The creators of Knives Out bought a minority stake in the developer Dead by Daylight

NetEase strives to strengthen its position in the team horror market. For an unspecified amount, a Chinese company acquired part of Behavior Interactive.

The latter, as a result of the deal, remains an independent studio with the former president and executive producer, Rémi Racine. However, NetEase got the opportunity to appoint its own person to the board of directors of Behavior Interactive.

The studio positions itself as the largest independent developer in Canada. It boasts 70 million game copies sold on all platforms and a mobile audience of 200 million people.

The main blockbuster of the studio is the team horror Dead by Daylight for PC and consoles, in which four players on one side must escape from the monster, and the fifth player, on the contrary, must kill them all.

Dead by Daylight was originally published by Swedish Starbreeze. However, last year, Behavior Interactive bought the rights from the publisher and today operates the project independently.

The project is considered successful. Its sales since its release in 2016 amounted to 12 million copies. In 2017 alone (the last full year when the game was sold on behalf of the public Starbreeze), the game earned $21 million.

For NetEase, buying Behavior Interactive can be not only a good investment, but also an important step in terms of mobile expansion to the West. One of the largest projects of the Chinese company is a mobile clone of Dead by Daylight, which is called Identity V.

Identity V’s monthly earnings are $6 million, according to DataMagic. The bulk of the game’s revenue comes from the Asian market. In the States and Europe, the project earns much less. Perhaps the bright specific style of the game in the spirit of the cartoon “Coraline in the Land of Nightmares” does not come in.

The partnership with Behavior Interactive, presumably, will allow NetEase to release a mobile Dead by Daylight on an already tested basis, which appeals to horror films more familiar to Western audiences.

Or, more likely, the NetEase mobile experience gained while operating Identity V will allow Behavior Interactive not to make mistakes when releasing its own similar game. In favor of the latest version, the recent announcement of the mobile Dead by Daylight.

By the way, NetEase is not the first Chinese investor of a Canadian studio. In October last year, 20% of Behavior Interactive was bought by Beijing Gaea Interactive Entertainment. Together with her, Canadians are now developing a mobile card project for Game of Thrones.

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