Dying Light 2 Now Has Less Players Than Dying Light 1 Just a Year After the Sequel's Launch on Steam

After numerous delays that left many wondering if Techland’s sequel would ever see the light of day, last year’s launch of Dying Light 2 seemed like it was worth the wait with positive reviews and six times as many players as the original game’s all-time peak of 46k players on Steam.

Unfortunately, after a strong start, interest in the zombie-slaying sequel quickly started to decline just one month after launch as players beat the game’s campaign and found that there was little left to do with (or without) other players in the game’s beautiful new open world.

Now, one year after its peak of 275k players at launch, Dying Light 2 has seen its player base decay away to barely 5k concurrent players online during peak hours – a disastrous 98% drop that even a 50% discount hasn’t been able to help much during this month’s Steam Spring Sale.

With Dying Light 2 falling out of Steam’s Top 100 Most Played Games, surprisingly, the original Dying Light is still going strong eight years after its launch and almost one year after Techland officially ended support so they could focus on the sequel and other new projects.

But while Techland might be done with the original Dying Light, fans aren’t. Peaking with 22k players just a few weeks ago, the beloved classic has been topping the sequel every week — sometimes with almost twice as many players online.

This puts developer/publisher, Techland, in a very tricky situation — one that we’re starting to see become a more common problem with big sequels in the gaming industry and one no developer wants to find themselves in — especially not Techland, after their previous two games: the failed battle royale, “Dying Light: Bad Blood” and the very poorly received $9.99 fantasy RPG spin-off, “Dying Light: Hellraid.”

Clearly, Dying Light 2 is the superior game compared to the original in terms of visual upgrades and more modern gameplay elements… but, as a result of trying to make everything bigger, better, and more realistic than the first game, the devs seem to have cut too many features from Dying Light 2‘s launch and are now still struggling to create meaningful new content.

The good news for Techland, is that other co-op zombie shooter/brawlers (like Back 4 Blood and Warhammer 40k: Darktide) have done even worse over the past year. And with Dead Island 2 facing similar production issues over the past decade and no longer featuring an open-world when it launches next month as an Epic Games exclusive, the original Dying Light is likely to stick around Steam’s Top 100 for a few more years. Even if the sequel doesn’t.