Behaviour Interactive, the Canadian studio responsible for Dead by Daylight, has acquired The Fun Pimps, the developer behind 7 Days to Die. It is a pairing that nobody really saw coming, but the more you think about it, the more it starts to make a strange kind of sense.
7 Days to Die spent an extraordinary amount of time in Early Access. Over a decade, in fact, before its 1.0 release landed in 2024. That release was long overdue, but it was also well-received, with the game finally delivering on the survival-horror-meets-crafting-and-base-building formula that had kept a loyal community hooked throughout the wilderness years. The Fun Pimps built something with genuine legs. They also built it entirely independently, which makes the acquisition all the more interesting.
Behaviour is a different kind of studio. Dead by Daylight is an asymmetric multiplayer horror game that has run as a live-service title since 2016, constantly refreshed with licensed characters pulled from just about every horror property imaginable. Behaviour knows how to keep a horror community engaged over years. That is their entire business model. The question now is whether that expertise gets applied to 7 Days to Die, and what that looks like in practice.
The crossover potential is obvious and slightly terrifying. A Dead by Daylight chapter set in the 7 Days to Die wasteland, or a licensed killer drawn from that universe, would not be out of place. Behaviour has never shied away from unexpected collaborations. More significantly though, could 7 Days to Die itself receive a multiplayer overhaul or live-service treatment under Behaviour’s ownership? The survival game currently has co-op but has never leaned fully into the kind of persistent, evolving multiplayer experience that Behaviour specialises in.
The concern for existing fans is that the survival-horror identity of 7 Days gets diluted in favour of whatever commercial direction Behaviour sees for it. The hope is the opposite: that the game gets proper resources behind it and the kind of post-launch support it deserved but never quite received. Early Access is over. What comes next should be interesting.
