The Queer Appeal of ’Dead by Daylight’

A few months ago, a friend introduced me to this peculiar horror game he was playing on Nintendo Switch. The game, Dead by Daylight, originally came out in 2016, but quickly enveloped my life. Working from home with minimal social interaction and looming financial precarity put a heavy strain on my mental health, and a horror video game where I’m constantly fighting for survival felt like a kind of virtual exposure therapy.

If you haven’t played before, here are the gameplay basics for Dead by Daylight. Five players are in each round: one killer and a team of four survivors. The team of survivors work together to repair generators, while the killer attempts to catch the survivors and impale their bodies on giant hooks strewn across the map. If the team of survivors is able to repair five generators, then any survivors who have not been sacrificed by the killer can try to escape out the exit gates.

I am definitely not the only member of the queer community currently obsessed with Dead by Daylight. The game is quite popular with Twitch streamers who use the LGBTQIA+ tag. Even Trixie Mattel, from Rupaul’s Drag Race, is an avid fan of the game and recently played Dead by Daylight on Twitch as part of a charity stream.

Dead by Daylight fleshes out its survivors and killers with detailed game lore exploring their backstory and motivations. In June, the development team behind Dead by Daylight, Behavior, acknowledged a lack of diversity in the game’s lore: “We did set our character’s preferences in the past, notably in heterosexual relationships,” the developers posted on the game’s official Twitter account.

We spoke with five Twitch streamers who are members of the queer community and regularly play Dead by Daylight to investigate why a video game that was not intentionally created for the queer community has gained such traction with this audience.

Sammy, aka simplesammy, primarily streams as a survivor in Dead by Daylight. He is especially drawn to the character of Zarina. “I was honestly so surprised when she was released, because I relate to her so much. My dad is a Syrian immigrant to Canada, and her story is similar. She is the child of two Arab immigrant parents (reference) who come to the U.S,” he said.