Dead by Daylight turned ten years old on June 14, 2026, and Behaviour Interactive marked it in a big way, with a huge party. The event took place at the Old Port of Montreal and included developer panels, an art expo, more cosplay than the venue probably planned for, and a broadcast stuffed with reveals. What’s amazing about that is the fact the game is still going. A lot of games will get a year’s worth of content and then the developers abandon the content aspect and focus on bug fixes and then it stays as is after that. Dead by Daylight is still going though. What started as a game with three killers and a limited number of things to do is still growing, while almost every horror game that tried to do what it does is dead and buried.
I have put a lot of hours into The Fog. Over 2000 hours on Steam the last time I looked. In that time I have watched the entire genre Dead by Daylight basically created turn into a graveyard. While games like Last Year, VHS, and Friday the 13th died, Dead by Daylight still stands holding the knife over the games that it has outlived.
A Decade Since the First Trial
When Dead by Daylight launched in 2016, the pitch sounded a little ridiculous on paper. Four survivors, one killer, one trial. The survivors sneak around a map repairing five generators to power the exit gates, and the killer stalks them, downs them, and hangs them on hooks to sacrifice them to The Entity, the god-like thing that feeds on all of it. That asymmetry was the whole trick. One side has power, the other side has numbers and information, and the tension lives in that gap.
The launch roster was small and would feel almost quaint now. The Trapper, The Wraith, and The Hillbilly carried the early days. The Nurse launched a short time later and is still sitting near the top of competitive play a decade later because her teleporting power ignores the walls everyone else has to respect. None of that explains why the game survived, though. Plenty of games launch with a clever hook. The hook is not what kept the lights on.
The Asymmetrical Horror Graveyard
Look at what came after. Friday the 13th: The Game arrived in 2017 with a license people would have killed for and a genuine shot at the throne. Deathgarden was Behaviour’s own attempt to run a second asymmetrical horror game, and even they could not keep it alive. Last Year: The Nightmare came and went. Evil Dead: The Game launched to real excitement and then got delisted. VHS, Propnight, and a handful of others never made it past a flicker of attention.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre game from 2023 is the closest thing to a survivor, and even that one has spent its life fighting an uphill battle for players. The pattern is brutal and consistent. Studios saw Dead by Daylight printing success and assumed the format was the magic. It was not. The format is easy to copy. The thing that actually matters is much harder, and it is the reason every one of those games faded while Behaviour kept building.
How Friday the 13th Killed Itself
The clearest example is the one with the best license. Friday the 13th: The Game should have been the game to beat. It had Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake, and Kane Hodder doing the motion capture. What it did not have, before long, was a future. A copyright dispute between original screenwriter Victor Miller and director Sean Cunningham froze all new content, and a horror game built on a live treadmill cannot survive standing still. The dedicated servers went dark, the game was pulled from sale, and the whole thing collapsed under a legal fight that had nothing to do with how it played. I wrote a full breakdown of that mess in why Jason Voorhees was kept out of Dead by Daylight for ten years, because the same fight reaches into this story too.
Contrast that with Dead by Daylight, which pushed out a new chapter roughly every three months for ten straight years. Friday the 13th got one set of content and then nothing. Behaviour built a machine designed to never stop feeding players, and when its biggest rival was forced to stop feeding entirely, the gap became a canyon. You can read the full slasher history on the Friday the 13th franchise page if you want the rest of that saga.
The Licensing Machine Nobody Could Match
The real moat was the crossovers. No other horror game has ever pulled off what Dead by Daylight did with licensing. Michael Myers showed up early, then Freddy Krueger, then Leatherface, and the floodgates stayed open. Pyramid Head walked in from Silent Hill. Nemesis and Albert Wesker arrived from Resident Evil. Pinhead, Sadako from Ringu, the Xenomorph from Alien, Chucky, and even Dracula from Castlevania all eventually shared the same roster. The Demogorgon brought in Stranger Things, and Leatherface gave the game a foothold in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre world too. They even have Nicolas Cage as himself in the game.
That breadth is the part rivals could never answer. A competitor might land one big license or be based on a license, like Evil Dead or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Behaviour assembled what amounts to a horror hall of fame under one roof, and once a player has their favorite icon in the game, leaving for a competitor means leaving that icon behind. The licensing became the lock-in. It is the single hardest thing to replicate, and nobody has come close.
Jason Finally Walks Into the Fog
Which brings me to the moment I did not think I would ever actually see. On June 16, 2026, two days after the anniversary, Jason Voorhees arrived in Dead by Daylight as Chapter 40, listed as The Slasher. His power, Omnipresent Evil, is built to make him feel as inescapable in a trial as he is on screen. With Jason in the roster, the game now holds Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Ghostface, Leatherface, and Jason all at once, the entire Mount Rushmore of slashers standing in one place.
Sit with the irony of that for a second. The licensing fight that buried Friday the 13th: The Game is a cousin of the same rights tangle that kept Jason locked out of Dead by Daylight for ten years. The game that out-survived its rival eventually outlasted the legal mess itself and then walked away with the very icon that was supposed to belong to the competition. Jason’s own game died waiting on lawyers. Jason ended up in the game that refused to die. There is no cleaner way to show why Dead by Daylight won the genre than that.
Year 11 and No Plans for a Sequel
The anniversary broadcast made it obvious Behaviour is not slowing down. Art the Clown from the Terrifier films is set to join as a licensed killer in November 2026. A full chapter based on The Casting of Frank Stone, the Supermassive narrative game from 2024, is coming in March 2027. There is a community-built chapter on the way, a long-requested mall map, and a complete visual and animation overhaul rolling out in phases starting in 2027. A Dead by Daylight movie is officially in development at Blumhouse with Thordur Palsson directing and a screenplay from Alexandre Aja and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, aiming for filming in 2027.
The most telling detail, though, was Behaviour confirming there are no plans for a Dead by Daylight 2. Instead of resetting and asking everyone to rebuild their collections from scratch, the team is committing to evolving the original for years to come. After watching so many rivals chase the format and fall, that decision reads less like caution and more like a studio that finally understands exactly what it built. Ten years in, Dead by Daylight is not the last asymmetrical horror game standing by luck. It is standing because it is the only one that ever figured out the part that actually mattered.
