The Rapid Downfall of DBD's Rival: Video Horror Society 

🌏 Get Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/dowsey It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee! ✌

The beta test in general was a massive mistake. The most exciting time for an asym is those early weeks when everyone is learning together, no one really knows what they're doing, and there's no established meta. People were absolutely excited for VHS at the start, but that excitement was squandered as most people, included myself and some of my friends, were left out of those early days and we walked away and didn't look back.

I'm gonna be honest, the reason why I've dropped the game was mainly the queue times as teen, and when I tried to play monster it was too hard to even bother spending hours learning how to play against people that had a lot of hours in previous betas

Closed beta absolutely killed VHS - finally getting to play the game on full release and matching into a full lobby of players with hundreds of hours was NOT fun. 3-4 matches and I was done forever.

I’ve never been swept up by the VHS hype, but I do kind of feel bad that a few of the “mistakes” were actually malicious attacks that have happened to even the largest of companies (Warlords of Draenor launch anyone?). Not saying they couldn’t have upped their security but it just seems like a lot of really lousy bad luck.

I was rooting for VHS from the moment the closed beta dropped, the excitement and buzz on that first day was unreal.. if you were lucky enough to play in that beta you know exactly what I'm talking about

These games may have fun concepts but DBD has 2 advantages over them: 1- Star power... From not just horror movies but games as well. The list of licenses they've gotten thus far is impressive on its own. For a competitor to even try to rival DBD it has one hell of a long way to go just to catch up from the get-go. 2- Regular updates and new content. BHVR is going to ride this gravy train as looooooooooooong as they possibly can.

There was never true competition for DbD. People just wanted something to pressure BHVR into fixing issues they had at the time.

Some other notes from my VHS experience: 1. For a long time during Early Access, there was a bug that would put people in incomplete lobbies and then never fill the empty slots. The problem seemed to occur more often when trying to queue with friends. This meant that Teens would wait 10 minutes, get into a "dead lobby," and then simply had to quit the lobby and queue again. It also meant it was nearly impossible to play Teen with your DBD friends. (This problem is mostly fixed now from what I can tell.) 2. The grind for unlocking perks is insanely long. Progress can only be earned by playing a specific Teen or Monster. In other words, the only way to get Tier 3 Werewolf perks is to play 50 hours of Werewolf games, even if you don't enjoy the monster. 3. Hellbent finally added an incentive system to balance out queue wait times, but it only awards currency used for the shop. It doesn't award any kind of bonus to progression/XP. 4. Playing as Monster is significantly more difficult/stressful than playing Killer DBD. The melee attack hitbox is fairly small, making it relatively easy for teens to dodge attacks. Once teens have weapons the Monster has to be very defensive and tactical. 5. Beta players had a massive head start on the rest of the player base, resulting in extremely unfun matches. 6. There's voice chat but no text chat at all. 7. The end of a match feels abrupt and unpolished, as shown in the Sodapoppin clip. 8. There's no way to gain cross-role progression. In DBD, I often played Killer just to grind BP for my survivors. In VHS there's no way to do this, so there's no reason for Teen mains to try Killer. It's a shame the game is failing because playing as Teen is generally pretty fun. Honestly VHS could fix so many of its problems by taking notes from DBD's playbook. Buff the Monster's base kit, reduce the XP grind, allow cross-role progression, and improve the queue incentives. It might be too late at this point, but I do think these changes are what's needed to bring this game back from the brink of death.

Just from a game play standard, I think the reason that some asymmetrical games fail over others is simple because the 'killer' can be killed by the 'survivors'. Games with this mechanic like **VHS** and **Evolve** are not new player friendly and died quickly, while games where the killer can't be killed (or take and extreme amount of effort to kill them) still succeed, like **Dead by Daylight** or **Friday the 13th.**

Well said Dowsey. I had high hopes for VHS but it floundered on the landing. I'm still shocked that the devs spent so little on advertising in a world where games are forgotten as quickly as they're released. I'm hoping for a revival at some point.

