Today, publisher Deep Silver and developer Dambuster Studios have announced that Dead Island 2 has broken through the 20 million player milestone. This comes after the game immediately turned into Deep Silver's best-ever launch, with two million units sold in less than two months. Later, the player base expanded even more thanks to the launch on Game Pass, and more recently, it was even given away for free during the Epic Games Store 2025 MEGA Sale. Both promotions inevitably greatly helped inflate the player figures.
Still, today, the publisher-developer duo also confirmed that a new franchise entry is already in development. As teased by the image, it will likely take place elsewhere, abandoning the Los Angeles setting for somewhere else.
Dead Island 2 was released in April 2023 after a very troubled development. It changed hands not once but twice; the original project was being handled by Yager (Spec Ops: The Line, The Cycle) and was scheduled to launch in Q2 2015. However, that year, Deep Silver announced it had decided to change the development studio. In 2016, that studio was confirmed to be Sumo Digital.
That didn't pan out, either. Three and a half years later, it was put into the hands of the internal team Dambuster Studios. That was just a few months before the pandemic, which would inevitably delay the project (as it did for literally everything) even further. After all this ruckus, Dambuster's game inevitably raised some eyebrows when it approached the launch window. However, it proved everyone wrong by delivering a solid and fun core experience.
In Wccftech's review, Francesco De Meo rated Dead Island 2 7.5 out of 10:
Games that go through development hell hardly turn out great, but Dambuster Studio proved with Dead Island 2 that this is not always the case, although the game is far from a masterpiece. While the gameplay works and feels quite fun at the start of the game, things become repetitive very quickly due to the linearity of the experience and the shallowness of the combat system. Offering nothing more than some mindless fun, the game would have been more than fine if launched at a lower price, but at full price, Dead Island 2 doesn't offer that much to justify it.
What would you like to see in Dead Island 3? Let us know below!
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