Friday the 13th (F13) was publisher Gun Media’s 2017 entry point in the asymmetrical horror genre. A successful, fresh take on multiplayer at the time, F13 faced numerous challenges during its live service cycle. The game was plagued by performance issues, an engine upgrade, dedicated server migration, and, lethally, a lawsuit battle between the creators of the beloved franchise. Read on to hear from the GDS team what went wrong with Gun Media and Illfonic’s first partnership.
1. Licensing lawsuit
A licensing lawsuit was the largest challenge Gun faced during the development of Friday the 13th. F13 started life as an unlicensed generic horror game titled Slasher Vol. 1: Summer Camp. Gun Media announced their intentions with a 2015 Kickstarter campaign, promising an asymmetrical multiplayer experience pitting one killer against a team of weak, helpless teenagers. Gun’s project drew the attention of Sean Cunningham, the director of the original Friday the 13th film. Already looking to license a game, Cunningham met with Gun CEO Wes Keltner and was eager to grant the official license.
A legal battle between Sean Cunningham and the original film’s writer, Victor Miller, began in 2016, the year before Friday the 13th released. The original film came out in 1980, but US Copyright Law allows authors of works created after 1978 to terminate a grant of copyright over their work after 35 years. Cunningham fought the decision on the grounds that the script was a work made for hire, but the court decided in favor of Miller, transferring ownership back. Given that Cunningham was the one who initiated the deal to create the game, Gun Media didn’t have time to wait and see whether they’d be able to forge a new deal. Gun had to stop releasing new content for the game and go into maintenance mode.
2. No new content or updates
The legal issues meant that the lack of content on release was impossible to fix. F13 had 8 maps by this point, but only one multiplayer game mode and identical objectives between maps. Gun Media addressed the lack of variety with a singleplayer challenge mode after launch, but a short singleplayer mode wasn’t enough to keep player counts up.
The singleplayer provides between 2 and 3 hours of content on a fresh playthrough. Gameplay in the singleplayer challenges is identical to in multiplayer, except with objectives to kill players in certain, gruesome ways. The challenges encourage replay by asking players to complete objectives without being seen, without leaving any survivors, and reaching a par score. The gameplay differs from multiplayer in two ways. First, a special cutscene introduces the scenario and establishes the location of the victims. Second, the game adds Stalk points: places where the player hits a button to enter first-person and watch the counselors from afar.
The only other singleplayer game mode, the Virtual Cabin, is more of an easter egg than a fully-fledged game mode. The Virtual Cabin is similar to Museum Mode in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre game. The cabin contains trivia about the movies, the development of the game, and secrets to find through the completion of puzzles. Puzzles usually involve finding and placing items, much like an adventure game, occasionally with appearances by Jason to threaten the player. The main attraction of the cabin is the number of secrets. Players must guess passwords to access data about each character in the cabin’s computer. An entire sequence is only unlockable by entering the Konami code. While an interesting change of pace, a player who knows what they’re doing ought to expect around 30 minutes of gameplay, making this mode a short distraction.
The main game mode, multiplayer, shipped with relatively little content. A variety of game modes, community-generated content, and numerous distinct maps are popular ways to keep a game alive after the end of its main content, but F13 didn’t have those advantages. Highly anticipated maps like Grendel were cut because of the lawsuit, so players had to stick to the 5 maps available to them (8 if counting the small versions of three maps). Each map has the same methods of escape: calling the cops, driving out of the map, activating the boat and taking it over the water, or waiting until daytime. Most of the map variety comes down to their size and terrain. Pinehurst is large, making it hard for victims to find everything they need to escape. Packanack Lodge is hilly and driving the car up slopes is a challenge.
3. Cheating and hacking
Cheating and hacking offered another reason for players to leave the game. Gun and Black Tower Studios put out several updates to address issues with hacking and instability. We’re only able to speculate based on their patch notes how common the hacking problem was. Certain architectures and issues with netcode, however, hint at the causes.
F13 started with peer-to-peer (P2P) connection rather than a client-server architecture, which is one potential reason why hacking was prevalent. P2P connections are less challenging for developers to implement, as it requires no servers for hosting matches (although servers for storing player data are necessary in some cases). P2P doesn’t solve the challenges, though, but it distributes them among the playerbase. When a game runs on dedicated servers, that server is the source of truth for what happens in the game. Accessing and modifying the game state on that server isn’t possible. With P2P, however, one player in a match must be the host, which means a single player acts like the server instead. Players opening up their own computers to other users, rather than an officially hosted server, makes the game more susceptible to cheats.
