Do you think there will actually be any sort of competition to Dead By Daylight at some point?

Resident evil resistance had the most potential to actually challenge DBD out of the many asymmetrical team games I've played. It needed to be separated from remake 3, needed more advertising, needed more communication in general on the game, and needed more updates on a regular basis. There is a rumor that the team working on reverse will go back to resistance if reverse isn't that popular. Resistance still has a retty substantial playstation player base. I really love DBD but I haven't had as much fun as I did with resistance in many many years. Resistance had some issues, but overall gameplaywise even the most "toxic" builds were far less frustrating than what you find in dbd

Things resistance did better with

-more variety in each killers playstyle

-much more team oriented

-more variability in general to achieve victory

-more item options for survivors

-map layouts were more interesting

-encouraged more variability in teams rather than repeated builds like dbd does

-killers had much more personality

I can go on and on. If the game got the proper support it needed it would be serious competition. Devs didn't put enough faith in the game despite it having a lot of players early on

Like you said, the licensing issue makes it very difficult to compete. At this point, I'm thinking DBD will be on top of the genre until the devs decide to call it quits.

There's been plenty of competition, it's just failed every time. Clearly, people prefer DbD.

There’s been competition but DBD was just better than them for the most part

They will have competition again as they had it in the past, the cake is there and companies will attempt to get slices of it like they did with WoW back in the days (and look how long it took for someone to pose a threat).

The question if said competition will be able to sustain themselves for more than a few months and grow into an adversary because everything they have tossed at DBD has failed or bombed hard.

On a sidenote, I believe DBD success is mainly because they offer a simple enough formula thats easier to get into but not too bland, they really hit the nail in complexity/dificulty/easiness, also licenses are very good form of advertising (I got into this game because it had Myers on it), I believe other games just tried too hard to offer stuff and sometimes more or bigger doesnt mean better, some just felt like "fake" complexity.

That's what killed F13th.

The new Evil Dead game could become a pretty nice opponent.

That was just an excuse, the game was dead* long before that. You can check the Steam playercount yourself.

*Not literally 0 players, because that usually takes a very long time, but close enough.

I guess at this point DbD is way too iconic and has way too many iconic licenses to just get overthrown by some asymmetrical horror game.

something like that Ash vs Evil Dead Game or another game featuring a big license could become a big competition, but then again I really doubt it.

This is not about gameplay elements beeing efficient, but beeing problematic:

• Camping turns the game into a very boring and frustrating experience for all sides involved. The perfect play in that situation lacks any kind of interaction between the players, a lack of reward for the camped and basicly is a standill or automaton. The game is basicly playing itself at that point. And that's a game design flaw.
• Yes, tunneling is efficient. Mostly because Killer progress not per Hook directly, but per survivor. This can lead to games where killer either kill the survivor on the third or the ninth hook. But Survivors aren't like Gens a gameplay element just sitting around at the map. It's similar frustrating as camping, even though it has a little bit more interactivity as it in that regard. But doesn't change it beeing a game design related how killer progress during the game.
• Yeah slugging for the 4k is fine, if the killer does it situational smart. But often it turns the game into a weird standstill, where the killer doesn't know where the last survivor is and slugs for the sake of it. It's also a design flaw understandable how both sides react to it, but still a standstill that either one side to give up their position and gift the win to the other side.
• Yes, they said and promised it back in Summer '18, when they announced to bring all killers to the same AddOn format. They have a long list of To-Do stuff that just keeps adding. Some planned changes are just talked about for eternity until they are finally adressed. Of course things take time, but it's really frustrating, when they let broken/problematic things in the game for quite some time. Additional having a break-now-fix-later mentality we basicly saw e.g. with Twin-patch, or the new HUD.
• True. Gen times are already at their maximum. But the general Killer-progress-Survivor-progress-ratio is messed up. And that leads to many problem we face in the game.
• Devs will never completely adress the teamwork-beeing-optional approach DbD takes. It's the core issue of many flaws the game has. Starting with the question "Why a camped survivor shouldn't suicide and jump into the next match?" issue e.g. It's a core design issue Behaviour basicly can't solve within current DbD tbh. And if a competitor would take a look on this flaws and find fixes to it, then it would have a good and improved stand to compete with this game.

Honestly because of how much of a head-lock DbD has on this genre right now I doubt anything big will happen in the near future, something would need to come and build up a following over time the same way this game did. Although I absolutely agree that this past year has been atrocious for this game.

Silent Hill was decently polished but brought the worst map in the entire game, Blight was a good addition but has been stuck with low POV for nearly a year, I don't even have to explain the Twins release that's how much of a disaster it was, and The Trickster feels like a killer who was rushed out the door for release, he has an incredibly weak power and his animations make him look like he's not even from this game (At least change his running animation please, it looks ridiculous.)

It sucks to say it but DbD doesn't need competition, it needs new developers. Something happened once the rift came out, some mind set changed, the updates have felt less and less polished, and we've been getting less and less word from the community managers or even Cote himself. Before this, even though the game wasn't in a perfect state, I at least had some confidence in the people developing the game, but that's been gone for a while now. I really hope something changes soon, because they can't just release one big hit for the anniversary and then go back to this, it's depressing.