Interview: Dead by Daylight Devs Talk Horror, Community and Plans for the Next 10 Years

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Published Jun 15, 2026, 4:47 PM EDT

Laurence Wall is a Contributor at DualShockers who has been writing professionally since 2022 and covering games since 2023. He primarily writes guides and lists, with a focus on indie games, RPGs, ARPGs, Soulslikes, MMOs, card games, boss fights, and detailed tutorials.

Before joining DualShockers, Laurence worked as a game reviewer for Movies, Games and Tech. He also co-founded and served as a contributor liaison for a university creative writing magazine, where he was one of the publication’s principal contributors. Laurence holds a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London.

This past weekend, I was lucky enough to visit the Dead by Daylight studio in Montreal as part of the hugely exciting 10-year anniversary event.

Chances are, if you’re a horror enthusiast or even just a regular gamer, you’ve heard of Dead by Daylight, the 1v4 Asymmetrical horror experience! And with this anniversary event, the devs were excited to announce a whole host of game-changing updates coming to the game in the near future.

While I am a huge horror fan, I'm actually a rather new player in the Dead by Daylight scene, so I was fascinated to see how the game was evolving and everything I would be able to experience in the near future.

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Knowledge is power, but it's also holds secrets you simply can't ignore, especially in the horror genre.

With a host of burning questions in mind, I sat down with Dave Richard and Mathieu Côté, keen to learn a bit about the behind-the-scenes process and what goes into creating a game with such long-term potential. So grab yourself a brew, and let’s get into it!

Speaking with Dave Richard and Mathieu Côté

Dead by Daylight 10th Anniversary Splash

Laurence: Well, I wanted to start by saying congratulations on the 10 years. It must be such an incredible experience to lead the charge with this fantastic game that so many people are so invested in. And it's fascinating how it goes from just a game at the beginning to a burgeoning community and then its own sprawling universe.

Dave: Yeah. Good answer.

Laurence: I'm sorry, I'm supposed to be letting you guys answer the questions here.

Mathieu: It's a great way to say it. And it's absolutely correct. It's thrilling. It's really exciting to be here to see that.

Laurence: So,10 years on, if you could go back in time and show yourselves how the game has blossomed, what would you say to those people at the beginning, starting off with this project?

Dave: I would be too scared of the butterfly effect. I would say absolutely nothing. I mean, we've been given a chance to work on this project; it was all about building the game we would play, enjoy, and find really cool. Of course, there was a strategy behind it, but it was still something we made really for fun, and that's it: work on the project you love, and good things will follow.

Laurence: How often do you guys find yourselves kind of surprised by the community that's playing the game? I mean, I assume when you're designing, for example, a map or a character, you have this strong vision in mind. How often is it that you present it to the community, and they turn it on its head?

Mathieu: Often!

Dave: Yeah, yeah, gameplay-wise, finding things that are unexpected and how to use them is great to see. You know, often we end interviews or streams with the last thing we say being, "Can't wait to see what you'll do with these characters." And it's because there's no way for us to plan for all the different scenarios in DbD. There are just too many components.

Laurence: But also, there are people who are just beginning at the game, some who are in the middle of their experience, and then people who have mastered it. You're going to get different kinds of perspectives all the time. How do you plan for all of those?

Mathieu: You don't! We give people tools and toys, and we're like, just go, have fun, right? Break it!

Dave: There's always a maze level of internal knowledge, you know, and you need to keep these different crowds in mind. You know, some players are more competitive, some are power hungry, and others are there for the scares and the scenarios. And how do you mix this and that? And so there's a layer of knowledge, a layer of data collection, and a layer of player testing. And then... it goes into the world, and we'll see. But what is really cool about a game-as-a-service model is that we can iterate on and mature the characters and ideas over time.

Laurence: I mean, thinking about people who have been with the game for a long time as well. How do you keep that horror element of the game fresh, especially with people who’ve been playing for so long?

