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DbD total victory over other games in the genre
VHS dubbed by streamers as the dbd killer, latter changed to a competitor, player count declining rapidly went from 5k to 500-1300 players maximum. Probably will cease development soon.
Evil dead the game shutdown one of the US servers due to lack of players. Others expected to follow. Only EU and US server remain
Home Sweet Home Survive shutting down EU and US server.
Spirit Detective lost all of the global playerbase.
Propnight peak player count is 300 players daily.
So DbD is the king of the genre, no competition.
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I doubt VHS will cease development. It’s on,y major issue atm is the lack of monster players compared to teen which was an issue dbd has faced for quite awhile until now
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VHS is really puzzling. They had such a long beta with consistent feedback about monster being boring and the alarming frequency of long drawn out stalemates. Did absolutely nothing about it, launched early access, and went radio silent since.
I really don't understand why so many asymm devs think players want to play 20-30 minute games when the king of the genre (DbD) has games regularly end in 7-15. You create so many self-inflicted queue issues when games last 20+ minutes and you have a population imbalance (looking at you, VHS).
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What even is Spirit Detective? Gotta look into that one.
otherwise, the Texas Chainsaw game is gonna release soon and looks actually promising from artstyle and gameplay? But.. eh.. DbD is obviously doing something right which is lacking with these others..
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I stopped listening to people saying DBD would die when F13 The Game, but especially Last Year and Hide Or Die completely flopped. I don't see VHS being any different. Although to be fair to F13 - it was fun, but unfortunately had licensing issues.
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Texas won't belong in the genre since will be 3 vs 4 players!!!
It's closer to midnight ghost hunt which was 4 vs 4, btw player count is 90 players at peak times lol.
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Yeah but unlike dbd which was fun as killer even when underpowered, there is nothing like that for monster in VHS, its just boring extremely so, not unbalanced.
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I don’t think the genre is strictly 1v4/many though, as long as it’s asymmetrical?
i mean otherwise you could also make the arguments the others games aren’t the same genre because the ‚survivor‘ side can fight back/kill the killer and all.. doesn’t need to be a hard copy..
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There's a bit more to this.
See - DbD is to APvP games what World of Warcraft was to MMOs. It's not just that it's good, it's that it has years and years of polish and content, which is difficult to match.
VHS, while it had some great ideas, feels janky and unrefined.
Evil Dead had potential, but it's a single franchise and doomed itself by being Epic exclusive.
Eventually, one of two things will happen.
- DbD's devs will get complacent, and a competitor will emerge as with World of Warcraft.
- DbD will peak and gradually decline.
There's nothing wrong with this, and right now - while I certainly don't agree with all of their decisions and design philosophies, BHVR are constantly improving DbD and it's going to be hard to beat.
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Even if another asymm comes out and it ticks all the right boxes, as well balanced as possible, fun to play as the survivor equivalent, fun to play as the killer equivalent, enjoyable to watch (for growth by streaming), decent queue times decent matchmaking etc etc...
I still don't see how it could ever compete with the variety dbd has. Especially games focused on one franchise, like playing as Jason is cool and getting to play as slightly different Jasons is nice enough you'll never get to play a game where the demogorgon chases characters from resident evil and silent hill around lampkin lane
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It's a shame because I really enjoyed Evil Dead.
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One problem is that when a competitor arrives on the scene, some people immediately champion it as the game that will topple DBD and kill it off, rather than just treat it as a separate game. Of course, there will be comparisons, but those games cannot grow at a reasonable, manageable rate because everyone has jumped in, hyping it up, and then - as with all games like this in their infancy - there will be rough edges, but players would have had such high hopes that they feel the game let them down and interest wains.
These games are there as competition, and I hope more come along to do well. But if they are always heavily hyped then it leads for disappointment, regardless of how good it is. There won't be a game for some time that will "kill" DBD - only games that will make their name and try to succeed for itself.
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Werewolf makes me snooze
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Apparently the VHS Discord is/was full of ranting about DBD. When I heard that I felt like it didn't bode well for the game. I don't think it's a bad game by any means at all, I think it stands alone just fine, but when the player base is seemingly drawn together out of mutual spite towards another game then its not a good sign imo
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VHS encourages all the survivors to use voice communication and map pings, and then wonders why the games feel absolutely miserable as killer.
