Dead By Daylight’s FNAF Crossover Shows the Game is Sitting on a Goldmine for One Type of Future Collab

Highlights

• The crossover between FNAF and Dead By Daylight is on the horizon, marking a pivotal moment for horror gaming.
• Mascot horror games like Bendy, Poppy Playtime, and Hello Neighbor could be next in line for exciting DBD collaborations.
• Embracing mascot horror crossovers can attract new players and keep the game fresh without exhausting licensed characters.

The long-awaited crossover between Five Nights at Freddy’s and Dead By Daylight is finally coming, albeit in just under one year’s time. For a game that’s become a Hall of Fame for horror characters of all stripes, it was only a matter of time before the developers at Behaviour Interactive knocked on the pizzeria’s door. In under a decade, FNAF has become arguably the most ubiquitous horror video game franchise, eclipsing the likes of longtime industry mainstays like Resident Evil or Silent Hill in its sheer mass popularity.

For a lot of fans, this collab is just a logical endpoint of both series’ ongoing runs. Both of them have fundamentally changed the landscape of horror gaming in the last ten years, with Dead By Daylight inspiring a run of asymmetric horror games and FNAF ushering in an era of what’s been labeled as mascot horror; horror properties focused on colorful characters and subverting them for scares. And with the granddaddy of all mascot horror finally coming to DBD, it’s time to open the floodgates proper.

Dead By Daylight Needs to Have More Mascot Horror Crossovers

With the FNAF collab confirmed, Dead By Daylight is primed to start featuring crossovers with other popular mascot horror series. Since FNAF came on the scene ten years ago, the mascot horror genre has been steadily growing in popularity, with dozens of titles with devoted fanbases all over the internet. One YouTube search for almost any mascot horror game will yield theory videos, let’s plays, and fan edits all with tens of millions of views each. More mascot horror games that could feature in DBD in the future include:

• Bendy and the Ink Machine
• Baldi’s Basics
• Poppy Playtime
• Duck Season
• Garten of Ban Ban
• Choo Choo Charles
• Hello Neighbor

Why DBD is Leaving Money on The Table Without More Mascot Horror

Mascot horror is a relatively new phenomenon, but it still has had plenty of time to prove its worth as a viable market. The fanbases for these games are some of the biggest on the entire internet, not just in horror. Gamers the world over have experienced the terror of getting chased by Huggy Wuggy in the first moments of Poppy Playtime, a feeling that they’d be dying to replicate in a game like Dead By Daylight. Videos theorizing on series like Hello Neighbor and Bendy and the Ink Machine have millions of views a piece, which Behaviour can capitalize on with crossovers and collaborations.

Embracing these crossovers can also help with an impending problem Dead By Daylight may soon be encountering with its licensed chapters; lack of name recognition. DBD has had a string of massively successful horror crossovers including Freddy, Michael Myers, Leatherface, and Pinhead, among others. These chapters have brought in a ton of business for the game, due to the characters’ popularity.

But those characters are a finite resource. Not every horror character has a big following, and DBD has already included most of the big names in film, with a few notable exceptions. By expanding further into the realm of mascot horror games, the devs can keep attracting eyeballs to DBD with big-name crossover chapters that will continually turn heads.

Does Mascot Horror Fit in DBD?

There’s an argument to be made that colorful bright characters like Bendy or Baldi don’t have a place in a game with an aesthetic like DBD, but the addition of killers like the Trickster and a lot of survivor cosmetics kind of defeats that argument. It’s clear the devs at Behaviour don’t mind having a bit of fun with their characters, so an appearance by Poppy Playtime’s Huggy Wuggy wouldn’t be too far out of left field.

There’s also the larger issue that mascot horror is horror for a lot of younger people. An entire generation of horror fans grew up on Freddy, Jason, and Michael Myers the same way the current generation is growing up with Bendy, Freddy Fazbear, and The Neighbor from Hello Neighbor. If DBD wants to keep the lights on long-term, these types of crossovers might just be a good way to do it.