Dead by Daylight Mobile

» see dbdmobile.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Dead by Daylight Mobile launched on 16 April 2020, four years after the PC game and a few weeks into a global lockdown that handed it the best possible audience. One killer hunts four survivors around a map of generators and meat hooks. The survivors repair while the killer patrols, and somebody always gets caught at the last gate. It took a million downloads inside 48 hours and ten million by October 2020.

By May 2022 it had passed 25 million downloads, which for a licensed port of a mid-size horror game is a serious number. Behaviour Interactive in Montreal owned the game itself. NetEase ran the mobile service in several Asian markets first and then took on the global version, which is an arrangement that works right up to the moment the publisher's priorities change.

Then NetEase killed the version it had and replaced it with another one. The old build came off the stores on 16 December 2022 and a rebuilt global version, co-developed with Behaviour, launched on 15 March 2023 with better lighting and mobile-only content. Three months of nothing sat in between. Players with thirty-two months invested in the first one started again on the second.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ twenty-five million downloads ~

The number is the most interesting thing in this shutdown. Twenty-five million installs is more than most standalone games sell in their lifetime, and it still was not a business NetEase wanted to keep running. Installs are not the number that decides a mobile port; retention is, and a four-against-one chase needs five people in a lobby simultaneously to function at all. Once the matchmaking thins out, a game shaped like this one simply stops working.

Mobile horror was never a category I went looking for. The offer here is forty minutes of being chased around a cornfield on a touchscreen, and the phone I carried in 2020 was a work tool whose battery had to last until evening. A good share of those 25 million installs came from markets where a phone is the only game console in the house. That audience is real and it has never included me.

~ the march 2023 build ~

The relaunch is worth recording because it means the product died twice. The second version ran for two years and five days, from 15 March 2023 to 20 March 2025, which is less time than the original version it was built to replace.

~ the parent outlived the child ~

In December 2024 NetEase announced the end, citing "ongoing shifts in NetEase Games' development and operational strategies". Both phone storefronts delisted it on 16 January 2025, and the servers stopped answering on 20 March 2025. Players were handed a transition package of rewards for the PC and console version, which is the politest form a mobile shutdown can take: the game you are losing has a bigger sibling, and here is a coupon for it.

Dead by Daylight itself passed nine years in June 2025 and is still releasing chapters. The mobile version it spawned managed four years and eleven months across two builds, and the second of those never reached a third anniversary.

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