As a dead by daylight player, the complexity of VHS was too much for me. I had no idea what to do and was getting matched with people who had hundreds of hours already. I never got an opportunity to learn how to play so I just left. My friends had the same experience.

This is genuinely the first I've heard of Early Access being released, I was still under the impression it was still in the Discord-invited only phase of the betas. Ive still wanted every now and again to try the game but just thought it was in an uneasily accessible place still. Hopefully this video passing that knowledge into a bigger space could increase the numbers a little?

Just wanted to say this real quick Dowsey: The VHS team at one point did address the marketing thing, they don't want to start marketing until they fix the issues with Monster and how stressful it is, which as a monster main I believe personally they have been doing a great job at doing so far, but there is still work to be done.

What I wanted: DBD but the killer isn't a complete joke. What I got: DBD but the killer is even bigger of a joke.

Stranger things didn't invent the 80s.

All this video did for me, was make me root for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Game, and Killer Klowns From Outer Space The Game even more. I really want both games to be highly successful. And I really think they will be. Both of those Dev Teams are working hard to make sure they do good things for the Community.

It really is so sad how hard this game derailed because of things it couldn't even control. They definitely could have handled some stuff far better though even then.

If you look at the steam reviews for the game there are so many negative reviews that are complaining about the same thing: Toxic Positivity. Having joined the discord, I have to agree. There's just so many toxic elitists there festering in their own world that they dont let anyone else have a voice. Even before the game came out, having criticism or having questions about the game that people didnt like to answer got you on the radar of alot of the staff there and basically got you snapped at by so many people. They never took anyone's advice, and they never listened to their players' frustrations yet they just expected the game to just by some miracle skyrocket in ratings. We see how that turned out.

Never got the chance to play VHS but I'm preying that it somehow is able to make a comeback because I want something other than DBD to play, and I want DBD to have some actual competition.

The one thing that set it apart for me was that VHS had monsters as opposed to humans which I found really cool. Not many games let you take on a bestial killer and that almost has me sold. Then I realized how difficult it was for new players to not die instantly and I lost interest. In asymmetrical games it's okay to let the "victims" fight back like killer stunning, or the huge situational process of killing Jason in f13, but when you can just blast the "scary" threat and kill it interesting, it's not really intimidating anymore

i still play vhs and it makes me sad that its dying i will still play vhs but i feel bad for the company , so many things happend to the game that it was inevitable that it would die

Oh wow, had no idea VHS died so hard.. This is going to be an interesting watch!! Thanks Dowsey!! :)

what I find funny is how much people were clowning those who said that playing monster would not be fun since the survivors had so many ways of fighting the monster off and literally had the objective to kill the monster. I myself was sceptical to that concept and every time I said it in comments I would get swarmed with people calling me stupid and hysterically trying to prove me wrong. I would really want to talk to all those people again now that it appears I was completely right. WHO IS THE REAL CLOWN NOW?

VHS was shilled. The beta test i got into it was immediately apparent to me. The killers were massively different strengths, and the game wasnt fun

Man, I remember Jaee hyping this game to oblivion. Talking about how much of a DBD killer it was going to be lol. And to know it's only 72 people playing is kinda hilarious.

Monster being so hard to get into is my biggest gripe, DBD killer is way easier to just pickup and W some survivors.

I truly think this game needed console support, I know it may not be cheap, but keeping your game alive via console player's is a huge must.

So, I’ve been thinking. Whenever someone remembers VHS, there’s literally one video on the internet I refer everyone to, and it’s this one. Dowsey, your analytics were great, and your style of storytelling kept things interesting throughout the whole thing. Have you maybe thought about doing more of this stuff? Telling stories of failure and success, and just anything alike that is worth talking about?

I didn't even know VHS was out of closed beta. Haven't heard about it in months.

