Behaviour Interactive has taken back the Dead by Daylight DLC it gave TheBurntPeanut on stream, two days after telling him it was his to keep. It’s up to the studio to gift people content on a stream. I think it’s the flip-flopping and the going back and forth that is the issue, and taking it back is way worse.
Key takeaways
- A Behaviour employee gifted TheBurntPeanut all of Dead by Daylight’s paid DLC during his Halloween stream.
- Behaviour’s November 3 statement says “We have already removed the content that was granted to the creator.”
- The studio says the gift happened “quickly and outside of our usual team discussions”, and it is rewriting how content gets granted.
- It says it is taking “appropriate action internally” with the staff involved, and won’t share details.
What happened on TheBurntPeanut’s stream?
During TheBurntPeanut’s Halloween livestream, a Behaviour employee sent him all of Dead by Daylight’s paid expansions, according to Polygon. He had never played the game before. Some players objected to the studio backing a controversial streamer, and he offered to give the items back. The official account replied in his chat: “We can take the heat! They are yours to keep.”
Polygon says that reply only made matters worse. It reports that some players uninstalled the game and asked for refunds, and that creators who’d been waiting a long time to join Dead by Daylight’s Creator Program were especially unhappy. Behaviour apologized on November 1, as we covered in our report on the studio’s first apology. TheBurntPeanut answered the backlash on a later stream, where Polygon says he denied the accusations made against him. A clip of that response passed 2.6 million views on X.
What did Behaviour say on November 3?
The second statement went up on the official Dead by Daylight account at 1:25am GMT on November 3, as four images. It passed six million views within the day. The main points:
- Team members saw “a very large audience” watching “a streamer who has not played DbD before” and “moved too fast”.
- The gift was made “before taking the necessary time to look at if this was a good idea”, and there weren’t “stringent enough processes and guardrails internally” to stop one person granting items.
- The “WE CAN TAKE THE HEAT!” reply “crossed the line of appropriate responses from our brand”.
- “We have already removed the content that was granted to the creator.”
- Behaviour is rewriting its guidelines for working with creators, including “who on our team can make those calls”, and its approval process for granting content and currency.
Was taking the DLC back the right call?
Yours to keep, then take them back two days later? No, that’s way worse. That’s way worse. They should have just stuck to their guns. Because now it just looks like they’re constantly going to pander to whatever people on the internet say to them.
I’m not the only one who thinks so. Gaming creator The Kingerd replied to the statement that Dead by Daylight “has doubled down on apologizing” and that the studio was “becoming a meme”, ending with “Awful PR man.” That post passed 200,000 views.
Should studios gift content to streamers?
It’s up to the studio to gift people content on a stream. If someone’s never played the game before and they’ve got none of the content you want that streamer to show off, it makes sense to give it to them and let them keep it, or give them an account just for that stream.
Should one person be able to grant that much content?
It depends how much it’s worth, right? How much did he get? What was the value of it? What was the point of him streaming it? Did the stream bring more players to the game? Was it a net positive for the studio, up until this flip-floppy point?
Neither of Behaviour’s statements answers those questions. Polygon says the gift was all of the game’s paid DLC, but neither statement puts a value on it or says what the stream did for player numbers. What Behaviour has said is that it didn’t have the checks to stop one team member doing it, and that it is now changing who can approve gifts of content and currency.
What changes for Dead by Daylight creators?
The statement adds a rule for the Creator Program: creators found to have broken its policy will be removed. Behaviour says it will tell those creators directly, and there will be “no additional communications on our social channels or in program Discords about these actions.”
If you play Dead by Daylight rather than stream it, nothing in the game changes. The killer tier list and everything else stays the same; this is about how the studio deals with creators.
Is working with game studios risky for creators?
I honestly think working with a lot of these studios is fraught with peril, just from their own incompetence. Recently we also saw JaWoodle get done in by The Fun Pimps, for them giving him the wrong build and then accusing him of releasing stuff that wasn’t being released.
That dispute involves the same parent company. GamingHQ reported in July that The Fun Pimps, the 7 Days to Die studio, is now owned by Behaviour Interactive. According to JaWoodle, he got a pre-release build of 7 Days to Die 3.0 through the official creator program, and it included content the studio hadn’t planned to show yet, such as bandits and chicken coops. He says the studio later told him it was the wrong build, put copyright claims on several of his videos and threatened legal action. GamingHQ said at the time that neither company had given a detailed public response. Bandits have since been confirmed, as I covered in my piece on the 7 Days to Die bandits update.
That’s two disputes with creators in four months at the same parent company.