Mathieu: Surprises. Yeah. And chaos. Some of the people here sitting in the office have been playing the game for 8,000 hours. We still managed to surprise them and get the scream. That's because of the elements of the unexpected, of surprise, and that is the core of the game. That's why it works: you never know who you're against. You never know who the killer's going to be. Most of the time, you don't even know all the other survivors. I mean, even if you're there with a friend, can I trust them? I don't know. And that is why it still works.

Dave: Yeah, and so part of horror is being scared, of course, but personally, and a lot of people have been in horror a long time; they consume horror because it's fun, because they want to see gore, because they want to see the monsters do their creative killings. Right? And so there are other layers to make a horror game interesting. So that somebody gets scared, but somebody else can also be like, "This killer is cool!"

Laurence: I mean, for me, it's that adrenaline, that horror gives, that I can't really find anywhere else. That heart-pumping sensation.

Dave: Roller Coasters and Horror!

Some of the people here sitting in the office have been playing the game for 8,000 hours. We still managed to surprise them and get the scream.

Laurence: But on the other end of the spectrum, of course, with those 10 years, you need to be bringing in newer players as well. How do you deal with newer players who might be a little bit worried about coming into a game that's been going on for 10 years? Perhaps too much has happened in that time, and there’s a lot to learn.

Dave: Yeah, we absolutely know. We realise that the game is 10 years old, and it’s becoming quite dense and complicated to understand. And if you are watching a streamer or content creator playing the game, they already have that knowledge. So it's intimidating, and maybe they think this game isn’t for me?

So it is part of our plans, especially with the graphics rework and everything else. It's also about the other systems we're reviewing, such as onboarding and progression, and how we will communicate this to provide a ramp for new players. Because even when we talk to our veterans, they want new blood, right? They want new players to come in. They want a bigger community.

Laurence: Okay, so in terms of all the years of updates, which killer or new feature has taught the team the most? Whether that's new things moving forward or something that went wrong in the past, perhaps you built upon it?

Dave: Sure, I can think of a few. I mean, maybe a bit boring. They're mostly technical. So, 10 years ago, in 2016, we started using Scaleform technology for our menus, and it's now obsolete. It's not even supported anymore. So transferring these massive systems to a new code base, for example, is tough.

Like, we can’t stop for a year and fix this. We have to create new content. You have to stay interesting. So that is really, really complicated. It's like repairing a plane while you’re still flying. You can't land. You just have to keep going.

Laurence: And then you guys mentioned, obviously, all the new graphical work and building new rigs too! That must be so much work, transferring and updating everything.

Mathieu: Fortunately, it's not the same team as the live team that continues to build the game. It's a different team working solely on that. They didn't want to derail the new game as it is. But yeah, it's an incredible amount of work.

Dave: That's a luxury that we take today that we couldn't before.

Laurence: Are there any features that you remember testing or, you know, ideating in the middle of the process that just didn't get into the main game? Some that might have changed it. For better or worse.

Mathieu: Killer powers or Perks. So many things that we tried. Usually, when we do that, we try about five ideas, and one is the best, but that doesn't mean the other four are bad. They're just not as good for what we're trying to do right now. So, yeah, there's quite a lot. And we never throw anything away, right?

Laurence: Yeah, of course. You put it in a drawer for a rainy day.

Dave: Speaking of things that didn’t quite make it. Here is an interesting story. Early on, we had issues with killers camping in front of the hook. We were like, no, no, no, that's not how you play the game. But we were all like playing with honour here, right? Yeah. A bit naive thinking that everybody else would. But it's boring for everybody to do that.

So one of the first features we tested to fix that was to weaponise the survivors of the hook and give them away to kick the killer! And it empowered the survivor with this kind of toxic weapon and broke the immersion of being a victim. It's like, I'm not scared anymore!

Laurence: That's interesting, talking about balance. How do you manage the voices in the community that kind of run counter to the long-term health of the game? Because, whether you're making nerfs or balances, obviously you're going to get this big kind of outcry from certain people. But you have to do things for the long-term health of the game, or it’ll be damaging later on.

Mathieu: The thing is, people do scream. It's known on the internet. But oftentimes it's not even so much what they're screaming, but why they're screaming, and it's not always the same thing.

