How much longer?
So the game is over a decade old now and that's quite impressive especially given it's only become more and more popular, but realistically, how much life do you believe DBD has left?
Another 10? More? Less?
Interested to hear your thoughts and why.
Comments
Dbd too big to fail and has monopoly in the horror asymmetrical niche, no game has any odds to challenge it. So as long as the devs dont make a catastrophic mistake like new mmr system that kill of new or casual playerbase or stop getting new licenses etc, the game likely survive another 5 years easily.
The only way to die if a new dbd 2 made by the devs so the old core is abandoned. This probably will happen as dbd foundation code wise is very flawed and likely will give out in the future or playerbase starts to fail and need a rejuvenation project.
Anyway in 3-5 years the game future likely secure.
Later could be a new one
hopefully forever, if they end severs one day I hope they give server side connections when shutting em down or people start running custom servers for people to play on.
Ds/ wii come to mind. can still play online with em because community kept it alive.
The game easily survives 5 more years but will likely die out and will turn into something like Tf2, a game with a small dedicated community that makes mods and such to keep the game fresh and alive.
It will probably die when a good assym competitor comes out and will probably get a sequel in my opinion at that point, to get rid of 500 perks it would have (personally I want a new features maybe something like perk combo where if you bring 2 perks that give some strong bonus).
It is impossible like dozens tried but none of these succeeded. The most recent try already lost 3/4 playerbase. And I dont think the Myers game has any odds either. It is simple nobody can compete with licenses and the horror niche is small, most wouldn't switch after years investment into ecosystem. Further than that as history proves the odds are extremely low so most very cautious jumping ship
What game lost 3/4 of playerbase if I might ask?
I do also believe that Myers game doesn't have the odds but I feel like there's going to be an assym from some indie game company which can compete with dbd, in 5 years probably my guess. Not a horror assym that has 1v4 probably can succeed.
Carnival hunt its the newest attempt at the genre its 1 vs 5. But from 2600 players went to 600 in 3 weeks. Can't compete against dbd
Yeah was thinking you meant that one but was not 100% sure. My friend played it somewhat and tried to get me into it even before it was released but it just did not really seem that interesting to me.
Yeah same, the style didnt appeal to me, just always keeping eye on possible competitors.
I telling now that Halloween wont have any chance the gameplay loop will revolve around NPCs either killing or rescue them, so essentially thats already a fatal flaw, and no role choice is almost guaranteed.
Is it that DBD is too big to fail or the fact that there hasn’t been anything to challenge it? Cause I think DBD is at it’s most vulnerable. They are bleeding players and they continue to listen to content creators who have terrible takes. If the right game comes along they’re in trouble.
I think the biggest challenge / risk to DBD in the near future is the upcoming graphical update and the rebuild to remove all the spaghetti code. Both might be a bit of a gamble, because assuming that will mean leaving older platforms and weaker PC set ups behind, it could leave a lot of the player base behind with them (at least in the short term, anyway. Given that DBD can currently run on pretty much anything, that could be quite a lot of players). So unless the AI bubble bursts, with the increased cost of hardware it could be a while before a lot of players are able to upgrade. And with all the content that the game has, the re-coded game could be a buggy mess that might take BHVR months to get into shape.
But then again, perhaps the update will give DBD a new lease of life and bring in players that were turned off by the dated graphics. It could go either way. Maybe they've planned for a potential drop in players and have money in the bank saved up to keep them going. In any case, if it can get through that update OK, I can see DBD lasting indefinitely.
But I do think we're pretty close to DBD's peak popularity already. There's not much left that could be added to push up the player numbers beyond what we already have (besides adding polarising content that isn't horror like a Star Wars chapter). I doubt it will ever be as popular as Fortnite or Marvel Rivals, horror games are a niche genre and don't have the same potential to grow.
That said, so long as BHVR can attract new players, I can't see it ever coming to an end. Even if BHVR were to put DBD into maintenance mode and just focused on selling new skins, there are probably enough hardcore players to sustain it for a long time yet.
Well, with the creation of Modding Tools and official BHVR support, the total game rewrite/revamp, and the dozens of licenses probably in queue currently (as well as all the new, cool things that will be popularized in the next 5-10 years), I truly think DBD may be at a point where unless BHVR truly, undoubtably turns violent on their community (which probably won't happen), I think DBD is too big to fail at this point.
TF2 despite everything is still kicking and that's because the community loves the game and showcases that through all the community driven maps, modes, cosmetics, events, etc etc. I think DBD come 2028 will look pretty similar.