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I hope this isn't being presented as a "victory" of some sort. It's terrible for the marketplace and the biggest reason why BVHR just keeps making changes every week.
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The biggest problem with DBD is SWF. Always has been and always will be. It's a problem in other games too but they have built in voice chat. DBD's entire premise was to see if 4 STRANGERS could work together with limited communication and escape. It was never intended to be anything else. I wish there was an option to play either without perks for everyone or ensure all 4 survivors aren't connected. All of these changes do help killers but none of it is helpful to solo players.
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Yeah, Evil Dead has potential to be a game I might like but I played it a couple times and didn’t really get into it. 🤷♂️ It’s a shame it hasn’t found a way to catch on so far.
VHS didn’t interest me though, it looks more like an Overwatch style game than a DbD type. Not that Overwatch is a bad game but if I want to play that type of action shooter I’d still be playing Overwatch.
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That I agree with. Monster is a role I don’t think they can fix tbh. It’s boring whether you win or lose
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I don't think you can compare DbD to ED. They might both be asymmetrical games, but ED is the polar opposite of DbD
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I hope VHS can resolve its difficulties but, realistically, no game that's out there will 'kill' DbD. As @StarLost mentioned, DbD is highly polished with lots of experience and development behind it. A different asymmetrical game can still be successful as gamers can and do play different games but DbD has too much going for it to be dethroned by anything less than falling into complacency.
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Evolve Stage 2 is starting to see an uptick in popularity, but only a couple thousand players. Considering it came out in 2015, and its base died fast in only a year and a half due to shady dealings by the publisher designed to milk as much money as possible from the gamers via DLC packs, I'm actually surprised about its current (if meager) rise from the dead.
Still don't see it making enough of a comeback to compete with DbD though.
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Imo, the people who jumps on the dbd-killer bandwagon does more harm than good in keeping healthy competition alive, it should never be about replacing something that already exist, but to have something that can co-exist with one another.
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I wouldn’t call it a king, cause Assymetrical games like this are HARD AS HELL to balance while also keeping it fun, most of the game that did die either couldn’t find a way to balance it enough to keep it fun, had poor advertisement, or takes way too long to change some things…sometimes all of the above even
DBD still holds ground as it does cause the variety the game has makes it feel different to play than the other games so unless another assymetrical game releases that actually is just people surviving against licensed killers, expect dbd to have the high ground for awhile
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I wouldn't call DBD the king of the genre the one thing that made so many people play it was that playing survivor was easy for so long compared to other games.
Like someone said hide or die flopped and is was because of a few reasons but one of the biggest is that the devs changed the game from LMS which is what people backed on kickstarter to a DBD copy because so many people complained that it wasn't fun getting killed then that was it there was no stages just death on first time, they couldn't loop the killer they had to hide from it yet the name of the game was hide or die. so when it came out in EA people didn't like it because DBD was better and hide or die was just a copy.
F13th is a great fun game in my view but apart from the legal issues once they get the balance of the game in a good spot people found playing survivor was a lot harder then DBD, if people think solo q is bad in DBD then they should try F13th where once Jason finds you your pretty much dead and that could be 1 min into the game, to escape you can do it solo but chances are low you really need to work as a team to get out. I watched a group of DBD streamers try it a couple months ago when it was Friday the 13th and yer they found it fun but also a lot harder then DBD when it came to playing survivor.
So for people that wanted a easy mode when they played survivor DBD was the game to go to as it allowed that until the last patch and look at the outcry from survivors because the game wasn't as easy anymore.
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I've played VHS twice, and I didn't enjoy it.
...but I wouldn't write it out just yet.
If the devs of VHS nurse their game, it can easily grow into something far more popular.
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I started playing killer in 2020 - and preferred it to survivor then.
Yes, the role had a lot of problems, but it was far more engaging than survivor.
F13 was fun, but it was a mess. Infinite stuns, trolls, hackers...plus, I found that it got old really fast.
VHS is just so...janky.
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Did you ever play it after they buffed Jason so when he got rage only like 3 things could stun him at that point, that was a lot of fun then having a group around you trying to stun you and you just standing there slashing them all to death lol.
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Yup. You could still use the car, in conjunction with other stuns to basically keep him disabled forever.
