Somehow I doubt that all 850+ are working on Dead by Daylight. They're both a developer and publisher, meaning they probably work on all sorts of external projects that we're not privy to.

Their Wikipedia page name drops seven different games they've worked on since DBD released (one of them being Deathgarden). Of course, they're mainly ports and mobile games, but still.

If you think 850+ is ridiculously big, you should take a look at Square Enix (5,500+), Nintendo (6,500+), Activision-Blizzard (9,500+), EA (11,000+) and Ubisoft (**19,000+**).

BHVR isn't just a game development company, but also a publishing company. There goes some of the staff.

In the game development segment, they work on their own original content outside of DBD (confirmed through job listings a while ago), and they outsource a lot of other work. There goes about half the staff if not more.

Of the remaining ~425, being generous here, there's also janitorial staff and catering staff, since they hire chefs to make hot meals for their employees whenever they're in-office (confirmed from their website and sources talking about their time being employed). There goes another 30-50.

So that leaves about 350 people to work on DBD, and that's with me being generous with my guessing.

Of those 350 people, a lot work on new content. The design team needs to create powers and perks, the art team need to make concept art and then model it in game, the programmers need to code them into the game, etc. Not to mention half of that number works exclusively on The Realm Beyond content- or has done for a while, anyway; with the release of RPD and Eyerie I'm not sure if they work exclusively on it anymore. So we have about 100 people left, and we still need to split the work into legal, marketing, and then the balance team and design team for older content (like reworks) - there really aren't that many because of how the company is structured.

I've said it before and I'll say it again- BHVR is an example of how a company should be run. Employees are salaried rather than on wages, crunch and overtime in general isn't mandatory, and they've been consistently rated as one of the best employers to work for in Canada full stop, not just one of the best game studios to work for.

Unfortunately, a decade of studios with mandatory crunch, terrible working conditions, and overall labour exploitation has lead us (the consumers) to expect a much higher product than is reasonably possible with this amount of x-inefficiency in a company.

BHVR makes their employees live comfortably, and in return the product suffers in quality.

(this isn't me trying to kiss the devs' ass, because good god does something need to change and they need to kick themselves into high gear at some point, but that's an overall explanation as to why "850 employees" isn't as big as you'd think)