Killer winstreaks

dodged "people he knew" would end his win streak

I think 65 million is the total number of new accounts that have ever played the game.

Talking about player count varies depending upon what you mean. It could be the peak number of players who play the game at a single time, but more likely it is the number of people who play the game at least once a month.

I'd say it is way over a 100k. There's 31k people on steam playing the game right now as I post this, Steam is only one of the ways to play the game on the computer, you have multiple console versions which I think have more players overall (I'm not really sure what the preferred method of playing DbD is within Asia, which has a substantial player base).

It also depends on whether you count mobile players as part of DbD or its own separate game.

I see sites that estimate a million different people play DbD per day, that seems like a reasonable number to me.

Where did you even get that number from my man? 65 million is massive, I don't think it is even close to that... Unless there have been 64 million bot accounts when the game was free on epic...

Mobile is a completely different game, so no that does not count.

There is no way this game has a million different players per day and matchmaking is this God awful... Dota 2 has like 6-7 different players a month, which is still massive and somehow the matchmaking works properly.

I'd really like a source because otherwise this is just random number guessing.

Actually, it doesn't count DC/Suicides/Given Up/AFK if people put them in. Everything is manual.

The 65 million - https://www.polygon.com/23978649/dead-by-daylight-player-count-2023

Also, there's currently a bloodpoint code celebrating when they hit 60 million players from back in November.

The article says more than 60 million, the original commenter either has more info than me or rounded up.

From that article: the game had 12 million players by 2019, that's two years before it was free on Epic or ever on mobile.

For current player counts you aren't going to find any data that says it absolutely, because outside Steam no platform releases their data. https://activeplayer.io/dead-by-daylight/ lists it at half a million to seven hundred thousand per day excluding mobile, I don't know their methodology, but the site tries to estimate lots of games.

That number would make sense. Throughout the week the player count at any single time varies between 25k and 40k on just Steam. Those players are rotating over the course of day with many people logging in to just play one or two games.

As an example using very rough math: let's say every player on Steam plays DbD for 8 hours straight and they have an average active player count of 35k over the day. That would still mean a 105k unique players from Steam alone. And very few people are playing this game 8 hours a day, or even 2 hours day, so the number is a good deal higher than that.

Then you can factor in all of the other platforms. Even if you exclude the mobile count, lots of players on playstation, xbox, epic and switch.

DbD has a few things going for it on sales numbers. It's always been a very cheap base game, is on a lot of platforms, world popularity, and has a 7 year run.

Cheap: Many players have more than one copy, this isn't just Epic (though that's part of it), there are a fair number of players who've bought it on console/switch and PC. It's a relatively cheap game compared to many other popular games.

7 Years: This separates it from a lot of games. Take the Witcher 3 from that list of games, it's highest concurrent player count ever was 100k (a little less than the highest ever count for DbD), but it only had two windows of popularity (release and the Netflix show). People who are getting into gaming now (i.e. kids) aren't really likely to pick up the Witcher 3, and a few years from now will be even less likely, but DbD keeps attracting new players because of its ongoing nature.

World: Not many games have had as much international appeal as DbD. It's heavily played in North America, Europe, and Asia.

So basically they want to say that this game is basically dunno top 5-6 of best selling video games? When we go after raw numbers?

Player counts look comparable to Red Dead Redemption 2, both games are available on multiple platforms, and DbD has had a longer run, though given the differences in base price likely wildly different revenue returns.

As for the estimates that would make the whole thing really sad, because with the game basically being this big there is no excuse for the slow changes to basically everything... I basically gave them an easier time thinking the game was rather niche and not as big as other titles, but hell no if this is true there is no excuse for that bad performance and slow changes to major issues.

People do have this misconception about DbD as being a small time player. I got into DbD relatively late, about 18 months ago, and every other gamer I knew had already played DbD (quite a few only a couple of times and then never again).