I played lot of games in the genre: DbD, HSHS, Evolve, DeathGarden, Propnight, Spirit Detective, and I always was a KILLER MAIN. However in VHS the "killer" role as monster, the worst I ever played, the weakest killer role in the genre, meanwhile teen being super fun because how overpowered the survivors in VHS, teen queue was like 30+ minutes, as monster instant. The game was simply unfun, unbalanced mess.

“It was really unfun to play monster” huh, I wonder where I’ve heard something like that before?

Survivors: Can't bully killers? Let's go back to dbd

I called it, an asymmetric where the monster can be kill will NEVER work. They will just get bullied. There's no satisfaction once the survived learned the meta. VHS was death the second I saw that you can kill the monster

I called it from the very beginning. One of VHS's biggest fatal flaws was the decision to make the Teens the power role. Seriously, who wants to put themselves through the utter torture session that is playing Monster?

I knew that VHS was never going to be a real competitor to Dead by Daylight. I spotted the balancing issues from a mile away on day 1. But I didn't know about the technical issues or their "marketing strategy". Either way, I'm glad the game existed since I'm positive BHVR would never have pulled their head out of their ass if there had been no competition around. Anyways, great video! Super informative!

Great video man, I was interested in the game last year and heard about the Discord attack but have wondered a few times what happened to it. I think honestly one of the biggest things is the Brand Change - identity is everything ESPECIALLY for a small indie game. What a ride and you presented it so well. Cheers dude

The devs can't seem to move it to console which would def boost its player base. All these other garbage games can some how make it to the PlayStation store but VHS just makes it seem like its impossible or something

I never saw this game as the "DBD killer". When I tried it this summer, I started to play the Teen (survivor) and I noticed it has a voice chat, a ping system, an icon that tells everyone in your team what you're doing, it's cool. Then I played the monster (killer) and I have to say that it's really damn hard to win there. The teens really have to mess up in order for you to get them. It was so unbalanced that queue times for teens were over 15 minutes if I remember correctly. Monster queue was instant. This is also a problem. I don't play a game to sit in a lobby and play a match that lasts less than my queue time. I dropped it after 2 weeks. Maybe I'll try it again if it will ever come out of early access.

Def overhyped. The game didn’t even keep hype for a year but somehow people thought it could be a rival lmao

Dang. And we all thought this was gonna kill dbd lol

For me the biggest lettdown was the 2 wipes that deleted all your progress and the implementatioin of a anticheat (i know it was necesary), and so on my low end pc the performance really suffered.I was getting 70 fps constant before, and now i barely hit 50 fps.

I love how you're talking about it taking a long time for people to get beta access and I'm just here like "You guys got beta access?"

I wasn't really ever hyped about VHS, but I did download the game when it came out. My first experience was infuriating as tutorial taught me nothing and it took me additional 10-15h to finally figure out how to play properly, but I did grow to love this game. I've put around 70-80h in it, maxed out my main Jess... And then it just completely fell off for me. By the end of August I wasn't playing it at all and didn't feel like coming back: queue times as Teen weren't worth the wait, games as Monster were stressful and gameloop overall became incredibly stale for me (with challenges often being impossible to complete due to actions of other players). Since release of their new monster, I've played only one match as Teen and it was enough for me to understand that at this point I've lost all passion for this game, so I deleted it and never came back since. Really a shame. It could've been great.

Sponsored by NordVPN, the best way to ensure you slap survivors directly through those pesky pallets every time!

I didn't even know this had come out until months later, I saw people playing Video Horror Society but I didn't know that's what VHS stood for lol.

Cyberpunk 2077 came back just because of the Netflix series and I've heard a lot of mixed feelings about this anime. But the song "i really want to stay at your house" nailed it! A lot of people wanted to revenge several characters from the anime because the main villian in this game actually was the demise of the main character! Very emotional ending AND the game fixed tons of his hickups VHS on the other end wanted to compete with a giant and didnt even made it out of kindergarten, unfortunately

I wanted VHS to succeed so badly, and part of me wishes it does when its out of Early Access. Its sad to see such a well made game suffer at some very avoidable mistakes, and some mistakes that weren't even their fault.

