The CEO of Embracer Group, Lars Wingefors, hasn’t given any further Dead Island 2 details, but who knows, maybe the Duke Nukem Forever of this generation could finally be a reality…

Granted, Duke has needed a lot more time, with an announcement in around 1997 and then reaching players in 2011, which is fourteen years; Dead Island 2’s clock is still under eight years (it was announced at E3 2014), but there hasn’t been much recently that has taken more than a decade from announcement to release. (Nioh was one of those games in the previous console generation.)

In 2021, Deep Silver, under the Embracer Group, eagerly announced that Dead Island 2 would be an Epic Games Store exclusive on PC (and knowing the company, they’ll do it with Denuvo to make the port even more crippled with the extra hump). Then again, it was all deadly silence after that news. Still, during a Q&A during Embracer’s last quarterly business report, Wingefors hinted that people were already writing off Techland’s legacy (no wonder). The “host” Oscar Erixon, an equity market analyst at Carnegie, said: “People have written off [Dead Island 2], not knowing if it’s still alive. But it very clearly is. I, at least, expect the release this financial year—sorry, next financial year, I should say. Is that reasonable? What can we expect from the title? It’s been in development for probably ten years or so.” So can we expect a release in the next financial year (April 2022 to March 2023)?

Wingefors didn’t duck the question but replied with the following: “I can’t talk about Dead Island 2 because it’s not announced, as such, from the publisher, but we have just talked about—we have one unannounced triple-A title that you think is Dead Island 2. It’s hard for me to comment further on that. But I’m excited about unannounced titles,” while looking at Erixon.

So Dead Island 2 could be in the works and, in principle, could be released in the next fiscal year. In the picture below, a presentation from Koch Media’s division (which includes Deep Silver) showed Payday 3, Shadow Warrior 3, Crossfire Legion, and the Saints Row reboot along with Dead Island 2…

Source: PCGamer