Even when talking with non-gamers its not unusual to run into people who have heard about the game.

As for the pace of changes, that annoys me, especially the bugs. On the game change issue, I do from a financial standpoint understand their reason for slow rolling changes, given that they are currently doing amazingly well and it makes sense to not mess with that.

It's also unknown how many people actually buy cosmetics, so estimating their revenue would be incredibly difficult.

But there's a reason multiple other companies have tried to imitate DbD's model.

I don't know how steam counts players, but I basically assumed it to be total numbers and not as of this second?

I don't know if they track every second, but you can see how the player count changes in the game hour by hour.

If DBD is basically that big the state of the game is quite embarassing... Imagine taking years for basic options and still missing some when you have a fairly big game that is out for that long and what not... I will never get how that is a thing. This game has options missing that games had in 2005...

So there are two ways to look at this:

1: The charitable view - DbD has a diverse player base with lots of different interests. What might be an obvious improvement or change to you or I matters very little/would be disliked by others. BHVR thus needs to move very slowly with their changes to try and account for all of the different interests.

Related to that, many us might underestimate the difficulty of coding for multiple platforms, which some other large multiplayer games (i.e. Dota) don't have to worry about. (also bad initial coding because the expectation was never that the game would turn into what it did).

2: The less charitable view - The release schedule is intentional as a live service game. BHVR isn't looking to make an ideal game, but ever changing/evolving game. If they just "fixed" everything, many of us would probably play it for a few months and then move onto something different. But continually having changes every couple of months keeps the player base coming back.

I mean the Witcher books are also fairly successfull so I guess they will eventually attract players to the game or even new games may be created.

The Witcher is a good example of how DbD is different. Between 2007 and 2015 three games were released and combined have sold over 75 million copies (https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/29/23741471/the-witcher-cd-projekt-red-cdpr-gaming-franchises). So DbD has probably sold more copies then any single Witcher game over roughly as many years, but they've sold less overall copies (and they definitely have not made as much revenue off of the sales). It's why comparing live service games is difficult with traditional games because they have completely different release models.

That's the packaging, not the core. The underlying game is far more complicated and it shows in the way these gamestyles develop. Including, unsurprisingly, playstyles that very much avoid doing chases. The idea that people come to DBD just because it says on the tin that a killer chases survivors contradicts how the game is actually played and ignores the core gameplay of DBD to focus on the superficial presentation of it.

It's like someone being given the choice between a red 1995 Fiat and a blue 2020 Porsche and then saying they only chose the Porsche because it was blue.

No, you are the one losing track of the point here.

Your original argument is that enjoyment stems from tension, which you then subsequently argued stems from, specifically, the horror element. I pointed out that this is not true.

But even if you were to disregard the litany of gameplay problems that prove time and again that people play to win, you'd still be incorrect. People do not play this game for the horror element. It may draw them to it, but the ones that stick are the ones that ultimately gel with the mechanical aspects, not the set dressing. They're attracted to either the party game nature of a custom game among friends, or the competitive nature of the game.

Horror thrill is not one of the pillars of DBD. It's a marketing point, but not part of the actual gameplay, otherwise the gameplay would look dramatically different from how it looks right now. The closest thing we have to a true horror killer is the Dredge, and even he will be of much more interest mechanically than thematically, in the long run as novelty wears off.

You lose nothing of the theme if the game is balanced better. Conversely, if you intentionally imbalance the game, you do fully alienate the competitive players.

In case you hadn't noticed: DBD has -no- competition. The closest thing is TCM, which does the horror element far better. So why aren't you moving there if you think the horror element is so important?

It's a rather phenomenal leap to assume that DBD becomes rainbows and lollipops over the game not being balanced in the killer's favour. It's also a leap to assume there's no way to make the theme work with a balanced game-set.

All in all, it just sounds like more begging for killer buffs.

Well, let me reword it: It's more clamouring to keep the game unfairly balanced in favour of killers.

