Behaviour Interactive Supports 50 Million Dead by Daylight Players Using Amazon GameLift

Founded in 1992, Behaviour Interactive is one of the largest game studios in Canada, with 1,200 employees worldwide and over 70 million games sold on every platform. Its award-winning game Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game in which players take on the role of both the Killer and four Survivors being hunted.

Released in 2016, Dead by Daylight first ran as a peer-to-peer game; the player acting as the Killer would also be the host server to which the four Survivors connected directly. However, if the host server had a bad connection, the other players would too. As the game became more popular, Behaviour Interactive needed a more scalable, reliable game-server hosting solution.

Since before Dead by Daylight launched, Behaviour Interactive had been running its proprietary backend on AWS using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which offers secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload. Thus, the company could migrate the game to a server-based infrastructure using Amazon GameLift in 2019. “We were familiar with AWS services,” says Julien Derveeuw, head of technologies at Behaviour Interactive. “When technologies like Amazon GameLift were added, it was natural to use them.”

The company’s continued use of Amazon GameLift has made Dead by Daylight even more successful. The game sees 50 million players worldwide. Much of that is owed to the cross-platform play functionality that supports players in accessing the game across major PC and console platforms, including PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S.

“By using Amazon GameLift, we can support cross-platform play,” says Remi Veilleux, technical director for Dead by Daylight at Behaviour Interactive. “We can grow our player base and make many opportunities to play across platforms, even new ones.” For example, as soon as Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 were released, they were immediately supported by Amazon GameLift dedicated servers. If it weren’t using Amazon GameLift, Behaviour Interactive would have had to adapt to each system individually.

The cross-platform play functionality has led to partnerships between Behaviour Interactive and major gaming companies, including Japan’s Konami in 2020 and Capcom in 2021 and 2022. Konami’s Silent Hill franchise and Capcom’s Resident Evil are now chapters within Dead by Daylight. “Working with such big names and being able to use their franchise is a great honor and a fun opportunity,” says Veilleux. “After using the scaling capabilities of Amazon GameLift and AWS, our infrastructure is more ready and stable for such important releases.”

Massive influxes of players followed those partnerships, and Behaviour Interactive relied on the scalability of AWS to meet demand. It expected to gain 400,000 players after launching Dead by Daylight on Epic Games Store in December 2021. So it took advantage of Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, designed for applications with short-term, irregular workloads that can’t be interrupted. During lower traffic, Behaviour Interactive optimizes costs using Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, which use spare Amazon EC2 capacity available for less than the On-Demand price. “We reduced costs by a big factor by using Spot Instances,” Veilleux says.

The company has optimized its Amazon GameLift servers to run faster so that they can now process 60 frames per second instead of 30, reducing ping time slightly. The company delivers high-quality player experiences by deploying those servers across nine regions globally: two in North America, one in South America, two in Europe, three in Asia, and one in Australia. As a result, Dead by Daylight has seen next to no outages or downtime. When there is an outage unrelated to AWS, Amazon GameLift automatically redirects players to the closest data center so that they experience no interruption. Behaviour Interactive can even upgrade to new game servers without disrupting players.

Behaviour Interactive has captured players’ attention by adding new content and next-generation platforms. It also uses modern graphics to update the look of existing characters and maps. “Every time we release a new version of Dead by Daylight, it brings new players,” says Veilleux. “We’re always freshening up content to make it fun. Using Amazon GameLift means that the game stays relevant.”

Behaviour Interactive has realized those benefits without hiring an extensive team to handle infrastructure maintenance and monitoring in multiple countries. “Because of the flexible nature of how Amazon GameLift handles matchmaking queues and fleets of servers, we can deploy patches and updates seamlessly without interrupting or impacting players who are connected and playing the game,” says Derveeuw.