Dead Island 2 Was Nearly a Disaster—Until Deep Silver Hit Reset

Dead Island 2 took eight years longer than planned to hit the shelves, and it wasn’t just because of bad luck. According to former Deep Silver comms boss Martin Wein, the original version of the game was so rough during early playtests that pushing it out would’ve been a death sentence for the whole series.

Speaking at Develop: Brighton last week, via GamesIndustry, Wein pulled back the curtain on how the publisher’s decision to scrap the first build of the game likely saved it long-term.

Back in 2014, Dead Island 2 was revealed at E3 with a polished cinematic trailer and a 2015 release window. But behind the scenes, things were already starting to crack. The game was originally in development at Yager, the same studio behind Spec Ops: The Line, but player feedback from early testing rounds came back brutal. According to Wein, test players simply weren’t having a good time.

“This is not fun, this is not engaging, this does not feel like the Dead Island that I played.”

That’s what came back from players after the first round of feedback. The team made tweaks. They tried to patch it up. But when the second wave of playtests delivered almost the same reaction, it was clear something bigger was broken. At that point, Deep Silver could’ve pushed the game out anyway. That version would’ve looked like a follow-up on paper, but it would’ve played like a dud.

“We could have, at that point, put out a shit game,” Wein said. “It might have made some money, but it would have killed the franchise.”

Instead, the publisher made the hard call. The game was pulled from Yager, who described the cancellation in 2015 as “a catastrophic event on so many different levels”. The studio's special division, Yager Productions, was shut down after the decision. Dead Island 2 was handed off to Sumo Digital, then eventually taken in-house to Deep Silver's own Dambuster Studios in 2019. That’s where the final version came together.

In the meantime, bits of the old game leaked online. A build from the Yager era surfaced in 2020, and the gameplay looked pretty close to what the first Dead Island offered—hitting zombies with improvised melee weapons on a sun-drenched map. But clearly, it wasn’t enough. The game wasn’t fun, and feedback from actual players made that painfully clear.

Wein talked about the huge role player research played in turning things around. In his words, it was “a clear divide between player expectation and motivation and the direction that game development had taken.” That divide was too wide to fix with surface-level changes. Starting from scratch wasn’t ideal, but it was necessary.

And it paid off.

Dead Island 2 finally released in April 2023, eight years late. But it sold over 2 million copies in its first month, becoming Deep Silver’s most successful launch ever. Whether you liked it or not, it’s hard to argue with those numbers. The franchise lived, and the gamble to wait worked.

“I think at that point Deep Silver did the right thing,” Wein said. “Because they took that step, and they said that we need to make a game that fits for the player.”

Even though Dead Island 2 didn’t exactly blow critics away, the decision to scrap and rebuild saved the IP. And that’s a reminder of how unforgiving the live-service and AAA market can be, especially when a franchise tries to come back after years of silence.

Games like Fortnite, League of Legends, and Minecraft dominate time spent by players right now, especially on console. According to industry data, over 40% of time on PS5 and Xbox in the U.S. is still going to the top 10 live-service games. So when a game like Dead Island 2 makes a comeback and lands over a million copies sold in its first few weeks, that’s no small feat.

It also shows that publisher patience—rare as it is—can actually work when backed by data and a willingness to eat years of development time. In this case, feedback wasn’t just useful. It was the only reason Dead Island 2 exists in its current form at all.

Dead Island 2 is now out on Steam and consoles, closing the loop on a journey that started all the way back in the early 2010s. What was once nearly a franchise-killer became Deep Silver’s biggest launch ever. And all it took was eight years, three studios, and enough bad playtest results to fill a graveyard.