Dead By Daylight is an online asymmetrical multiplayer game released back in 2016. Yet, the game is more popular than ever in 2021. And for the first time, Dead By Daylight just hit over 100k concurrent players on Steam, setting a new record for the online horror game.
Released back on June 14, 2016, Dead By Daylight has seen numerous updates and events over the years that have helped keep the game popular on Steam. But thanks to a huge five-year anniversary event, as well as a lower price during the ongoing Steam Summer Sale, the game’s popularity has skyrocketed. This all led to June 30, where the game hit 105,093 concurrent and active players according to data on SteamDB.
Earlier this year, Dead By Daylight devs found themselves in some controversy when live balance designer Ethan “Almo” Larson criticized fans who had been asking for years for a colorblind mode to be added to the game. At one point, during a stream on his personal Twitch channel, Larson derided a viewer for “blabbing about colorblind mode all the time.” In response to the community backlash that followed, Dead By Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive announced it was working on accommodations for colorblind players. The studio also distanced itself from Larson’s comments and apologized to its players.
“This is not indicative of the views of the team,” explained Behaviour in a Tweet. “We deeply apologize for any frustration or harm this may have caused.”
Another game on Steam, Team Fortress 2, also just broke a concurrent player record. Last week, Valve’s classed based shooter hit over 150k concurrent active players for the time ever. However, some questioned how many of these players were real humans and how many were fake (sometimes racist) bots. Team Fortress 2 has long struggled against bots flooding servers and matches. This isn’t the case with Dead By Daylight and it is likely that most of the 105k players who all logged on at the same time on June 30 were in fact real.