http://dbd.game/killswitch
Summing Up My Thoughts On the Last Few Months/Years of DBD
I've been playing since 2018, and I've seen patterns come and go in DBD. This video, while long, sums up my thoughts pretty well.
Doomer? Perhaps, but it ultimately says what I've been thinking for a long time. Eventually, DBD will collapse under its own weight and I see no way forward besides a DBD 2, as it is clear BHVR intends to further monetize the game instead of fixing issues.
Comments
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This game gonna be an example for life services of how fast food approach to the content sooner or later will lead a game to an unstable mess with weak potential. Not every game is Fortnite, yk.
The only one reason this game is alive is Lack of competition. Identity V and the upcoming Carnival Hunt are way too competitive in the assym-horror genre. TCM or Friday the 13th are examples of being held hostage to a single brand identity that's going out of fashion. This is the only reason why DBD survives and still has a high online.
DBD had something that can be called “golden middle” . The provided both original and licensed content. Original concept and popular trend. It has diversified both the casual and competitive community. Different regions. Different approaches.
But fast pace leads to cheaper, more monotonous content. Recycled material is an attempt to conserve resources. This inevitably impacts quality.We all know why they were looking for employees who knew how to use AI. They're trying to speed up their production.
I'll just stay to see where such greed will lead this game.16 -
Borrowed Time??? Oh my god that's a DBD reference!
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Real.
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Can't say I agree with much in this video.
- Unfortunately people have been saying "DbD is dying" every other month since the game released, and it's really lost its weight for me. There's never actually been any real sustained loss of players, and I personally don't think there will be any time soon. As the video itself covers, the core playerbase is actually very stable and has been for years. Personally, I'll believe DbD is dying when I see it.
- The lack of true growth, as the video describes, is pretty easily explained by the fact that this game ultimately has a very niche target audience. Being a horror game is enough on its own to limit its potential audience, but add asymmetric on top of that and suddenly its even more narrow. Horror has definitely become more mainstream in recent years, but still does not reach anything close to the appeal of other genres, and asymmetry makes the game feel inherently unfair for casual players. Survivors feel too weak individually against a Killer, but collectively the Survivors outnumber the Killer which can make them feel "ganged up on". It works for us horror fans because it mimics the dynamics of our favourite movies, games, etc. but for casual audiences I imagine it is very off putting. If you're used to playing games where even numbers of players are matched together (like most PvP games) then DbD is very jarring to get into. People are drawn in when they see popular licenses, pick up the game, and several months later realise it's not really their thing. I don't think it's something that can be fixed. The game is simply unorthodox by nature.
- I think the absolute failure of every single other game in the genre is testament to the fact that this style of game does not have broad appeal. A lot of people point to other reasons why such games died, but usually its simply because there weren't enough players around from the get go to ever establish a stable playerbase. Take Friday the 13th for instance. A lot of people blame the lawsuit for this game's death, but the game was actually well on its way out long before the lawsuit happened. On Steam, the game peaked at around 16k players on launch, and within a couple of months it had already dwindled down to a couple of thousand regular players. The real reason the game died was because there simply wasn't ever enough interest in such a game. Of course it might have survived longer had it not been mismanaged and then caught up in a licensing dispute, but the game was always doomed to die IMO. And DbD's relative lack of growth is not surprising when viewed with that context. A game of this nature will never be able to compete with the behemoths that are symmetrical shooter games, action games, etc. It's just impossible to expect that kind of growth from DbD.
- The technical debt is one part of this video I agree with. It's obvious BHVR are overextending themselves with the rate they're putting out new content and have been for years. The only way the number of bugs will ever decrease is if they stop putting them out quicker than they can fix them. And to do that they'd need to reduce their output of new content. It's something they should've scaled back long ago for the long-term health of the game.
