Friday the 13th Had a Lot of Potential
The game may not have had as many counsellors or killers to choose from as Dead by Daylight, or as deep a meta, but providing you managed to get a game that wasn’t filled with trolls, it could be a fun game. Whereas DBD is undoubtedly faster-paced Friday the 13th offers larger, more interactive maps, more ways to fight back, and more ways to kill your victims.
Unfortunately, the game fell victim to a lawsuit which has lasted since 2018. The crux of the lawsuit is who owns the rights to the Jason character. A quirk in US copyright law lets an author reclaim the copyright of their work thirty-five years after its initial release. Victor Miller – writer of the first film – tried to exercise this right, only for the previous owner of the copyright, Sean S. Cunningham, to fight back, claiming that the original script was written under a work-for-hire deal, in which case the copyright was never Miller’s to claim.
Given that the licensing deal for the game was agreed with Cunningham, the lawsuit has prevented much of the planned DLC. While the game has managed to eke by on its current fanbase and dropped bug fixes, it looks like the game, unlike Jason, isn’t immortal, as a patch released later this month will be the game’s last, and Friday the 13th will no longer be supported by dedicated servers. Matchmaking will still be available and you’ll still be able to play the game using peer to peer sharing.
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The news will surely come as a blow to fans of the game, but it’s hard to say that this isn’t an outcome most people would have expected; the game has been on hold for a long time due to the ongoing lawsuit, which has given Dead by Daylight the opportunity to carve out a niche as the undisputed juggernaut of the growing assymetrical horror game on the market right now. Add to that developer Illfonic’s recent success with Predator: Hunting Grounds and this is simply final confirmation that it’s time to move on from Camp Crystal Lake.
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