Dead Island 2 Release Date Has Been Pushed Up
Dead Island 2 will be released a week early, on April 21.
Announced nearly a decade ago with a gleefully gory gameplay trailer, Dead Island 2, developed by Dambuster, has been continuously delayed past its original 2015 release windows. A few weeks back, nearly eight years after the original delay, Dead Island 2 was postponed yet again to April 28 without any specific reason, but now we have yet another date shift on the horizon. Dead Island 2 is now scheduled to release on April 21, 2023—one week before intended.
According to IGN, Dambuster Studios and publisher Deep Silver have announced that the Dead Island 2 release date has been moved up by a week. The announcement came via the game’s official Twitter account, and it thrilled the fans of 2011’s well-received original Dead Island, who spent the last decade waiting for the sequel. Hopefully, Dambuster and Deep Silver will deliver a game that fulfills the fandom’s expectations; the gaming community had its fair share of slow-cooking products that eventually came out raw, and by this point, everyone knows the release we’re referring to.
To be entirely honest, Dambuster isn’t the only one to blame. The entire development cycle of Dead Island 2 was a rocky journey—and we’re being generous with the terminology here; a rocky journey is an understatement. The game changed several developers during the development cycles; its original developer, Techland, decided to pursue Dying Light—whose crucial element has been delayed as well—with Warner Bros. Entertainment. This left Deep Silver short of a developer who’d work on their title, until Yager Development stepped in and got the deal.
In fact, Yager even established a separate division solely devoted to completing Dead Island 2. However, in July 2015, with the game’s release date right around the corner, Deep Silver announced that Yager had been dropped from developing the game and that the title changed hands, ending up with an unnamed developer. Apparently, Yager and Deep Silver’s visions of the project fell out of alignment.
The game then ended up at Sumo Digital in 2016 before finally arriving at Deep Silver’s first-party studio, Dambuster Studios, in 2019.
In 2020, Yager’s still-under-development version of Dead Island 2, which was playable, leaked online. Dambuster showcased a playable version in 2022, listing February 3, 2023, as a release date, before delaying the game until April 28 and now moving it to a week earlier release on April 21. While this is certainly good news, since most gamers like to receive their announced titles, preferably fully functional and working, as soon as possible, we have to express our concerns here.
Too many cooks spoil the broth, and we can only hope that’s not the case with Dead Island 2.
But there might be something else at play here as well. 2003’s Beyond Good and Evil, whose sequel is hopefully still underway, and Legacy of Kain: Defiance were both released in 2003, and their sales were overshadowed by those of more prominent releases. What does this have to do with Dead Island 2? Well, as it happens, the highly-expected Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was also delayed, with its new release date being April 28.
It’s possible that Deep Silver and Dambuster pushed the release day forward, wishing to avoid having to compete with one of the most-anticipated games of 2023.
