Dead by Daylight developer Behaviour Interactive announced that it will soon introduce a colorblindness accessibility option for the game, following a controversy over a game designer's comments during a live stream last week.

Lead programmer Ethan 'Amos' Larson was streaming the game on his twitch account and answering questions from viewers.

"Okay, JC, it's getting really tedious to always blabber on about colorblindness mode. If it's going to happen, it will happen when we have the time, and if someone decides it's something that needs to happen, we know a lot of players want it."

This comment was then clipped and circulated to the attention of Steven Spohn, COO of Able Gamers (a charity dedicated to the needs of gamers with disabilities) and others; Spohn said, "If you are sick of "being told badly about it" then imagine how fed up people are with not being able to play your game because they don't have access to it,"

he countered.

About two hours later, Behaviour Interactive responded to Spohn, revealing that a colorblind mode was already in the works.

In the video, BI's developers say that this is "the work we are doing now for the colorblind mode. This is something that many of us have wanted for a long time and we hope this is the first step in making our game more accessible to more players.

Dead by Daylight's latest chapter, The Binding of Kin, was released on December 1, 2020. Since the game releases an average of four chapters a year, the next chapter update is expected in early March, although BI is cautious about the exact timing of this update.

The studio's official account further stated, "We have been working hard over the past few months to bring colorblindness mode to Dead by Daylight. We did not want to announce this at this time, but we feel the time is right. We plan to address colorblindness concerns with a new HUD by the Mid-Chapter release. Further colorblindness support is targeted for the next Chapter release (date TBD). These are the first steps in making DBD more accessible to players."

While the reaction to this announcement has been uniformly positive, a surprisingly large number of people seem to think that this mode is "damage control" created overnight in response to their irritation over Larson's comments. This is hard to trust.

In addition, some have gone after the individual developer, demanding some sort of "accountability" or "apology" or, more clearly, loss of job. Larsson certainly doesn't get a good look from this, but his words were clipped from a longer stream, now deleted, and we don't know the background, such as how many times he had already addressed this issue. To play devil's advocate, his frustration may have had something to do with not being able to answer honestly, given that this feature was clearly already in the works and was scheduled to be completed in the near future (the announcement of the colorblind mode would have been part of the PR schedule, and games like DBD developers have to stick to such a plan).

In any case, the results are positive, and DBD has added a long-awaited accessibility feature.