http://dbd.game/killswitch
Dbd fanbase is very fickle with competition
A big statement I always see is that BHVR and dbd would get better and lock in more if there was competition in the genre
Yet when we actually get the competition you guys instantly say the game will die within a year. Yet you guys asked for this and you won’t go fund and support the competition to get BHVR to care again?
Then when that game inevitably dies off you guys complain again that we need competition it’s like a endless cycle
Even if there was a exact copy of dbd beat for beat gameplay no one would play it and say “it will die within a year”
I’m not saying to not have suspicions cause of how gun handled leatherface. But it’s kinda fickle how you guys ask for competition yet won’t go support it?
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But this competition is published by gun media, the same guys who sai ‘we’re killing tcm and cancelling all updates” and abandones the game very early on. (Not quoted literally.) It’s right to be mad at this competition.
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Because as much as people like to hate on bhvr, compared to all other competition bhvr are doing things good, great even, look at this while people are complaining that bhvr are ruining dbd for the 170th time, they are still working on future updates, bug fixes (they should work more on this btw), licenses, and listening to the community for better or for worse. You know what the competition is doing? Charging 10 dollars for each new character, picking fights on social media with their players, and throwing shade at bhvr for some reason. Like how on earth do you want me to play the competition when every time a major balance issue is happening they just tell you "chill its a party game" like bhvr has it issues, they normally go nuclear with nerfs but at least they listen, they undo questionable updates.
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I heavily disagree with this post.
Personally, I love playing all sorts of games in the asymmetrical horror genre. I've played Last Year, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Identity V, Home Sweet Home: Survive, Friday the 13th, VHS, Propnight, RE: Resistance, Evil Dead: The Game, Deceit; to name a few.
The issue in this case is the developer in question. I was super hyped for and really enjoyed The Texas Chainsaw Massacre game, and it's in my top 10 played games on Steam, actually. The developers, however, arbitrarily abandoned it to go and make this new project. They still have all the licensing required to develop new content, they just won't.
It's a concerning pattern from these specific devs, I have lost confidence in GUN Media and I do not want to spend any more of my money on them.
Often with asymms, it'll be a frustrating case of the games themselves being good, but the developers in question making some kind of horrible decision that causes them to die. Basically all of these games I would've loved to stick around for much longer, but that seems to be the way these things often go.
It's honestly some credit to BHVR for not fumbling the bag this hard, as questionable as some of their decisions can be sometimes, since that seems to be a relatively easy thing to do in this market. I think these types of games genuinely are really hard to make well, and keep going on top of that.
Even if there was a exact copy of dbd beat for beat gameplay no one would play it and say “it will die within a year”
Not really true. I play Identity V a bunch from time to time, and it's been going strong since 2018. The core gameplay loop is so similar to DBD that the developers of the game collaborated with them while they were building it.
Granted it's a lot more popular in China specifically compared to Western markets, but I think it still has its gameplay merits, I like how it focuses on each individual Survivor/Hunter having an ability instead of perks (not that I'd want DBD to be that way, I like both of them for what they are).
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Illfonic and gun media already had their chances. They wasted it 🤷♂️
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i played vhs and tcm and with those the problem was survivors would dunk and stunlock the killer to the point where you don't want to play anymore dbd is like that in the upper ranks but you have s tiers and camp tunnel and slug to at least mitigate it but in general asyms swing super heavily in favor of survivors, killers quit and games die
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TCM was fun until Gun decided to look for profit elsewhere.
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this isn't our first rodeo. I myself am a f13 refugee.
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In general these other games tend to fail because they focus on a single IP. And the company has a history of just abandoning their games early on while leaving them in a horrible state.
What we need is a game LIKE VHS or that carnival one to come out, change the formula, and succeed based on the game being good by developers who show that they care, and listen to feedback and are in it for the long haul.
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I did play TCM, actually, and I thought it was a ton of fun! I liked it a lot better than DBD, but it's been axed, sadly.
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After what Gun and Illfonic did to F13th, TCM and Predator Hunting Grounds, no one has any faith in any game those companies touch.
The Halloween game will last about a year before it flops, then the license holders will come crawling back to BHVR.
Best case scenario is the Halloween game is miraculously a great game and doesn't get abandoned nor becomes a cashgrab, which pulls some players away from DBD. In response, BHVR first switches up their roadmap and starts prioritizing licensed content, if that doesn't work, they pull a Blizzard and "suddenly" a bunch of stuff and QOL that have been requested for years get released rapid-fire to bring back the players initially lost to the Halloween game. Returning the status quo when player numbers return to BHVR's liking.
Unfortunately, being limited to a single license, the Halloween game cannot offer the same variety long-term that DBD offers with its constantly growing number of licenses. Even if the people behind the game didn't have a horrible track record, it would take a lot for DBD to be truly threatened.
