TITLE
Inside Yager Development’s Failed Attempt To Make Dead Island 2
AUTHOR
Blake Hester
PUBLICATION
Game Informer
YEAR
2023
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
From announcement to release, Dead Island 2 was supposed to take less than a year. Instead, it took nine.Initially revealed on stage during Sony’s 2014 E3 press conference, Dead Island 2 had an infamously rocky road to release. What briefly began in the early 2010s at Techland, the developer behind the first Dead Island and similar open-world zombie game Dying Light, then moved to Yager Development, then Sumo Digital, and then finally, Deep Silver’s Dambuster Studio, was for many years a giant question mark in the game industry. Its publisher, Deep Silver, spent many of those years saying little to nothing about the game other than vague confirmations that it was still in development. Until it resurfaced in late 2022, a seeming sign that Dead Island 2 would see the light of day – which it finally did, being released in 2023.
Understanding what went wrong requires understanding many different factors – how Deep Silver makes deals, how Unreal Engine 4 works (or didn’t, at the time), and how unprepared the team at Yager was for the project it’d taken on.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Deep Silver
Techland
Yager Development
GAMES MENTIONED
Dead Island 2