- DbD 2 is not feasible. It sucks, but it just isn't. To use his own words, it's very easy to talk when you're talking about someone else's money. Investing in a project like DbD 2 only to have it fail is something that could very easily take out an entire company. Could it work? Absolutely. But the risk is so big that no sane business would ever attempt it. BHVR are a much bigger company than a lot of people think, but nowhere near big enough to be able to shoulder a financial loss a project like that could bring.
- Don't get me wrong, I would LOVE a DbD 2. To see this game remade from the ground up and finally fix its longstanding issues would be a dream come true. But it's also just that — a dream. It's not something that I think is at all realistic, and I don't begrudge BHVR for not attempting it. I'd rather have a buggy DbD 1 than have them attempt and fail a DbD 2 which causes us to lose both.
- The notion that BHVR should've done a sequel as early as the Halloween Chapter's release is kind of silly… No one remakes their entire game from the ground up after only 5 months of it existing… Like… I really tried to understand the logic here but this one is a huge reach. The only reason we're able to say that would've been a good idea is with the gift of hindsight. Unless BHVR had a clairvoyant on their team, expecting them to be able to predict the heights this game would reach (and thus a recode would become necessary) is completely unreasonable.
- The other projects brought up in the video are completely unrelated for the most part. Criticising BHVR's misadventures with the likes of MYM or Deathgarden is valid, because it was entirely their own creation but the other titles they've worked on have nothing to do with the DbD or its shortcomings. BHVR staff were being hired to work on other companies' games long before DbD was a thing. It's not something they're facilitating by siphoning off of DbD's financial success, it's something they've always been doing independently of DbD.
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Towards the end he says: 'It's their fault they are not more successful."
The game is in its 10th year where they just hit a new peak. There are players who have put over 10k hours into the game. They retain a healthy relationship with their license partners. They've been able to keep 100s of people employed on this game. At a minimum, they have a few years left.
And they've made a lot of money in the process.
There's lots of things about the game I think could be better, but even if DbD collapsed tomorrow it would still be an amazingly successful video game. That's not a 'fault', the vast majority of games would gladly have anything approaching DbD's success.
I think the tone really undercuts his points. The issues he discusses have always been there and people still play the game.
He seems to misunderstand the player count figures that they represent players playing at any one time. It's not new players coming in and then quickly leaving, its a cycle of players playing more when new content drops that keeps them engaged.
When he talks about other games they've made his background image confuses games they released and games they were partners on (their primary business model). And I'm not aware of any evidence that Meet Your Maker was a failure. It definetly wasn't a wild success, but that's a different thing than a failure.
He also argues they should take more risks, while also arguing that they done too many changes (and ignores risks they've taken with games like Deathgarden and Meet Your Maker).
I don't know where he got some of the ending arguments about a DbD 2. The main reason they don't have to make DbD 2 is lots of people are playing DbD 1.
Yeah, DbD will die at some point. It might be under the weight of new content. But the new content is a huge part of the reason that the game has a healthy player count. For all my disagreements with them, saying that things have been a failure is just wrong.
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Dbd 2 would be the end of most players who have at least some financial restrictions.
I would NOT rebuy this game. Not even talking about DLCs.
What BHVR needs to do is stop churning out chapters like there's no tomorrow. Spread them out. You have time to fix bugs in-between them.
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Agree. At this point, BHVR needs to figure out a different business model because the constant cranking out of new content is becoming less and less sustainable. This is glaringly obvious by how increasingly buggy, broken and unfinished each chapter release has become in recent years. Slow down the releases, focus on game health, and find other ways to replace the revenue from super frequent chapter releases.
With that said, I could be very wrong about this path being unsustainable because what is also very clear is that most people don’t stop playing the game or spending money on it even with the ever-increasing amount of quality and game balance issues. It has worked for BHVR for almost 10 years now and there is no serious competition in this genre.4 -
I can't wait to see how well 7 Days Blood Moons will compete whenever it comes out…
It's like my two favorite games are having a baby. 😅
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Logged into my cobweb ridden forum account to say that - literally just last night me and my friend who introduced me to dbd were talking about the only way forward being a dbd 2 release as a clean slate… The biggest issues I saw with that was the licensing renegotiations as well as how likely it is that bhvr would require you to start fresh purchase wise and all of the money that we have spent prior being lost in the ether. They could do the overwatch 2 approach and port over cosmetics and what not… How ever I personally just don't have faith in an acceptable execution from bhvr in that regard.
