Dead By Daylight Removes Leatherface Mask After Racist Allegations
Dead by Daylight is removing the Leatherface mask in the game after a number of players alleged instances of racism around it.
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Behaviour Interactive, the developer responsible for the multiplayer survival horror gaming experience called Dead By Daylight, has announced it will remove a set of cosmetics for its Cannibal character — inspired by the 1974 horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. This announcement came following various community reports that the skin was used in several instances of targeted racist harassment of players. Just like any other company looking for a relatively quiet playground, Behaviour Interactive stated that the hateful activities wouldn’t be tolerated, and the company would take any precautions to protect its community.
According to IGN, the cosmetics in question were actually added to the game years ago, in 2017’s Leatherface DLC, introducing the titular face-changing menace to the game’s narrative. The Leatherface character, just like his equally mute live-action counterpart, gets to wear the skins of the humans he murders. There are four different versions of the skin players can unlock by sacrificing one of the four Survivors of the game 25 times, individually. This allows the character to wear the faces of his victims, including the face of a Black woman, Claudette Morel — which was used to spread messages of hate and racial harassment.
The developers of Dead By Daylight will remove the troubling skin, no puns intended, with the next patch, which is only days away. They’ll also compensate all the players who unlocked the skin with 6,000 Iridescent Shards; an in-game currency used to unlock cosmetics. Black players have previously expressed unease about the Claudette version of the skin, stating that it imitates the act of wearing blackface. For those who aren’t familiar with the act, it’s a racial trope in media, in which non-Black performers make themselves look like caricatures of Black people, usually by cosmetically darkening their skin, drawing on huge, exaggerated lips, and/or wearing unkept kinky-haired wigs.
MiladyConfetti, a Black streamer and a member of the Dead By Daylight partner program, described the skin as “horrific,” initially believing that the game was glitching. She couldn’t believe that the skin like that one, depicting a white man wearing the skin of a Black woman in a literal case of blackface, could actually exist. However, besides the presumably unintentional instance of blackface, the Leatherface skin has caused an even greater concern. As MiladyConfetti elaborated later in her statement, she was targeted by players who knew she was a streamer because the in-game harassment was usually followed by on-stream harassment involving racial slurs.
In addition, someone sent 500 bots to the MiladyConfetti’s channel, spamming it with the racial slurs in her chat. If this sounds familiar, we previously reported on hate raids infesting Twitch’s streaming platform and recreations of hate-inspired acts of violence in Roblox. When it comes to Dead By Daylight, things got so out of hand that Black players would immediately disconnect upon seeing a Leatherface wearing Claudette skin — which, ironically, made things worse, inciting toxic gamers’ harassment campaigns against Black gamers. As a result, MiladyConfetti and other Black streamers started advocating for the skin’s removal — an effort that finally bore fruit.
