Cast your mind back, and you might recall Dead Island 2’s eventual, near-decade-long journey to release. Well, a former exec overseeing the project has now spoken a little more on its troubled development, claiming its scrapped first iteration would have “killed the franchise”.
Dead Island 2 was initially announced back in 2014, with the expectation it would launch the following year. However, delays ensued and 2015 brought the news developer Yager had departed the project, with studio boss Timo Ullmann saying its vision for the project “fell out of alignment” with publisher Deep Silver. Development then shifted to Sumo Digital and finally to Dambuster Studios, which released Dead Island 2 to a solid critical reception in 2023.
Now though, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz, former Deep Silver head of communications Martin Wein has shed a little more light on Dead Island 2’s troubled journey during a panel at Develop:Brighton. Asked for an example of when marketing or player research had helped get a development team back on track after it had veered away from a design vision, Wein specifically cited Dead Island 2, highlighting it as an instance of when he and his team had caused an “eight-year product delay”.
As recounted by Wein, Deep Silver had a “major milestone with the [then] development studio” shortly after its 2014 E3 reveal. “And boy, that game sucked… It had nothing to do with what [made] the original Dead Island […] really fun. So we commissioned a play test and got horrific feedback.” Wein later told GamesIndustry. biz, “the developer wanted to pursue their vision rather than follow player feedback”, and when the game remained the same at the next milestone, the decision was made to find a new studio.
“Sometimes you have to make hard decisions,” Wein continued during his panel appearance. “Because we could have, at that point, put out a shit game. It might have made some money, but it would have killed the franchise… I think at that point Deep Silver did the right thing, and Dead Island 2 was a commercial success in the end. Because they took that step, and they said that we need to make a game that fits for the player.”
All of which resolves at least some of the early mystery around Dead Island 2’s troubles. As to its quiet time at Sumo Digital, Wein shared nothing on that period of its development – but its strange saga did at least have a happy ending. When Dead Island 2 finally released in 2023, some nine years after its announcement, the gory zombie sequel successfully shifted 1m units in its first weekend of sales, and was loitering somewhere around the 4m mark by February this year. Hopefully a third entry, should it ever happen, will have a smoother road to release.