How Dead by Daylight Mobile couldn't keep the terror going on phones

• Dead by Daylight is celebrating ten years of terror this year
• And between the swathe of announcements you might be wondering why it isn't on mobile
• Well, it was, but we're here to look at exactly why DbD Mobile is now dead and buried

Recently, Behaviour Interactive celebrated over ten years of their asymmetrical horror hit Dead by Daylight. There were several announcements, ranging from visual refreshes to a confirmed Scooby Doo crossover. Unfortunately, mobile fans were left out in the cold as Dead by Daylight Mobile is long since deceased.

On the surface, Dead by Daylight should’ve been a shoo-in for success on mobile. But after first launching back in 2020, it was shut down last year. So, what killed it? And why is it that others have found success with asymmetric horror?

What was Dead by Daylight Mobile?

If you’re not already familiar, here’s a brief overview: Dead by Daylight pits one killer against four survivors. The job of the survivors is to repair the generators scattered around the map and open the exit to escape. Meanwhile, the killer’s objective is to, well, kill the survivors.

In essence, it’s a slasher simulator, and a particularly successful one with plenty of crossover characters that’ve made appearances over the years.

Now, I should clarify I don’t want to say that DbD Mobile failed. It was live for a whopping five years, more or less, and that’s still impressive for any mobile game. However, it undoubtedly always fell into the shadow of its original version and never really lived up to its potential.

Put it this way, Dead by Daylight drew in a whopping one million players at launch. Fantastic numbers, right? But in the world of mobile, that’s small potatoes, as Identity V now boasts over 300 million players total. It’s numbers like that which DbD Mobile was up against, and for NetEase, who also operated Identity V, it was the yardstick against which they were being measured.

Stumble Guys syndrome

A major reason Dead by Daylight Mobile was destined for the scrapheap is, in my opinion, due to Stumble Guys syndrome. Essentially, despite being the original, much like Fall Guys versus Stumble Guys, it was outmanoeuvred by competitors built from the ground up for mobile rather than offering a simple port of the original.

In the case of asymmetric horror, you’ve got dozens of options. Identity V, for example, which preceded DbD Mobile when it first released in 2018, and is still going strong. And that means you’d be relying on dedicated fans who want a smartphone experience, but I don’t think it’s controversial to say many of those fans are purely PC players, given that’s arguably Dead by Daylight’s strongest platform.

Identity V also takes advantage of being on mobile with plenty of collaborations and events, as well as an art style that has a more approachable and less gory quality than Dead by Daylight Mobile. This, and its gameplay being optimised for mobile, means that fans get more out of it than they did with DbD Mobile.

Is horror big enough on mobile?

When we were discussing this briefly behind-the-scenes, the topic of other examples of asymmetric horror was brought up. And truth be told, only Identity V and another game, Mimicry, came up. There are plenty of scary games, but not many that follow the same format as Dead by Daylight.

With that in mind, I feel as though Dead by Daylight Mobile was never going to live up to the promise of the original. Competitors were already well-established and while DbD Mobile hung on for quite a while, it never really had anything to offer which others didn’t already have.

It’s even worth noting that Dead by Daylight’s competitors on console and PC have never really seen similar success as the original. Friday the 13th is long gone, as is Evil Dead: The Game. And despite other competitors coming and going, the broad appeal and various characters in Dead by Daylight have made it the most successful option for asymmetric horror.

Ultimately, I think Dead by Daylight Mobile suffered from not being the first mobile game to offer asymmetric horror, and being a pure port meant that it wasn’t built from the ground up to take advantage of mobile as a platform. It’s a shame it never worked out, but a proper spinoff instead of a pure port would have (at least in my opinion) worked out better for Dead by Daylight on mobile.

Maybe in the future we’ll see Behaviour Interactive or NetEase revisit the idea of Dead by Daylight on mobile. But for the moment it feels as if asymmetric horror fans are happy to stick to the big screen for their fix, and those purely on mobile already have their own options such as Identity V.