Great vid dowsey, you were a great help in showcasing this game. So it must suck to see it start to fail. Hopefully it'll have a comeback though, this vid will surely show them the mistakes they made! Keep up the great content 👍

Probs didn’t help they made themselves a PC exclusive

Yup its crazy - I was a person who was really looking forward to the game... And I didn't even know it came out!!!!! It was a month after launch when I decided to check when it was coming out and it just so happened it was already out

This is reminding me that all my friends and I were waiting for codes to play the first closed beta, and I was the first in my friend group to get one - when i was too busy with work for 3 days. The second day of which was the ddos and then it went down. Then for the next closed beta I and my friend group never got a key. I learned later that if you got a key in the first beta and didn't play then you were removed from the list for the second beta. Which soured my mood on the game. By the time it released my friend group had gotten bored of 4v1 symmetrical play due to souring on dead by daylight and we just haven't gotten around to playing it.

For me the biggest (and only) issue was the closed beta. I said, when it gets out, it will cause a problem mostly because some people (mostly streamers) will get skilled at the game and a lot of people won't which will create a divide between skilled players and newbies and that's exactly what happened. I didn't mind the DDOS attack, I didn't mind the rebranding, the only issue I had was the feeling that the game was for privileged players and that drove me away from the hype and wanting to play. My voice wasn't heard on DBD but here I felt even less important.

I can’t wait to see that Jaee dude eat his words. He was claiming VHS would kill DBD and riding that wave sooo hard 😂

The devs just ignored all of the monster feedback people gave in closed beta, so the game launched with all of those problems still present, so now everyone has played it in its current flaws state and have seen all the problems on the monster end of things

I want to play this game but if there is no one to play with then i'll just stick around to see if anything changes with VHS, just hoping this game becomes a competitor or at least has a fair ammount of playerbase in the future.

I don’t think being DDOS attacked counts as a mistake but it sucks.

No surprise honestly. Dbd will never be replaced in this area of gaming

Never forget that Dowsey created a 2nd channel for this game lmao

The game started very strong but the main drag for me was going from the closed beta and then it being taken down for months on end sapped any or most of the interest I had in playing when it launched again with very little new content

This happens to literally every dbd "competitor" this is the least surprising thing to ever happen

Hopefully this game can come back because it looks really fun, I just hope that it gets better

No matter what people say about VHS I really love this game and really hope it can succeed one day

I remember VHS being in closed beta for like a year, it definitely felt like a longass time. This extreme delay really killed off any hype they could have hoped to keep and the severe gap in skill between newcomers and veterans from the beta was so vast that it deterred anyone from playing the killer/monster role.

Oh hey, I remember being excited for VHS. Then a few months passed and I forgot about it

No "dbd killer" so far has look even remotely appealing. VHS' Fortnite aesthetic was an immediate turn off for me.

It really puts into perspective of how difficult playing Monster was in VHS too. If Teens just knew where you spawned at, you could essentially just get spawn killed with each of the types of Weapons or stunlocked with them and just die and the match would just end. Teens had an incredibly easier time in the game than Monsters. Especially when going against Teens who have so much more time in the game than a newer Monster player. Not to mention, A LOT of the Weapons were broken or overpowered in each of the Types. I really wanted to like this game and was even rooting for it, but the fact that it was just miserable to play as Monster and super mind-numbingly easy to play as a Teen to the point where even THAT got boring fairly quickly, it just wasn't fun anymore. I really hope the devs figure out how to fix their game to make it more balanced, but from the way things are going right now with it, I highly doubt that they are. And that's upsetting

I was excited when they announced that they'll release a beta but the thing is you need a beta key to play it. The moment it opened to the public I was happy to get to play it but queue time is so long and I can't even get to play in my own region (the reason why i stopped playing it)

Does anyone know the song that Dowsey uses often, the song I'm speaking of is the one right before the outro song. Been trying to figure out what song that is for a while now.