When I got involved in DbD more heavily 4ish years ago I thought the game was on its downswing and at the 10 year mark the game would be entering life support. I was obviously wrong on that.
The game could still be quite profitable with a lot less players than it has now, so 5 to 10 more years of the current release schedule is pretty easy to see.
The two caveats
1: The potential for a competitor. I think the genre is extremely hard to get right and its unlikely, but not impossible, for a competitor to take their place.
2: This presumes BHVR doesn't commit a horrible mistake. If the game was to ever see a sudden drop, I think it would be something like a patch that was broken/horrifically balanced that came out right before they all took a holiday break, and they couldn't recapture the player base afterward.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts forum community.
As much as we all have our issues with the game, it's nice to see we're all pretty optimistic and confident that there's plenty of years still to come.
I personally believe that if a competitor really stands a chance to be taken seriously, the foundation cannot be built on 1 licence and it'll need to follow the same formula of being an original creation with a core element that is accessible to casual players but allowing knowledge or skill expression of more invested gamers.
At the moment i can´t imagine a new competitor with the amount of licenses we got.
But the really need to do something for new players.
Learning curve is really steep at the moment and the grind gets more and more overwhelming.
For a competitor to succeed it needs a very fun Solo Q experience basically the survivor to be very strong, think when dbd started it was extremely survivor sided if launched a powerful killer state like this nowadays would have failed.
But here comes the issue, killer is the strongest ever been in dbd, so any competition will be discarded who doesn't offer a stronger more fun killer role. This is the typical result in the competition that survivor are way too strong and therefore nobody wants to play killer.
You might say what about making more fun than in dbd? Then simply survivors has no incentive to switch from dbd.
So no matter what the opposition does, its a lose lose situation.
Catering to any side result the other refusing to play. As people already heavily in the game ecosystem and need strong incentives to switch
My opinion on this has been the same on this for over 5 years now.
Until a real competitor arises. With the exception of Identity V which is just a mobile game that's been ported to PC and isn't sold on Steam, no game has cloned DbD's gameplay loop. Some competitors tied themselves to single franchises. Yes there are other asyms like VHS but they were very different from DbD.
I am still of the opinion that if someone, especially an AAA studio, cloned DbD's gameplay loop but did it with better code, better maps, better balancing, more frequent meta changes and better quality assurance they'd pull players from DbD. If it was good enough to retain those players it would be able to compete for licenses with DbD and maybe even pull licenses from DbD. Even if it didn't kill DbD (I doubt it would) just having competition would push BHVR to make DbD better at faster than glacial pace than we're currently getting.
But I've been waiting for so long that I am starting to resign myself that it might never happen and DbD is the best were going to get.
Without competition at least another 5 years, if not 10.
Horror is niche so thats why AAA company wont commit to this, as simply there arent enough people interested and probably the market research shows that dbd cornered the market completely, also history show again and again that new games in the genre cannot compete. The risk is simply too high and the audience caps out at 100k players maximum. This type of niche highly encouraging the cash grab method do a lazy one off license and then run after sales made.
So we have to accept at this point its dbd only
My guess, if the graphics update goes well, and the coding gets reworked properly, and the licenses keep coming in and expanding while in the game, along with a better tutorial/onboarding setup, than i'd guess another 15-20 years. And the reason for it lasting that long isnt just because of no competitor, but the time and money spent on progression, and constant new content to refresh the experience.
I played world of warcraft since it started, and the more it seemed to add, the more dull the game seemed to feel. To a point where id play for a while and then stop until the next expansion since they take very long to come out. The dullness, came from the game getting easier and less challenging to the point where you did'nt even need others to play the game with unless you wanted to go into dungeons (which you also didnt need the gear from anymore because it was much easier to fight stuff on your own compared to when the game first started ).
Dbd however gets more challenging the larger it gets, for both sides, which for me prevents it from getting dull. The game only feels quite dry when the only new content coming in is something you aren't interested in and have to wait months to even hear whats next, innwhich case cosmetics usualy give you something to look forword to in between. So theres a lot to keep people glued to the game.
DBD got so much more than 15-20 years left. You're forgetting that we're getting official modding support alongside the code and graphical overhauls.
That alone will straight up guarantee that DBD will last forever.
Depends for me, official support means alive as in getting new content from official devs.
If the support became only modding tools and game moved back to peer to peer i would consider it as dead while others still consider it as alive