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The game's just balanced around survivors doing other things. Being scared of the killer, hiding, looking in chests, doing dull totems. The problem is, once survivors don't do that, the game goes way too quick in their favor.
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One thing that I've noticed is that every game except for DBD allows you to kill the big bad in some way. Friday, VHS, Spirit Detective, HSH:S, Evil Dead (I'll admit I don't know about Propnight) all allow you to kill the monster in some way, while all DBD allows you to do is stun, blind, and run away.
I don't know if that means anything, and correlation =/= causation, but it does seem kinda interesting
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The devs have repeatedly stated that SWF and KYF were both intended features from the start, however beta players preferred KYF to SWF so that feature was prioritised for hard launch.
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afaik Propnight is actually a pretty heavy DbD clone except for the survs being able to turn into props.
but yeah, I guess for me personally this is one of the main reasons why those other games didn’t seem too interesting.. (among other things)
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Evil Dead had potential, but it has massive balancing issues and a bad progression system. It's really bad for new players especially. Like you think killer was bad in DBD, imagine having to lose ten or more games just to stand a chance at winning. Also the demons don't have enough variety. Dbd succeeded because matches are varied, new players tend to be on somewhat even footing, and the progression system is addictive. Variety is crucial.
I think another assym game could succed, but I think they'd need to go a root other than horror. You can't compete with the licenses bhvr has. But to succeed you need new players to be on even footing, you need a good progression system, and most of all matches must be unpredictable.
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I don't even think you need a progression system in this genre. It's something every developer has jedi mind tricked themselves into thinking they need. They're pvp games. Imagine Overwatch if you had to grind to unlock things on every hero. Nobody bats an eye about the lack of grind in that game because it's a pointless thing to have in a pvp only game. I can't imagine that someone would play the game only when they're weak and need to unlock things, and then stop playing when they finally have everything they want to have.
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There just no competition in this genre. That's why dbd can remain so medicore.
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I really want VHS to succeed, the characters they made are charming, the aesthetic is good (basically Fortnite meets 80s/90s b horror movies) and the cosmetics are good (I hate their rotating store format however but hey it's a free2play game), but so far they don't seem to be responding to criticisms regarding the monster role. They need to overhaul it immediately. The monster role is extremely beginner unfriendly and will turn off potential casual players this game will need to keep it's head above water. The queue times speak for themselves.
Doesn't help that whenever criticisms about the monster role is brought up the community is quick to shut it down "Get gud" "Your probably just way too used to DBD! Monster isn't the power role here!" "Skill issue" "Just keep playing lol you'll get it eventually".
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Evil dead the game shutdown one of the US servers due to lack of players. Others expected to follow. Only EU and US server remain
Can you post where you got this from?
I heard about the west coast having connection issues or something, but not about shutting down servers.
Evil Dead has only been out for three months this Saturday that's still too early to say a game is finished.
I'm not saying the game doesn't have problems (I know it does) there's a lot of balancing the game needs. It takes time in two months that the game has been out the DEVs have done Quality of Life patches, bug fixes and Balancing Changes.
Again the game is only three months old😂
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Devs simply closed West Coast server, and now only one US server. Guess what, the queue time became better for West Coast players, but for East Coast server players, the queues are now longer than used to be.
Turns out the "server issue" was lack of players....
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One of the biggest complaint for Propnight was the lack of progression system...
players felt like their time isnt rewarded, and demanded a dbd like progression, today generation, wants to have progression, feeling like they accomplish something.
Without grind dbd would lose half of the playerbase at least
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Again these things take time. I'm a east coast gamer I don't notice that much of a wait for a match.
All I'm saying is it's still to early to say it over with.
Maybe six months from now if the game is still the same then how it is now then, yeah it's over with.
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This kind of game doesnt work it seems, since the genre in concept is based on imbalance, it creates an us vs them mindset that that increases frustration and drives people away.
DBD survives because It has Pyramid Head, and Freddy Kruger, and other icons. People will always enter into the game, enjoy it, get bored/annoyed and move on; maybe coming back for a character they know/like. That is how the game perseveres with it's many, MANY issues.
So probably DbD is a fluke almost a miracle, which cant be repeated.
The genre is flawed and impossible to make another successfull game
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