While developer Dambuster Studios had teased a new game in the Dead Island series back in September, the studio has been quiet about the project since then. According to the studio’s financial statements (as caught by Timur222) as of March 2025, however, it looks like Dead Island 3 is aiming for a Q1/Q2 2028 release window. What makes this especially interesting is the fact that this is the first instance of the title Dead Island 3 having been mentioned in any official capacity.
“After release of Dead Island 2 Ultimate Edition in October 2024, the primary focus for Dambuster Studios is now Dead Island 3,” reads the strategic report. “All developers are assigned to the project and once the Luna and Mac versions of Dead Island 2 are complete all of Dambuster’s QA team will also be assigned to Dead Island 3. Parts of the game are now in early production with feature, character, world and story design moving at pace. The current predicted release window for the project is Q1/2 2028.”
The Dead Island series has seen quite a bit of success. Back in September when it first teased the third game, Dambuster Studios had also celebrated that Dead Island 2 had gotten more than 20 million players since its release back in 2023.
The tease itself involved an image with a character that was seemingly leaving Dead Island 2‘s LA setting, hitchhiking on an intercity road. The text on the image reads “When there’s no more room in HELL-A…” The studio’s post itself also noted that “The next outbreak? Dambuster is already drenched in the work. The journey is far from over…”
While Dambuster Studios might have done excellently since it started working on the Dead Island franchise, former Deep Silver head of communications Martin Wein had spoken about how the game’s original version, being developed by Yager, would have essentially killed the franchise.
Speaking at Develop:Brighton in July, Wein discussed the delays seen by the original version of Dead Island 2 under Yager. “I can actually give you an example where myself and the product team caused about an eight-year product delay,” said Wein.
“I was working on that with the creative team, and we were mightily proud of that [trailer],” Wein said. “But then, about 3 to 4 weeks later, we had a major milestone with the development studio that was in charge at that time. And boy, that game sucked.”
“It had nothing to do with what [made] the original Dead Island […] really fun,” he explained. “So we commissioned a play test and got horrific feedback. And we sat down with the development team and said, ‘Okay, what’s the course of action?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, leave it with us’.”
Despite negative feedback from playtests, however, Wein noted that the project wasn’t seeing any changes or adjustments that takes the feedback into account, with Wein describing some of the feedback being “this is not fun, this is not engaging, this does not feel like the Dead Island that I played.”
Dead Island 2: Ultimate Edition was released back in 2024 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S, and includes the base game along with all of the DLC that had been made for the game. For more details, check out our review of Dead Island 2.
