In honor of the game's fifth birthday, Behaviour Interactive and Dead by Daylight released a plethora of in-game statistics, including the survivors and killers played the most by gamers. Dead by Daylight is celebrating the anniversary of the game's release with cosmetic rewards, challenges, discounts in the in-game store, and in-game currency. Though it started on June 30, this celebration only runs for another week, ending on July 15.
Behaviour Interactive first released Dead by Daylight in 2016 with three killers and four survivors created in-house. Now, the game has 27 survivors and 24 killers and matches are played across 15 maps. They are no longer solely Behaviour-created killers and survivors, because the developer has partnered and received licensed authorization to include iconic horror/scary icons, including characters from A Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw and Stranger Things. Most recently, Dead by Daylight did a collaboration with Resident Evil and now features iconic characters: Jill Valentine, Leon S. Kennedy, Chris and Claire Redfield (through legendary outfits), and the Nemesis. The iconic Raccoon City Police Station from Resident Evil 2 was also included as a new map. Although the map had to be pulled out of rotation the day of release due to bugs and crashes, the RCPD map has since been re-enabled.
The in-game statistics from Dead by Daylight were shared by a press release, and they revealed the top three most played survivors: 3) Feng Min, 2) Meg Thomas and 1) Claudette Morel. Interestingly, these are all original survivors made for the game and not any of the licensed survivors from other franchises featured in the game. These three characters are also appealing to players because of the perks included and unlocked with these characters. The most popular survivor perks were found to be: 3) Dead Hard, 2) Borrowed Time and 1) Self-Care. Self-care is one of Claudette's perks, which gives the survivor the ability to heal themself when injured without a med-kit. On the other end, the three most played killers are: 3) Doctor, 2) Huntress and 1) Wraith. The three most popular killer perks are: 3) Hex: No One Escapes Death [NoED], 2) Hex: Ruin and 1) Barbecue & Chili. None of the top perks are specific to the top killers, unlike with the survivors.
They also revealed more general in-game statistics. After five years of being available, players have played more than 420 million in-game hours. That equates to more than 1.8 billion survivor sacrifices by killers and more than 1.5 billion survivors who have escaped their match. Amazingly, more than two billion generators have been repaired by survivors. Those are amazing feats considering that Dead by Daylight just surpassed 100,000 concurrent players on Steam, and that doesn't include console players. One of the big benefits Dead by Daylight is its crossplay functionality, which allows fans to play with people on other systems.
When playing any video game where character customization and decisions are on the table, players tend to naturally develop a favorite. With Dead by Daylight, it is no different. It is exciting to see how far Dead by Daylight has come over five years post-launch. With Behavior Interactive continually working on the game, creating new original content and partnering with various franchises to bring well-known faces to the game, it will be interesting to see how or if these statistics change over the next few years.
Dead by Daylight is available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, PC, Switch and Stadia. It is also available for download through Xbox Game Pass.