Does Dead by Daylight have split screen co-op?

✓ At a glance

• There are no split-screen options available in Dead by Daylight, likely due to the game’s asymmetric nature.
• The devs don’t seem to have any plans to bring split-screen to the game.

The asymmetrical survival horror game by Behaviour Interactive pits four Survivors on a mission to escape against one out of a wide roster of Killers hunting them down across different horror maps. Given the inherently cooperative nature of play for survivors, it might strike some that the game puts itself in a good position for local cooperative play. But does it have it and can you play Dead by Daylight on the same couch with a friend on split screen?

Does Dead by Daylight support split screen play?

No, Dead by Daylight does not have split screen and is not a split-screen game. The game actually doesn’t have local co-op play of this type and is instead an online game focused around online multiplayer rather than couch co-op.

In fairness, this makes sense when taking a look at how the core gameplay of DBD works. One player will take on the role of the Killer, sacrificing the prey they hunt to win the game. Four other players will take on the roles of Survivors, working together to repair a number of generators scattered around the map and ultimately escape. To accomplish this, there are separate queues for Survivors and Killers, which match four of the latter and one of the former together in the matchmaking process. This would be difficult to balance properly in an offline play mode.

While an AI NPC Killer could work, that arguably diminishes some of the fun, and it’s unclear if a deadly entity or survivors piloted by bots could make proper use of perks, mechanics, and features to create a challenge.

So far as we currently know, there are no plans to bring local split-screen play to the game at any point in the near future, either. This would likely only happen if a major shift or expansion to the game’s playstyle were to occur, which is quite unlikely.