Horror fans are confused. Every time a licensed multiplayer horror game gets brought up, two things tend to happen: commenters wonder if it can dethrone Dead by Daylight, and they speculate that the game will shut down quickly. It’s happening again today, as I’ve recently published my Halloween review. Comments on YouTube and in Discord servers are already repeating the sentiments I’ve seen for many years now.
“Probably be dead in six months to a year because no one can live aside DBD.”
“It will be dead within a month like the rest.”
“The real question is, will it go the way of Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, and Texas Chain Saw, and not touch Dead by Daylight?”
I view this response as a kind of mass hallucination. This obsession over a game’s health and future prospects is a widespread problem in a number of genres right now, but it’s been especially irksome in the multiplayer horror space, where people rely on points that may feel true but don’t prove accurate upon closer inspection.
I’ve played nearly every licensed multiplayer horror game, like those named above and others, like Killer Klowns and Predator: Hunting Grounds. For the past decade, Hollywood licensors have been increasingly interested in adapting their intellectual properties to games, and with each new one revealed, there’s an expectation among players and onlookers that they will die off, failing to topple the titan of the genre, Dead by Daylight.
It’s true that Dead by Daylight remains in a league of its own in terms of its community size. What I find absurd, though, is that these other games are seeking to usurp Behaviour Interactive’s decade-long success story. Not one of these games seems to have aspirations or expectations of replacing DBD. Ultimately, they’re very different things, and these other adaptations are only looking to earn their place alongside DBD.
Halloween is the latest multiplayer horror game to be held up to the unfair DBD standard.
In some important ways, Dead by Daylight is closer to Fortnite than it is Friday the 13th or Halloween. To date, DBD has brought more than 40 killers, many of them from licensed horror movies and shows, to its one-size-fits-all framework. Except in cases of limited-time modes, DBD is always about four players sneaking around dozens of different maps, repairing generators, avoiding being hooked, and escaping off the map before the killer ends them. It’s a fun game I literally play every night, but it doesn’t offer a bespoke experience. Whether you’re playing as Ghostface, Leatherface, Pinhead, or Chucky, your job is to prevent survivors from fixing generators and opening the exit doors.
It makes for a great, highly competitive gameplay loop, but it doesn’t make sense in any of these killers’ original universes. Freddy Krueger is obsessed with invading the dreams of Springwood kids. Outside of DBD, he’s never been seen guarding generators to prevent Steve from Stranger Things and Detective Tapp from Saw from powering the exit doors. Again, it’s a wonderful game, but the thing it lacks most is authenticity for any one slasher or other horror franchise. It’s never the point for games like Texas Chain Saw Massacre to try and take the crown from DBD. What these other games want to do is capture the spirit of their source material. That’s a goal that can, and does, coexist with DBD quite peacefully.
It’s true that some players who enjoy games like this only have enough time in a day to play one, and maybe on many days for many players, that’s DBD. But so far, hardly any of the other licensed asymmetrical multiplayer horror games have had grand designs as live-service games. They get cosmetics and updates, sure, but most don’t include things like daily or weekly check-in incentives, and when they have, they’re more lax than DBD’s full suite of live-service mechanics. They don’t want to be your forever-game the way DBD does. They’re different tastes, and I love the variety they collectively offer.
As prevalent and wrong-headed as that “DBD killer” narrative is, it’s really secondary to the “dead game” narrative. Players like to predict that each one of these new licensed horror games will die off quickly, “like the rest,” they say. But the truth is, history isn’t on these doomsayers’ side.
Games like Texas Chain Saw Massacre don’t try to beat DBD; they just want to live alongside it.
Friday the 13th died because of a legal drama that saw its rights change hands, and any ongoing deals based on it, such as IllFonic and Gun’s multiplayer game, were forced to end. Suffice it to say, though this could happen again in theory, it would seem to be a rare case, perhaps never to be repeated. If that legal battle had never happened, I expect Jason would still be alive today.
In nearly every other case, games of this sort are doing fine. Not everything has to be the biggest game in the world. I worry players have become so obsessed with Steam player counts that they’ve stood in the way of their own fun. You can hop into a round of Killer Klowns, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or Predator right now. While some are no longer adding new content, they’re all in good shape, and I still enjoy rotating through them regularly.
Players especially like to call out Texas Chain Saw Massacre as some sort of cautionary tale, saying that the developers failed to deliver on content promises, even though all they ever promised was to support the game with new updates as long as it made financial sense for the studios involved. That lasted about two years, which seems fine to me. If I paid $30 for a game and had a blast for two years, I’d call that getting my money’s worth.
The pushback against that seems born from the idea that every multiplayer game must now be both massive and ever-changing. Can’t games just be fun for a while anymore? I don’t want to see them go offline; don’t get me wrong. But so long as they stay playable, why must they keep offering new things to do? It’s like regular players now take their cues from the venture capitalists infecting every fandom with never-ending expectations to grow and prosper more than they did last week, last month, last year. It makes me want to scream: We have a bunch of fun video games based on some of the best horror movies ever made!
I do admit, not every example supports my argument. I know of two horror games that went offline and were delisted: Evil Dead and Puppet Master. In the case of the former, I’d only note that I found it to be the least enjoyable of all those I’ve played. That doesn’t mean I wanted it to be delisted, and the teams behind that decision, Saber and Boss Team, deserve criticism for taking it away like that.
Evil Dead is a rare example of a multiplayer horror game closing down unceremoniously.
As for Puppet Master, I almost have to excuse that one. I’m neck-deep in this genre, and I nearly never knew it existed, only spotting it on Steam a short while before it got taken down. It seems it wasn’t even on the map of players like me. I certainly wish I got to play it, and that others could do so whenever they wanted to, but to me these are exceptions to the rule.
On the whole, horror multiplayer games are doing well. It feels like we’ve hardly scratched the surface of what other games can spring up from this trend–please, somebody make my Scream game with social deduction, whodunnit leanings. For now, Halloween is the latest of them, and yet another really fun one. I wish horror fans could experience these for what they are, rather than fold each of them into a bigger conversation about their financial prospects. I am literally Michael Myers, and I’m having a great time. That alone is worth celebrating.
