Dead Island 2 partners with a company that offers an unusual but very real service. First-person action role-playing games have been in the making for a long time. Originally announced at Sony’s E3 media conference in 2014, it will be produced by Yager Development and is scheduled for release in Q2 2015. However, with Deep Silver announcing that it will no longer be working with Yager Development due to creative differences. Sumo Digital took over in March 2016, and Deep Silver kept reassuring fans and the media that the game was still in development. By 2019, a new announcement was made that Sumo Digital had also exited, and Dambuster Studios was the new developer, Deep Silver’s in-house studio. Following Dead Island 2’s screening at Gamescom 2022, the release date was announced as February 3, 2023, but was later moved to April 28, then moved up again by a week.
However, after going through various development issues, Dead Island 2 seems to be the big game for Deep Silver. The game was a quick success selling one million copies in three days, and for fans who still had a lot of money after their purchase, Dead Island 2 had a unique bonus offer.
This strange partnership was announced in a video from the world of Dead Island 2, and if viewers haven’t read the description below, they’ll probably just think it’s an in-universe gimmick. But to celebrate the release of Dead Island 2, the game has teamed up with a British insurance company called DeadHappy. The company provides a service that most people find either excellent or distasteful. DeadHappy wants to give people a platform to think about what they want to happen after the inevitable has happened. The idea behind this is to hope to eventually change people’s attitudes towards death. The product is specifically called Deathwish, but DeadHappy is quick to explain that it doesn’t mean wishing for death, but making plans for those who remain after someone dies.
As a result of this partnership, DeadHappy has created a Dead Island 2 themed Deathwish, worth 8,000. It’s described as sending “your friends to a zombie cocktail party in real Los Angeles before it goes to hell! Wake all the wakes up in your name.” This will also covers the client’s funeral expenses, which if viewers believe the video, it will A reinforced coffin comes with it, so if the zombie apocalypse becomes a reality, the client’s loved ones are at least safe from the threat of the client’s own resurrection from the grave.
Whether fans think it’s a brilliant piece of marketing or downright pathological is arguable. But it did achieve more people talking about Dead Island 2.
Dead Island 2 is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.