a division the company had created specifically for developing the game.
Regardless, Wein says shooting the Dead-Island-2-that-was with the silver bullet of market research was the right call.
"I think at that point Deep Silver did the right thing, and Dead Island 2 was a commercial success in the end," Wein said. "Because they took that step, and they said that we need to make a game that fits for the player."
While we weren't particularly impressed in our Dead Island 2 review, it's hard to argue with the results of rebooting its development. Once its eight-year delay was up, Dead Island 2 sold more than 2 million copies in its first month, becoming the best game launch in Deep Silver's history.
Dead Island 2 is available now on Steam.
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