13 Harrowing Dead by Daylight Player Count Stats to Hook You in 2023

Game developers often prioritize consoles. In fact, many games end up as console exclusives. If a game proves popular enough, the devs might port it over to PC.

Not Dead by Daylight, though. It came out on PC in 2016, on consoles a whole year later, and then on mobile in 2020. Surely it must be good to warrant this many ports, right?

Keep reading to find out everything about the title—from Dead by Daylight’s player count to what makes it stand out among others survival horror games.

Chilling DbD Player Count Facts (Editor’s Choice)

• Over the last two years, the average number of players is 40,000-75,000.
• DbD’s Resident Evil expansion attracted huge interest among new audiences.
• Dead by Daylight broke 100,000 concurrent players in 2021.
• The game has had 26 DLCs so far.
• It was the 16th most downloaded game on PS5 in January 2021.
• It’s in the Top 20 most played games on Xbox.
• DbD’s daily player count sits at ~1 million users.
• Players have downloaded DbD over 36 million times across all platforms.

Basic Dead by Daylight Info to Start With

Terrific stats, right?

Wanna know what else will cause you to experience true terror?

Immersing yourself in Dead by Daylight. Don’t get us wrong, it’s stunning, but it’s also a one-versus-four survival multiplayer game.

1. When did Dead by Daylight get popular?

(Source: SteamCharts)

A quick look at the game’s population throughout the years shows a clear trend—it’s only going up. Dead by Deadlight’s average daily players have grown from about 10,000 in 2016-2017 to 20,000 in 2018-2019, up to around 40,000 in 2020-2021.

2. Dead by Daylight was released on mobile in 2020.

(Source: Wikipedia)

If you ever were in doubt about Dead by Daylight’s popularity, then this should convince you. The game originally came out in 2016, but as mobile gaming continued to grow in popularity, it got iOS and Android versions in 2020. If the devs thought all that work was worth it, then who are we to argue?

Dead by Daylight Players in Numbers

The game’s been around for a while, so there are lots of numbers to talk about. We’ll try to keep it simple by taking a look at the really impressive ones. For instance, those relating to DbD’s player count.

3. Players have downloaded DbD over 36 million times across all platforms.

(Source: VGChartz)

It’s true, we’re talking about a 5-year-old game that has had plenty of time on the market. In reality, though, most games die faster than that.

Dead by Daylight boasts player numbers few other titles can brag about.

4. Dead by Daylight broke 100,000 concurrent players in 2021. Twice.

(Source: SteamCharts)

You read right! The first time was in June, when 105,052 people logged in simultaneously to experience the Resident Evil DLC.

A few months later, in October, 100,416 players did the same for the Hour of the Witch DLC. No records were broken this time around, but it’s still an equally impressive achievement!

5. Dead by Daylight has had 26 DLCs so far.

(Source: Wikipedia)

A DLC in DbD usually means new characters, either killers or survivors. More often than not, it’s one of each.

In addition, 17 of the DLCs also introduced new maps.

6. Dead by Daylight is in the Top 20 most-played games on Xbox.

(Source: Microsoft)

Dead by Daylight’s exact player count on the Xbox is unknown, but the game ranks 19th in popularity on Microsoft’s store. Pretty good for an “old” title!

7. It was the 16th most downloaded game on PS5 in January 2021.

(Source: PlayStation)

Just like Microsoft, Sony makes it hard to get precise numbers. However, the company releases monthly blog updates on its top downloaded titles.

Dead by Daylight’s player count on the PS4 was among the highest out of any platform, but the game seems to be doing tremendously on the newer PS5 console, too.

8. Dead by Daylight has around 1 million daily players.

(Source: PC Gamer)

The keyword here is “across all platforms”.

Considering DbD hardly gets 100,000 players on Steam on a good day, though, some of the other platforms must be the real cash cows!

Asymmetrical Slasher Games: What Are They?

In short, a genre of multiplayer video games, in which players are divided in two teams that are not symmetrical (duh!), or equal. For instance, one team might be zombies, the other—survivors.

Meaning you can experience the game in totally different ways depending on which side you’re playing on.

Furthermore, in many ASSG games, there is a numerical discrepancy between the teams. In the case of DbD—one killer hunts four survivors.

Next, we’ll take a look at some popular titles in this genre and see how they compare to Dead by Daylight and its player count.

9. Friday the 13th was not a good day to release… Friday the 13th.

(Source: CBR)

Dead by Daylight has its competitors, but few come close to its greatness.

Friday the 13th is a very well-known movie franchise. Naturally, there have been attempts at creating video games based on their plot. Among them is Friday the 13th: The Game.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t very polished, and its only real appeal was playing as Jason. Even that went wrong, though, because only one person in the lobby got to play as the protagonist. This often led to other players quitting and ruining matches.

The devs didn’t see that coming… leading to shutting the servers down in November 2020.

Thus, the winner of the Dead by Daylight vs Friday the 13th battle is clear.

10. Dead by Daylight reigns supreme… for now.

(Source: Steam)

Let’s cut to the chase—if you want to play an asymmetrical horror game that actually has any semblance of a player base, you don’t have much of a choice.

DbD vs Last Year was the topic of many an article a couple of years ago. Last Year is now no longer available on Steam. That tells you enough about how alive it is.

Still, it’s not like the whole industry has given up. Hellbent Games is developing VHS, an upcoming title that’s supposed to be the next “DbD killer”. We have our doubts, but we can’t wait to see who wins the Dead by Daylight vs VHS fight.

DbD News

Dead by Daylight receives new content every few months, so it often finds itself in the limelight. This year, game journalists wrote about it a lot. Here’s why.

11. The Epic Store now sells DbD.

(Source: Twitter)

The game was made available on Epic’s platform at the beginning of December 2021.

To celebrate the occasion, they also made the base game available for free for a week. Hopefully, you got it. If you didn’t, don’t fret—you’d have still had to buy all the DLCs anyways. But now you can do it on a storefront of your choosing.

More choice is always good, right?

12. Dead by Daylight meets Ringu in a new DLC.

(Source: ComingSoon)

You know, The Ring, or Ringu, perhaps the single most famous Japanese horror movie.

Behaviour Interactive, the studio behind DbD, still hasn’t confirmed that Sadako (also known as Samara) will be the killer, though we’d be really surprised if she isn’t.

Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until March 2022 to start hiding in wells and scaring people.

13. Behaviour Interactive now deals in NFTs, too.

(Source: NME)

The studio released Chapter 21 of Dead by Daylight just a few months ago, and with it came DbD’s first NFTs. Specifically, we’re talking about a Pinhead character model, a Chatterer, a Lament Configuration, and some mystery items.

Needless to say, fans weren’t happy about this. Many people oppose NFTs due to their damaging impact on the environment as well as their perceived “pointlessness” since owners really get to own the item in question only digitally.

After the backlash, several other game studios have backtracked and decided to refrain from engaging in NFTs for the time being. Whether Behaviour Interactive will follow suit remains to be seen.

Wrap Up

Now you know a lot of things about the game, including how many active players Dead by Daylight has. You probably also noticed that its competition doesn’t seem to hurt it much.

We can say it’s doing pretty well. However, we hope the devs don’t let all this success get to their heads. The decision to sell NFTs proved to be a very unpopular one with the majority of fans, and in this case, fans equal customers. And when running any business, you definitely want to keep your customers happy.

Still, Dead by Daylight’s player count is high, and it’s only been going up. Continuous content updates are what made it a great game. And now, we’re looking forward to what might be the most exciting DLC so far.