Behavior Interactive calls Dead by Daylight the 'most-played horror game in history' at 10 years

Dead by Daylight just got an anniversary flex from its own developer: Behaviour Interactive says it is “the most played horror game in history.” And unlike a lot of milestone marketing, the company attached numbers to the brag. Ahead of the game’s 10th birthday, Behaviour said it has more than 70 million players over the decade and currently averages over 1 million players a day across all platforms.

For decision-makers, the important part is what those figures imply about durability in a genre that usually burns bright then fades. Behaviour also said Dead by Daylight remains particularly strong on Steam, where it has stayed among the top 15 best-sellers for nine years. That combination, long-tail platform performance plus daily active scale, is the closest thing the modern games industry has to a “category winner” signal.

Let’s unpack the incentives behind this kind of claim. Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical 4v1 multiplayer horror game, also described as a live service. Live service titles survive by constantly refreshing engagement loops, not by one-time box sales. Behaviour did not reveal an updated sales number, but it did share how the business is behaving: revenues have increased by more than 50% over the last 12 months. In other words, the company’s pitch to the market is not just “we’re popular,” it’s “we’re monetizing that popularity better than before.”

The company framed the milestone as a long runway that turned into a machine. When the game launched in 2016, 30 people were working on it. Now, Behaviour says the team is nearly 500 strong. It also emphasized that Behaviour is the largest Canadian gaming studio, with more than 1,200 employees spread across offices in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Dallas, Middlesbrough, and Rotterdam. That matters because headcount is one of the real costs behind live service. When you see nearly 500 people on a single title, you can infer why “10 years” is a milestone worth shouting: sustaining content and live operations at that scale is expensive, and it only works if player interest does not collapse.

Behaviour tried to lock in credibility by naming what “pioneered” means. Rémi Racine, Behaviour co-founder and CEO, said Dead by Daylight “pioneered a genre: the asymmetric multiplayer horror game, where one killer faces four survivors.” He also contrasted expectations versus outcomes: initial forecasts predicted sales of around 300,000 copies, and 10 years later the game has “more than 70 million players.” Racine added that 2025 was Dead by Daylight’s most successful year so far, with over six million new players, record performance, and growth continuing into 2026. He said over the last 12 months, revenues increased by more than 50%.

Crossover events are another engine in the story, and they are not subtle. Behaviour said Dead by Daylight has collaborated with a number of well-known horror franchises including Alien, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Resident Evil, Friday the 13th, and Stranger Things. In business terms, these partnerships act like distribution deals with built-in audience overlap. They can also reduce creative risk, because the game is not starting from a blank page every season. For executives overseeing growth, the meta-point is straightforward: when your core gameplay is stable, the calendar becomes your competitive moat, and licensed events can keep that calendar from going stale.

Now shift from “what happened” to “what happens next,” because Behaviour is also tying this claim to an information moment. The announcement comes as Behaviour prepares to welcome more than 3,000 fans to Montreal for a 10-year anniversary event where the future of the game will be revealed during a livestream. The livestream is set for 5pm PT / 8pm ET on Sunday, June 14. The presence of a large fan gathering signals the company expects to translate momentum into commitment, and for live service operators, that often means retention, re-activation of lapsed players, and a clearer pitch to the next wave of customers.

There is one nuance buried in the details that matters if you are benchmarking the “most played” claim. Behaviour’s statement relates to player numbers for an individual title, not a franchise as a whole. And IGN notes there are other contenders for the most-played horror game crown including titles in Capcom’s Resident Evil franchise, Konami’s Silent Hill series, the Five Nights at Freddy’s games, Phasmophobia, and Outlast. For executives, that distinction is the difference between winning a category versus owning a brand ecosystem. Dead by Daylight is being positioned as a single-title endurance story, not a multi-game franchise crown.

So what should peers take from this if you are running a studio, investing, or steering a portfolio? Dead by Daylight is demonstrating the hard-to-buy combination of long-lived audience, platform stickiness, and accelerating revenue. Behaviour’s scaling from 30 staff at launch to nearly 500, plus over 1,200 total studio employees, is the operational reality behind the headline. If you are evaluating other live service bets, this is the bar: the ability to keep “one game” relevant for a decade and still show revenues up more than 50% in a year. The 10-year anniversary livestream is the next chapter, but the business case is already written in the player counts.