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I think it's going to be very obvious during the middle of December/early January that the game will absolutely die without consistent chapter releases.
Even then, we've seen those sort of fade fast too.
They are in a damned-if-they-do damned-if-they-don't situation. They can't keep letting the game bloat, but they also can't take time and actually fix things. Even now, during a supposed Health Update, the game has only gotten worse since it started.
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Watched the video and have to agree with everything.
BUT I think this post will be deleted and you're gonna get banned in the next hours, specially because of the last part of the video.1 -
And VHS was basically "surv mains: the game"
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Maybe theyll release a DBD2? In 2020 I thought the game had years ahead of it. But now, Im just indifferent to it all. I know nothing will change. How many more killers with rehashed powers will be released? How many unbalanced maps will be released? How many more killers with unchecked bugs and outdated kits will remain untouched? Im not very optimistic. The doomsday attitude has come time and time again and this game has proven it can crawl out even in its darkest state.
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A little late—I meant to watch the video as soon as I saw the thread.
You summed up a lot of my thoughts very accurately. I've seen how companies adjacent to BHVR operate and I've known for a long time how the game has been treated and the path it will go down. Granted, it's all speculation on my part, but I believe that the passion to improve the game has been gone for a very long time like you said. The most important thing is to "reinvent" in the short term, pouring money into projects they know are going to fail. Frankly, idiotic ventures that will not release them from DBD as their sole namesake. I doubt the inappropriate handling of money ends there. But I don't know, I wasn't there. Meanwhile they bank on our nostalgia and our pitiful hopes that the game will get better, even if deep down we know that it won't. That being said, I don't foresee DBD "dying" in a literal sense. At one point I expected it to become a fashion game primarily, but the fashions are getting hilariously bad and the cosmetic bugs are constant and slow to fix. I don't believe the art department is thriving there. Instead, I think licenses are their end goal. Eventually they will run out, but after a decade they still refuse to look at the bigger picture so it's no surprise.
Beyond that, I have always hated the "poor multimillion dollar indie dev" and "we should be thankful" arguments with BHVR as well. As if we should feel apologetic for being, in all honesty, taken advantage of. That our feedback falling on deaf ears (which I believe extends to their paid/official consultants as well) or any changes to trick us into spending more time and money on the game for lesser and lesser returns is in any way, shape, or form acceptable. That the amount of bans we STILL see here regularly, that the handling of their social media channels, that the horrific PR (as you've mentioned), and so on are all somehow positive things. We SHOULD demand more and we SHOULD be very vocal about it.
As far as DBD 2 goes, I think it could be possible. Maybe not the way that we imagine, but I can see it. Very doubtful that anything we've purchased thus far would be transferred over or comped (unless something has changed, but based on their rage-inducing responses to players that lose their inventories due to circumstances beyond their control, I don't think it has). But at the very least, it could be a fresh start. Maybe they swallow their pride and sell the IP to Epic and that's when it happens. Maybe it does burn out like you speculate and there's a revival in a decade. Maybe "DBD 2" is just DBD hosted on fan servers with mod support. I'm not sure. But it's hard for me to believe that it won't continue in some form.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the video and I'm glad you put your perspective out. Not many people are as invested or as honest about things. And just in case anyone gets upset with me, all of this as always is in my opinion. 😵
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This is probably the most feasible option in my opinion. I know people would love for this game to be perfectly balanced but with how many bugs this game has this has got to be where the devs start. I'm fine with going a few months with no new content if it ment every month there was a bunch of bug fixes
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