Dead Island 3 Is In Development, Seeking Our Brains In 2028

It looks like the wait for Dead Island 3 won’t be quite as long as that between Dead Islands 1 and 2. Dambuster Studios, the team that took over development of the second mainline entry in the sprawling zombie series, remains at the helm for the follow-up, aiming for a 2028 release.

As detailed by Timur222 on X, Dambuster’s latest financial statements state that the UK-based subsidiary of Deep Silver (and thus Embracer) has moved straight on from 2024’s release of Dead Island 2: Ultimate Edition to working on the direct follow-up as its “primary focus.” Right now all developers are working on the game, while those in QA will be moving over too, once Luna and Mac versions of DI2U are out the door. The details state that “feature, character, world and story design” are all “moving at pace,” all with a view to releasing in the first half of 2028.

The original Dead Island appeared in 2011, developed by Polish team Techland, and despite being a solid zombie first-person action-RPG, arrived in a mess of mistakes and controversies. Chief among them was the severed torso statue of a bikini-clad woman included in the game’s special edition, but releasing the internal development build onto Steam instead of the final game on launch didn’t really help. Still, once fixed, it was fun—nothing exceptional, but fun.

Techland followed it up two years later with a standalone expansion (remember when we called those “expandalones” for a minute?), Dead Island: Riptide, but had a cooler reception given it repeated so many of the things that held the first game back from being great. There then came a crappy spin-off called Escape Dead Island, a rapidly abandoned MOBA called Dead Island: Epidemic, a remastering of the original, and a canned mobile spin-off that never saw a release. At the same time, Techland opted out of making Dead Island 2, instead moving on to much greater success with Dying Light, meaning Deep Silver had to find a new studio. That was German team Yager Development, best known for Spec Ops: The Line, with an expected 2015 release. It didn’t go well.

By July 2015, Deep Silver announced they’d taken the game back off Yager and handed it to UK studio Sumo Digital (Crackdown 3, Team Sonic Racing), issuing annual proof-of-life statements for the project until 2019 when it was declared that it had changed developers yet again. That time it went to another UK team, Dambuster (formed from the ashes of the collapse of Crytek UK), and in 2023 it was finally released, some eight years later than originally intended. It was fine!

It also sold well enough to justify continuing on, and we now know that Dambuster has been working on the third mainline entry since it shipped the remaster of the sequel. For what it’s worth, the financial report filed in the UK also shows that the 194-person-strong company made a profit in 2024, and is sitting on assets of over £2 million. Dambuster is owned by Deep Silver, which is owned by Plaion, which is owned by Embracer, which is owned by Cthulhu.