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Nothing by that company is legitimate competition. It's a game that will last a year or two max before it gets shut down. For a game to really compete with DBD it would probably need to drop with 5-6 big licenses in it and be backed by some serious money.
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I was going to make the same point. DBD is a success because it's had the time to build up 10 years worth of original and licensed content and managed to (for the most part) seamlessly bring it all together.
The only other asym that I play is Ghostbusters: Spirits Unleashed (another Illfonic project that's been put on life support). It's a fantastic game and everything that a Ghostbusters fan could want from an online Ghostbusters experience. But at this point they've pretty much added most of the content that they could. Sure they could create more maps and skins to unlock, perhaps add some more story campaigns but there's not really much else they could do with the game to give it extra longevity. It's risky to put time and effort into those things because if it doesn't bring in new or returning players, it'll be a very poor business decision for them.
Unless your single IP video game has a very deep well of established lore to draw from (like Star Wars, Star Trek or Marvel), you're very quickly going to run out of new content to add to keep players interested.
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to be fair, dbd with all its licences and wide variety of killers and survivor and perks…. really there is no variety. its the same killers time and time again using the same perks time and time again. every survivor is exactly the same, its just perks that make them different and survivors seem to use the same perks time and time again. there is no variety. even the map rotation is limited, repeatedly getting The Game map multiple times a night and rarely seeing maps like coldwind farm.
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I agree with all of this. I don't care much about IPs but DbD being chocked full is what keeps me around. There are 41 killers and tons of perks to change things up. If I'm bored with a playstyle, build, character, or role I can change.
I played a bit of TCM but, even with that being one of my favorite films, it felt too samey too quickly. The two roles both being third person and both having set abilities per character wasn't interesting to me either. It's the variety that keep me with DbD, and it been built up over so many years that I don't know how anyone catches up.
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Same here. Lots of fun to be had until you ask them to make literally any changes, then it's all excuses and insults from Gun.
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As everyone else has said, anyone who has played the TCM game and interacted with the community knows Gun is awful at managing games. They will likely do just as poor a job with the halloween asym as they did TCM.
Competition is a good thing when the competition is good. If Gun is making it, it won’t outlast or outpace DBD.
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My opinion in a nutshell.
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but gun isn’t working on the game Illfonic and another company have been working on the game way before gun abandoned TCM
The only saving grace the Halloween game has is the story mode/single player mode
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With all due respect, this is quite a terrible take.
Just because someone wants competition to incentive DbD to improve, they aren't obligated to spend their time and money in any bad game that shows up wanting to compete with DbD.
Because most of the atempted competition against DbD over the years has been just that, very bad, buggy, poorly balanced games that were handled terribly by the devs. So of course they didn't get support for long, couldn't hold a playerbase and died, they just weren't worth the time DbD is.
The thing is: asymmetrical online games are very hard to balance, specially with the conflicting feedback coming from different sides. They are often original games that are trying styles of gameplay that weren't tried before, and done by small developers with limited budgets. So things often don't go as planned and they fail. DbD is so far the only asymmetrical game that found the right formula and made it work, and yet it still deals with issues related to its base design. Some other games not only failed to find the right formula, they were also very poorly handled by their devs, who didn't even do the bare minimum. That was what happened with Last Year, Friday the 13th the Game (which was awfully buggy and very poorly balanced, but had that lawsuit as a escapegoat to blame for its failure) and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The lattest two are from Gun, and I think that says everything that needs to be said about them. To make things worse, their upcoming Halloween game looks like a copy-pasted F13th reflavored in Halloween's scenario. I'm not interested in playing a game with a teleporting Michael Myers who can be stun-locked by survivors exactly like Jason was in F13th.
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Gun is involved apparently.
Therefore a bad omen has been brought upon it.
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but they came on last minute? The game was announced back in 2023 and it’s been in development since 2023 it finally was revealed in 2025
Gun didn’t do any of the work on gameplay or publishing before 2025
I won’t buy the game but it’s not strictly there game and Illfonic while not perfect atleast still updates there games no matter how dead they are
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I have said in the past that people need to give other assyms an actual chance, that they drop them way too quick and don't give the devs time to address issues. BHVR had the opportunity to work through those new game growing pains but new games don't get that because the players have DBD to fall back on.
In general I still do believe people need to give other assyms a solid chance BUT in the case of the Halloween game I can't fault people for not wanting to give it a shot. While Illfonic are the main devs and have continued support on games that have a small playerbase, they unfortunately have teamed up with Gun who have now abandoned 2 games after 1 year and 5 months - F13 they had the lawsuit as their out, TCM they claimed "it reached it's full potential" even though data miners had found an unreleased killer and other content. Gun are the financiers for Halloween, I don't have faith they won't drop the financial support after 1 year and 5 months and force Illfonics hand to drop support. I personally won't bother with it unless Illfonic can guarantee to continue support if Gun jumps ship.
