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Video proof that killer mains control the devs game design decisions via political lobbying.

Official Dead by Daylight Nov 2025 Live Stream

Step 1) After going to the official dev live stream linked above, click Open panel on Live Chat Replay. Then set 'Top chat replay' to 'Live chat replay' in the chat panel on the right.

Step 2) Skip to 27:07 of the dev live stream, where the dev asks chat to press K if you're a killer main, S if you're a survivor main, or B if you're both.

Step 3) Watch on the right panel until about 28:30 as the chat is flooded overwhelmingly with "K's", and hardly any S or B's. Another dev says "a lot of B" but if you actually look at the chat, it is clearly mostly K's and many chatters are pointing that out.

This is just one glaring example of how on big social media platforms like YouTube, it is mostly killer mains watching, or even if it isn't, the killer mains are certainly the loudest voices in public chat. This is especially notable considering that the game design requires 4 survivors for every killer, yet killer mains are still overwhelmingly dominating the official dev chat.

I've also noticed this to be the case in places like the official Dead by Daylight Reddit, where if you make a survivor-sided post wanting killer nerfs, no matter how politely stated, you will usually get heavily downvoted to 0, but if you make a killer-sided post complaining about survivors, you are far more likely to get a high upvote percentage (there are exceptions of course, it is popular to hate on Kaneki, for instance). Looking at Steam reviews, there appears to be far more killer mains threatening to uninstall/quit the game due to it being "survivor-sided" (there are a fair number of complaints from both sides, just more killer complaints).

It isn't unreasonable to think that this is also the case when it comes to public feedback surveys on game balance, such as the anti tunneling/slugging/camping PTB which got very quickly scrapped before killers would even have time to adapt to the changes since the killers were heard "loud and clear" that the changes were "too punishing for killers". Killers that have come to rely on slugging/tunneling/proxy camping to get high kill rates need time to adapt to these kinds of changes, just like survivors need time to learn to counter new killers. But no such time was given in the anti-tunneling PTB. Just a knee jerk reaction by the devs to scrap the changes after social media outrage. From a corporate perspective, BHVR may essentially panic when they see this kind of reaction, fearing that the game's popularity will plummet if they balance the game fairly.

Since a lot of people are easily swayed by public opinion because they want to be part of the "in-group", a lot of survivor mains will simply agree with whatever narrative seems to be the most popular on social media from big content creators that push a "BHVR hates killer mains and the game is survivor-sided" narrative. Because that becomes the "cool" thing to say even if it's a false narrative that doesn't reflect the actual gameplay experience for the majority of the player base. And a lot of people don't want to stand out as the devil's advocate like me, since they are liable to be shunned or accused of trolling, etc (look at what happened to Jesus for telling the truth).

I first started playing Dead by Daylight in 2016 when the game balance was far more friendly towards survivors than it is now, and SWF didn't even exist. So there were a lot of passionate yet frustrated killer mains playing the game. My theory is that they basically learned to band together on social media as a minority and make their voices heard loud and clear by the devs. However, that same outspoken killer main culture has persisted to this day, in 2025, in spite of the survivor role being heavily nerfed for several years now, the killer main victim narrative has remained exactly the same as it was since 2016. This kind of baffles me. I remember back then, killer was so much harder to play, and now it is way, way easier to play that role. Like night and day. Yet killer mains now seem even more adamant than ever that killer is miserable to play and that survivors have it so easy with all their crutch perks.

It's not that survivors don't complain to the devs, it is that killer mains tend to complain much louder. There could even be psychological factors at play, which is that the killer role tends to attract more aggressive players that want to dominate as the power role, whereas survivor is more of an underdog role where you are supposed to run away from the bad guy. So survivors may be more tolerant of being slaughtered over and over, whereas the comp Blight's absolutely loath getting anything less than a 4K extended win streak. A loss feels all the more humiliating since they're supposed to win playing an S tier.

BONUS: Go to 13 min in the live stream and observe the chat panel on the right and how many killer mains are spamming "JUSTICE FOR KILLERS". Even if there are more survivor mains that killer mains, they seem to be a lot more quiet. It is ironically quite a similar phenomenon to minority groups protesting in real life.

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