Yes, you kind of do. If you make the game inherently imbalanced and push that constantly, it's going to remove competitive players. They're not going to play a game where their chance to win is arbitrarily kept low.

But if you're playing primarily for the horror element, you'd like TCM more, so why aren't you going there?

That is, again, a huge leap. You have yet to prove you physically cannot have a good execution of the horror theme with a balanced game.

I also feel it's important to point out that some of the biggest outliers in terms of winrate, which, by your logic, should have the best thematic results, are three killers that specifically kill all the tension by making players twiddle their thumbs. They're more apt at making survivors bore themselves to death.

Nurse and Blight aren't much better, generally considered some of the most oppressive killers, and people don't like going up against them because it removes their agency.

But you know, if you want to have this tension argument, let me hop on that: Remove aura reading for killers, and remove scratch marks. Stealth play is by far the best way to add tension in the game for survivors, so let's buff the crap out of it for thematic reasons.

That would require DBD to have no matchmaking at all, though, and I don't think that's true.

We do want to point that yes survivors do have just as many tools as the killer, but there being 4 survivors, they need to be watered down so that its equal to or better than the killer's only when working together.

Explain what "fair play" is please.

We don't actually know that though, since we don't know the extent of the disparity, nor do we know what the ultimate winrate of swiffers actually is.

Except the game itself was never built for tunnelling, camping or slugging. There's peripheral design elements that indicate that. What you are talking about as being some core of the game is actually emergent gameplay, bordering on an exploit. It has never been a core.

Considering the developers have taken steps to try and mitigate it, maybe you are the one playing the wrong game.

A 'tangible threat', in and of itself, is not 'good' by default. If we released a killer that could simply press a button at the start of the game to immediately execute a survivor, that'd be a 'tangible threat'. It'd also be absolutely terrible for the game. It being a 'tangible threat' is not a justification for its existence.

Except it doesn't. Camping most of all, is one of the most boring and tedious ways to play. Tunnelling is not much better. Neither is slugging. All of these are 'tangible threats', and also a really good reason to walk away from the game, since there's no agency for the player and thus their participation is not required. (Disconnects/suicide on hook, anyone?)

Except you already changed your argument. Your initial claim was that it's all about tension, except it's evidently not, because you're willing to defend mechanisms that deplete tension and replace it with frustration or boredom. And so you move to a new term in 'tangible threat', which, as demonstrated, is not necessarily a good thing.

It feels like you started with a conclusion (Killers should be overpowered) and then worked backwards to try and find argumentation.

This is not a personal thing, this is something that kills tension for a very large contingent of players. It's been an eyesore for years. I know your argument is that 'it heightens the stakes of a chase', but the problem with camping and tunnelling in particular is that 3 out of the 4 survivors don't get a chase. And the fourth only gets one.

This is why your argument about 'tension' doesn't really hold up. If you want to use that to try and defend those playstyles, you're letting go of your core concept.

but are you sure "gms" only face "gms" on dbd matchmaking?

that is an important point. because I do not think so. don't think it's possible based on player numbers alone.

to examplify

imagine if magnus went to a 1900-2100ish elo championship. 1000 players. where he would play 100 matches against random opponents in that championship (no swiss pairing).

in those circunstances, would you find it weird if he got a, say, 50 win streak? (if we assume he actually tried to win every game)

now let's assume the top 50 chess players are there aswell. but because the pairing is not swiss, since it assumes everyone is around the same level, magnus only has a 5% of facing any of them in each match.

and if he eventually face one of the gms, he is fully capable of actually winning the game and keeping the streak.

so even with actually quite the sizeable gm count, still entirely possible and even likely he can get the streak.

those don't happen in chess because the elo system actually works there.

TL DR: The type of team that is required to beat the killer is too small of a percentage of the total players that can be paired with said killer. so they can keep the streak going a lot and only really need to have their game on a few times, which they are very capable of having.