So that's why we have a big player data group that essentially looks at the game's stats. Like, how many kills happen with killers? Are they more successful than others? And then you have the community managers who are mostly trying to take all this online noise and translate it into understandable language so we can understand what people are screaming about, what's the biggest concern. And then we sort of ingest it all and try to make an educated decision around it.

Dave: It's a challenge, because sometimes there's a solution that we know would be ideal in the long term, right? Like, if we build this, we'll fix that issue for good, in a great way that actually enhances the gameplay experience. But it is so expensive and will take so much time that we can't do it, and we need a solution that's not as great but will help right now.

Laurence: So, speaking about the community, it must be difficult when people are hyping up something. They've got this idea in their head for a killer that they want. Oh, this person is coming, this person's coming. But it's often not in your control. Sometimes you release a character, and people are like-

Mathieu: That's not the one we wanted!

Laurence: But, of course, you've got to deal with licenses and all that.

Mathieu: And you can't say anything. No. That's the thing. You can never address it.

Dave: And it happens, and sometimes we feel like we're cursed. But it's impossible to control.

Mathieu: The other thing is that people talk a lot about “The Community”, but there is no such thing as the community. It's about 5,000 different communities.

You know, your community - it’s the content creators that you know, it's the subreddits you visit, it's those things in your language, in your geographical region, and it's very different for other people who live in other places. And so one community might be screaming their heads off about some things, and some other people are like, yeah, no, that's fine. We don't care about that.

Laurence: That's true. There are so many audiences all over the place.

Mathieu: That's it. But we have one game, right? So you can’t say, Oh, in Japan, we'll patch it this way because, of course, they play differently. No, it has to be everywhere in the world.

Laurence: Yeah, you can’t cater to everyone, can you? You also mentioned a bit about the modding experience in the presentation. Could you expand on that a bit? Like, what kind of tools are you giving people? And how far can people push that?

Dave: So that's something we'll announce later. So if we can't talk about the details just yet. It’s a controlled experience. It's as open as we can make it, legally, tastefully. So, of course, there's a lot of gatekeeping and barriers we need to put in.

But we really want players to be able to explore whatever they want, creatively. For example, when we build a mode, we want it to be a horror mode; we want to create an experience that we feel would be in a horror movie, right? But for the players, if they want to make something super silly, go for it. Like, this is not our universe anymore. It's your own parallel DbD universe.

Laurence: Thinking about the modding community, if you look at, I don't know, for example, Skyrim or something, look at the modern community for that. I mean, that game came out in like 2011 or something. But people are still making mods for it today.

Mathieu: That's part of the objective here: to give people even more ways to enjoy the game. And also a way for them to tell us what they want the game to be.

We want to create an experience that we feel would be in a horror movie, right? But for the players, if they want to make something super silly, go for it.

Laurence: That's true, yes! So, in this shifting world of live service games, why do you think Dead by Daylight has managed to grab this core community and hold onto it? A lot of games these days pop into existence and then die in a second.

Dave: There are so many components to this. The work, the good timing, making the right move and the right decision at the right time, but there is also a lot of luck.

Mathieu: A lot of luck. A lot of luck. There's also, I think, originally, we did not build a live-service game. That was not what we built. We built a game, put it out there, and said, "If you want more, we've got a couple of chapters and new stories." But that's the game. Enjoy it. That's it.

And I think it was year two or three when the in-game store came in, which is nowadays, if you were saying you need to build a game that's a live service game, that's basically the first thing people think to include. But instead, we were able to not do that. And so, essentially, we became a live service game because people wanted to keep playing. Not the other way around.

Laurence: I mean, it’s said, just focus on making a good product. If people want it, they will stay.

Mathieu: Exactly, that’s it!

Laurence: Well, that was pretty much everything I wanted to ask, so thank you.

Dave: Thank you so much.

Mathieu: It was really nice to talk to you.

Laurence: Yeah, you guys too. Thank you so much. And again, congrats on the 10 years!