Dead By Daylight Developers Launch Second Lengthy Damage Control Attempt Following TheBurntPeanut Controversy

During the weekend, Dead by daylight Developer Behavior Interactive found itself embroiled in a brawl after a member of its team provided controversial Vtuber TheBurntPeanut with a bunch of paid in-game content for free during his live stream. Behavior later issued a public apology for the situation, seemingly condemning its own employee and Peanut at the same time, and thanks to the perceived ambiguity in Peanut’s alleged enormities, it angered people of every possible position against the studio. Now, Behavior is attempting another round of damage control, while maintaining its previous stance that TheBurntPeanut should never have been approved.

This new four-page statement is clearly aimed at trying to fill the many gaps left by the previous attempt, which allowed the situation to spiral out of control over the past 24 hours. However, given that throwing his own team member under the bus didn’t sit well with many, while condemning TheBurntPeanut without citing a reason infuriated his huge following, it’s unlikely to appease anyone who took either issue.

To our community:

We wanted to follow up on yesterday’s message in order to better answer the questions that you really ask yourself and that are most important to you. pic.twitter.com/OPqAJ9xIoh

— Dead by Daylight (@DeadbyDaylight) November 3, 2026

It’s a complicated situation, because while TheBurntPeanut is undoubtedly someone who courts controversy and suggests hostility, he is also often deliberately (perhaps trollingly) ambiguous in his speech. The main example of its problematic nature is an occasion in which Peanut loudly declared that he was going to “use a slur” and then performatively beeped instead of saying anything offensive. This left what he was not tell the viewer’s imagination, and the results were a disaster. Clearly designed to provoke, in true Edgelord fashion, this means that Peanut – despite being one of the most popular streamers on the internet – is widely hated across large sectors. Given Dead by daylight has gained a reputation over the past 10 years as an online space for marginalized gamers, particularly popular among LGBTQ gamers, TheBurntPeanut’s apparent endorsement became an extremely inflammatory moment.

This is something that Behavior is now trying to break down in excruciating detail, following Dead by daylight being bombarded with negative reviews on Steam from every side imaginable.

Take the heat

“When we collaborate with a new creator,” Behavior explains, “we typically take a hard look at their past content to determine if it represents the values of inclusion that our community expects of us. In this case, it wasn’t considered or discussed as a group.” Or, in other words, a team member noticed that the game was getting a huge Halloween boost from a big streamer playing, and excitedly threw them the game’s unlocks to improve this. This was able to happen, Behavior explains, because “we did not have sufficiently strict processes and guardrails internally to prevent directly granting in-game items to players without broader consensus and approval. Our team members acted without a support system behind them to guide them toward an alternative outcome.”

During the stream, Peanut suggested that getting the free content was bound to cause problems, and the anonymous team member responded via the official Behavior Interactive account: “WE CAN TAKE THE HEAT!” The new statement says: “This post, and others during this session, showed a disregard for the context we suddenly found ourselves in and crossed the line of appropriate responses from our brand. This response made things worse for us and for our community, particularly our content creators on the front lines of these conversations, and that is unacceptable.”

The statement then moves on to the exact values ​​that Behavior Interactive holds. Given the ubiquity of the use of phrases like “doesn’t align with our values” in generic apologies, almost always used without defining what those values ​​might be, this is a welcome inclusion. “We mean respect, transparency, diversity and creating a space where people from different backgrounds and experiences feel welcome,” the company explains. “Diversity is one of the DBDand everyone is invited to play it. But when we choose to work with a creator, we put our name next to theirs and want to partner with creators whose words and actions share and support this principle.

Action stations

“What are you actually going to do about it?” was one of the most resounding responses of the last day, and Behavior will answer it next. “Each of the issues listed above has addressable solutions that we are already making progress with,” the studio says. This includes removing content offered to Peanut (already done), rewriting the company’s guidelines on interacting with creators and authorized team members to do so, and changing its own internal processes for granting content and in-game currency to players. There is also a desire to address “communication standards” with its staff, and the game’s creator program will remove creators who “violated” the rules.

As for what action will be taken against the team member who interacted with TheBurntPeanut, Behavior Interactive maintains that this is a confidential internal matter. “We take this situation very seriously,” the statement said, “and are taking appropriate action internally.”

The long, very long post ends then,

This incident has broken the trust in our community that has expectations and respect for the types of people we work with, but more importantly, expectations for the conduct and actions our team takes in our daily work within this community. We understand that it will be a slow road to regain that trust, but we are committed to doing the work necessary to get there.

Clearly, the decision to completely condemn TheBurntPeanut is behavior that Behavior stands by, and while it will likely encourage its toxic audience to hold grudges, it also demonstrates strong public support. DBD clearly strived to cultivate. As for its own team member, the statement still goes to great lengths to try to distance the studio as a whole from the actions of an individual acting out of turn over the weekend. While recognizing that the training and processes were not in place to prevent this error from happening, there is still an awful lot of “but it was them, not the rest of us” that follows. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Then again, the other crowd clamoring for a head will also be unhappy with the assertion that this is a confidential situation.