You didn't even talk about how the devs were ACTIVELY DISMISSING the people saying that monster was too hard. There was definitely an air of "get gud" when it came to their responses to people saying monster was too weak, and in a 1v4 game the 1 needs to be much stronger. If it isn't then NO ONE WILL PLAY IT, and your 1v4 game will just die... oh wait, it will be completely dead in 3 months without ever even leaving early access lol.

For me it was so many beta tests that I was unable to get access to and then the stories of the hackings they faced.

i literally never got my closed beta key. i was on the waitlist since the FIRST DAY

I was looking forward to this. I liked the aesthetics, the monsters were cool (I love me some werewolves), and it just looked like a fun game. Sucks that it tanked so hard both by being targeted by criminals and their own ineptitude. I hope they can one day turn it around.

Some people really thought this game was gonna outnumber DbD lol. I truly don’t think any game will ever beat it

Despite friends pestering me to give VHS a shot, I was reluctant to try this game out, because what I saw in previews never grabbed me the way Last Year did. I finally tried it out during the Halloween event and it ended up impressing the hell out of me. It's got plenty of faults, but then, DBD just keeps adding more faults all the time and it's still ultra-popular. I suppose I'll have to do the same thing I did when a lot of my all-time favorite games were bleeding players, and make sure to get in queue for a while every day just to counter the player loss.

Legitimately. I never heard of VHS as being a rival to DBD until today. And I am big into the general horror gaming community. If someone who is at least fairly well connected into the genre and never knew about it being a rival to DBD they didn't do well with marketing lol.

I stopped playing cause i kept getting stuck going against the same streamer and their squad and just couldnt do anything against them. They showed me how bad monster in that game was. And it took me a legit hour to get a match as a teen

Very incredible to see this timeline and what all went wrong. I had been waiting to try VHS for so long I just lost interest, and it would seem the majority of the player base did as well. Id love to see a in-depth look at all the "DbD killers" or DBD like games and where they went wrong or just what happened. HSH, Friday13th, Prop Night, Evil Dead, ect. Just like what you did here for VHS.

I luckily received a key for the beta of VHS and I really enjoy the game. I dropped the game once it came into early access because of lag and server issues. My original intent was to sadly drop it until they fixed it but you’re completely right. Around that time DbD was making massive improvements that encouraged me to play and made it more fun, I eventually forgot about VHS. I had no clue they went offline for a few months

I still play VHS everyday I really enjoy the game a lot. I do think it is in a lot better of a state now, but unfortunately it did take way to long to get to that point. I think the game is well worth the try queue times really aren't that bad and the average numbers do sit at around 300 give or take during peak times. Even with that low playerbase queue times for Teen sit around 5-10 mins instead of 15+ due to the changes they have made to monster. I do still believe in this game and hope it does well!

Ain't it crazy how more people are into the game's downfall than the actual game

My issue was that the first day it launched, my friends and I (Australia) queued for over 10 minutes for our first match. Then 20 for our second. We went to play something else before we got a third

So I guess it really was like Evolve, just in more ways than 1

Playing monster in this game is like having a constant aneurysm. I thought killer in dbd was intense but holy shit its way worse in VHS. One mistake can cost you a stig and its very easy to make a mistake in this game. The CDs on the monsters oops i fucked up skill is usually pretty long so all a teen has to do is apply a lil pressure to make you pop it then bait you into a friend. It's a tried and true method that i fell for quite a few times. The game encourages you to play super careful and cautiosly which is so weird for the power role but thats what made it interesting. Some of my favorite moments were when i played more aggresively than the teens thought i would and punsihed them if they dont react fast enough (warts pounce is a fucking godsend). The game has its moments, but man the devs are bhvr levels of slow when it comes to fixin shit

I love this game, I STILL love this game… and am one of the very very few people still playing it, but it is in a state that is simply tragic with how terrible it feels to load into lobbies and how difficult it is when you do load into lobbies due to the poor matchmaking *due to the small player base*

Just watching this video after wondering what happened to VHS, that entire part about the name rebrand hit me pretty hard cause I also had that issue of finding the game again and not realizing they changed the name.

