It may come as a surprise to you, but Techland’s popular open-world zombie game Dying Light has a battle royale spinoff: Dying Light Bad Blood. It released two weeks ago on Steam, but things aren’t looking too good for it. The Dying Light Bad Blood player count has tanked since release, and the game may already be dead.
GitHyp reports that player counts for Dying Light Bad Blood have flatlined since the release date of September 13. It didn’t launch very successfully either, since concurrent player counts peaked at just 455 players in the game’s first week of sale. In the week since, from September 20, the peak count was just 285 players on Sunday, September 23. The counts have been steadily dipping since then, and yesterday (September 27) they peaked at just 130 players.
What’s perhaps worse is that player reviews for the game on Steam haven’t been particularly positive. The game is currently sitting on a ‘Mixed’ rating on Steam, and while a number of poor reviews are related to the low player counts (one reviewer notes that they got a refund after waiting an hour to find a game), most of the negative comments are about Bad Blood‘s gameplay. Reviews include complaints about the combat being “clunky and unfair” or suggestions that the game is laggy (with some gamers using this to their advantage), has little replayability, or poor item placement.
Techland is promising to do more to fix bugs and balance issues, with the help of the players, but perhaps one of the biggest issues is that Dying Light Bad Blood is selling for $19.99, whereas the most popular battle royale game Fortnite is free. It also doesn’t help that the game launched a month before Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 prepares to launch its own battle royale mode, Blackout. At least Dying Light 2 looks enormously exciting, but Bad Blood may already be a shambling corpse ready to have its head kicked off.