Also Illfonic usually for their games opens a discord server just for that game. With Halloween it's part of Guns discord server with Guns community managers being the main faces, Illfonic community managers are nowhere to be seen. During TCMs run Gun had terrible communication with the playerbase, like community managers just getting into petty arguments with players. Having Gun doing the communication on top of financing just seems like a bad choice after TCM.
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Dbd and beHaviour isn't doing nearly as bad as people pretend they do. The only real issue is the spaghetti code and not moving from blueprints to c++ code to help prevent random unrelated things from braking when they make changes
The competition in the asymmetrical horror genre all are so much worse1 -
The thing is that it sometimes is quite clear that the Devs are only moving when there is big criiticism. I want to remember how accessibility was handled - they only added colorblind modes after a very strange answer from a Dev which caused criticism on basically the whole internet including some quite big names when it comes to accessibility in gaming. Only then they showed that they are working on a colorblind mode, which they could have shown earlier instead of having the Dev given this weird answer. (I dont know the exact answer, but it was something like that it is not a priority for them or something like that)
And for all we know they could have just put something together when the criticism was really loud to show it. Because the game was already years old without a colorblind mode. (And dont get me started on console optimization or work on Dedicated Servers)
I also dont think that the Devs are only doing bad and they are certainly doing better t han the competition, since there are always valid reasons why the competitions failed. And those are not only "DBD has so many licenses so people prefer to play it". However, I wish the Devs would do matter and not only move when they absolutely have to and then do some kneejerk reactions when there is a bit of opposition to their changes. (Which they actually handled way better years ago - they were listening, just not immediatly to the loudest people. This changed. See the Anti-Tunnel disaster - changes for this were needed for a long time, but again, snail pace and only moving when needed. Then they propose them and immediatly abandon them because people complained. So they put in work for nothing and now they will not do anything, because they will claim they did something.)
And competition would help with that. The problem is just that people who try to be competition are either doing it badly or are bad people. VHS as an example - during that time one of the main complaints for DBD was that Killers dont like to play against Survivors because they think Survivors are too strong. And VHS had the option for Survivors to actually fight back to the Killer and stun them. Obviously this will not work, because that is even worse what was criticized in DBD.
Then there is TCM - I think the general idea was great, a 3v4 was a very good idea. But it had so many flaws in the execution - that at the start every game needed a Leatherface, who was the worst character, for example. Then that there was a rule that only one copy of a character could be played, which makes sense given they had different abilities, but made queues a nightmare when new characters released. (And I think there were also penalties for Lobbydodging, if you got a character you did not want to play) And on top of that there was the Behavior of the Devs.
Overall (and I was drifting more towards the topic on that whole blabbering) people want competition and DBD NEEDS competition. But competition for the sake of competition will not work, because the games which are competition actually have to be good. Because then the Devs are forced to move. Because currently it is a big joke, delaying content for a QoL-initiative which never happened.
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VHS is basically the survivor main dream game, and unsurprisingly no one wants to play killer in a game like that
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You could say the same was true for Deathgarden, but for the killer side. And that game didn't last much longer either.
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It was poor decisions that made the game unbalanced, not the fanbase.
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The asymmetrical genre is sadly not that exciting or interesting. I think it's easy to forget how niche DBD was before they landed the Halloween chapter (which poetically is being lost this year). I've said it before but it bears repeating—DBD would be the same as every other asymm that has come and gone, many with far more potential than DBD has ever had, if there were no licenses (in my opinion). This is the only game where you can have Claire, Heather, Bill, and Ash go up against Freddy Krueger. Nothing can fill that niche. No other IP stands strong enough on its own to challenge that. It's just the reality. ED, TCM, F13, KK, and the like are not DBD's competition. It's games like Fortnite that it can compete for licenses with.
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Yet when we actually get the competition you guys instantly say the game will die within a year.This is the same community that thinks a match is over if a teammate gets downed at 5 gens, or a ghostface player who gets an outdoor map. Catastrophizing is practically a requirement these days.
That said, a lot of the failed competition have patterns people pick up on, and some publishers in particular are exceptionally bad at keeping end user trust, even more than BHVR. A lot of times its writing on the wall, other times its people expecting the writing on the wall and just not bothering to spend the money. After all, if you already own DBD and can play it without buying new DLC, there's minimal financial investment required compared to a full price game (which then may add more paid dlc) which isn't even guaranteed to last more than a year or two. Consumers are as risk averse as publishers sometimes.
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