Thank you for the presentation, Dowsey. Unexpected video, but very interesting.

Personally, as someone who played through both betas and early access, I think they could remedy the playerbase and aim for a marketing campaign focused on the full release with a console release alongside it. I do think a revival is possible and I do hope for it because teen is fun, and they have addressed a ton of issues over the past few months. I think it could turn into No Man's Sky given enough time. Note: If you want to try the game, they will add customs (kyf) in November although a exact date hasn't been provided. That will be a good time to play and learn the game

I would love to play it if it came to console! I'm hoping they make a good come back. Them taking off for the holidays is not a big deal to me. I'm glad they gave their employees time off. I'd still play the game.

I actually want them to come back, it will be interesting to see. But thats if they can handle doing what they need to do to revive it.

I think it’s sad to only see DBD being the only game to experience a asymetrical game with few alternatives to match. Imagine if VHS, Evil Dead, DBD etc all competed to one up each other with strong player bases. Similar to the whole PC, XBOX, PS5 clash. The texas chainsaw massacre won’t really grow to be anything either since it’s even more niche then Evil Dead.

Well one big reason are youtubers like you 🥰 Who hype the game up like hell only to show bhvr "Hah we have something now to blackmail you to make the game better" And then afterwards no one made content anymore anymore after dbd got his bigger "fix" Update You only speak about the game now since you know you know it gives you a small view boost.

I saw this live lol but I think VHS would be cool if they could pull themselves together

I played the tutorial stuff and then one match of monster since I like playing killer in DBD but it just wasn't all that fun. Also, the way monster looked up after hitting someone made me a bit motion sick.

I was so hyped for vhs and was so happy to get my key in the second wave. My journy went as follows: 1. game as monster (because i used to be killer only in dbd). I got absolutly wreaked. There was no tutorial, no gameplayguides because the game was new and nothing else that could help me. 2. game trying to give monster another shot. Went even worse than the first game and the ttv in my lobby was increadibly rude to me in his vod and when i joined his chat afterwards. I was done with monster. 3. game now trying out teens. I didnt know what to do here either, but with the fun bonus of not using voicechat because i despise using any vc. Went as well as youd expect it to. I never really knew where i was or how to play. My team wasnt really helping me ever, so i really felt absolutly helpless when getting chased. 4. - 8th game with 2 twitchstreamers in discord. They are actually good at the game but doesnt matter, because i wasnt and we had 4 dcs in 5 matches. I once again felt absolutly helpless and didnt have any fun. It took 8 games for me to go from "i am so hyped" to "this game is worse than dbd" and considering how i absolutly despise dbd, that says something. If they want to get this game back to its original hype they need to make the new player experience better. More tutorials are an absolute must.

I really hope VHS gets a good publisher to help them, the devs deserve better cuz they made a legit good game.

I remember dbd being a little scared. when VHS went open beta dbd did a 'random' bloodhunt I also didn't like that all the trailers showed the teens bullying the monster

I’ve only gotten to play a few games of VHS since it’s release and it really saddens me to see it drop as low as 50 active players (last I checked the charts), it’s a genuinely fun game and even now I still wish for it to pick up steam and grow. I wish I played the betas just so I could’ve spent more time playing the game before it fell to where it is currently

As someone who used to be super into smash I saw this coming a mile away. When there is such a big monopoly in a specific genre and you make a game that caters to the people who absolutely loved the og. You aren't getting a native playerbase and those people will eventually return to the first game.

I am one of the few players still playing the game even today and I have to say that a lot of problems in terms of balance were fixed but there are still some problems that need to be adjusted. With 1k hours of dbd, I can confidently and proudly say that in terms of game balance, vhs performs better (don’t get me started with the hooking system). I believe that it just had a rough start as not every game released is in perfect condition. This is not an attack to your video but how I feel about the game in general.