Dead Island 2 isn’t Dead Yet; Deep Silver Says Still in Development
Images via Deep Silver/Koch Media Games News Dead Island 2
After no updates for over a year, Dead Island 2 publisher Deep Silver has come forward to announce that the zombie-slayer is indeed still in development.
Dead Island 2 has a bit of a convoluted past—it was announced at E3 2014, and expected to launch in spring 2015. But it lost momentum in July 2015 when development studio Yager was dropped from the project due to issues with the publisher regarding the game’s vision.
Shortly after being pulled from the project, the dev team filed for bankruptcy. It was a “catastrophic” blow to the German developer, Timo Ullmann of Yager Development told GamesIndustry.Biz. Shortly after, the game was presumed to have been canceled since it was pulled from Steam.
On March 10, 2016, Deep Silver announced that the title was still kicking and being developed by a new studio in the U.K., Sumo Digital.
“Sumo showed so much understanding of the brand, had creative ideas and an excellent, vision that was aligned with our own,” Dr. Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Koch Media, said in Deep Silver’s release. “It just made perfect sense for us to move the project to them. We will reveal more details at a later stage, but for now I’d like to say that we are obviously super excited about the progress that we are making with them.”
Now, after over a year since the latest update, Eurogamer reports that Deep Silver has confirmed the game’s development status, and that it is excited with the way things are headed.
“Dead Island 2 is in development at Sumo Digital, and we are excited by the progress the team [is] making with Deep Silver’s most successful IP,” Deep Silver’s statement reads. “When we are ready to share more information, we will.”
While the game is confirmed to still exist, no details beyond the E3 2014 trailer have been revealed. GameStop has returned the game to preorder status with a placeholder date for 2017, but this development confirmation did not reveal when fans might get news, or when the final game may be released.