Gun Media got to work switching to dedicated servers, but the playerbase had to wait more than a year after release. Gun reported that an upgrade to a newer version of Unreal Engine 4 was required to get dedicated servers running, although they didn’t specify technical details. Dedicated servers came in late 2018 to all platforms, but the end of the content had already been announced by that point.
4. Removal of dedicated servers
The removal of dedicated servers only came two years after their implementation in 2020. The major challenge wasn’t in the lack of servers, as P2P quick play and private matches were still available. The shutdown of dedicated servers marked the end of all new patches and fixes as well. The end of dedicated servers was quite a blow to Switch users, as they’d gained access to the game only one year prior.
Gun and IllFonic continued to leave the player progression servers online, but they finally announced the end of service on December 31, 2024, when their license expired. Gun Media did what they were able to to make the last year of service worthwhile. The price came down from $14.99 to $4.99 in June 2023, with all DLC becoming $1.
5. Issues with game balance
Issues with game balance afflicted F13 alongside problems with content delivery and server support. The power granted to killers in an asymmetrical horror game like F13 is thrilling for Jason and terrifying for the victims. The balance suffers as a result, though, and causes just as much frustration and silliness as true terror.
The 1v7 formula is an imbalance in fun as well as power. Jason players are autonomous. Without the need for teamwork, the player is in complete control of how to handle a situation. Jason’s roster of powers makes him more fun to play, too. As Jason, players have the ability to teleport around the map (Morph), zoom toward counselors on a cooldown (Shift), temporarily disable the audio cue that plays when he’s nearby (Stalk), and activate an ability to highlight buildings counselors are located in (Sense).
The challenge with making Jason so fun is that 7 out of every 8 players have to be counselors, his victims, and the counselor experience is much less dynamic and interesting than the Jason side. The importance of teamwork makes winning with random players a challenge, and, even when working as a team, success comes down to random factors. Counselors must search the map to find weapons, healing items, and key resources required to secure escape. The map is large enough that one player isn’t likely to find all of them. Key objects spawn in random locations, so any one player isn’t likely to find everything they need. If playing in a lobby with mic-less players, success is unlikely.
A coordinated team is too powerful in other cases, taking the fun out of the game for novice players on the killer side. Jason is limited by the fact players are able to stun him with bats, machetes, pocket knives, and firecrackers. A dedicated, cooperative team is capable of mobbing Jason and attacking him until he isn’t able to do anything. Getting one over on Jason for once is fun, but it’s pointless for victory and comes at the expense of the other player’s experience. The ability to bully Jason takes the tension out of what ought to be a nerve-wracking horror experience.
6. Problems with peer-to-peer connection
Problems with the peer-to-peer connection on launch gave the game a reputation for instability before the end of its content. Anecdotes of waiting 10 minutes or more for a match or dropping the connection suddenly were common in day-one reviews. Gamespot waited a week after launch to publish their final review, but the issues they found on day one were still the same. The main problem with P2P is that F13 has no host migration, so the match is over if the host leaves. Players have to wait a long time to play as Jason, meaning a sudden end to a match is likely to spoil the game’s most fun moments.
7. Lack of developer support
The lack of developer support in terms of content made sticking with the game a challenge. The engine upgrade drew developer attention away from adding content for several months in the first year of release. The upgrade work began in October 2017. F13 had few patches and no major content releases until May of the next year. The post-release period is crucial for a live service game, and entering a content desert about 4 months after release must have been a stumbling block for the game’s momentum. No major content means no new characters, playable Jasons, or maps. The only update in February 2018 focused on bug fixes and enabling bots on maps that didn’t have that feature before.
8. Toxic community behavior
F13 gained a reputation for toxic community behavior which partially emerged from mixed incentives on the counselors’ side. The main objective is to escape, but this doesn’t mean the player has any requirement to cooperate. Some players don’t care about escaping as much as they care about denying Jason kills. Both these incentives fight against the main objective, which harms the experience for new players along the way. A player who found a powerful weapon or the last piece needed to repair a vehicle has no incentive to wait for other players as Jason approaches, and new players are often left behind by bad mentors. Because friendly fire is enabled, players are able to use guns and traps to kill each other and keep Jason’s score low.
The bad mentor problem caused issues with F13’s Tommy Jarvis mechanic, requiring developers to add new, clearer messaging about his purpose in the game. Tommy is a character players are able to summon by calling him with the radio. Tommy Jarvis has all stats at max and comes equipped with a shotgun; he’s the only one who’s able to kill Jason. The intention behind Tommy is to rescue the other victims. However, Tommy is played by one of the other players who’ve already died. Players often just leave with Tommy immediately, using the chance advantage for their own gain.
9. Dragging pacing and flow
The dragging pacing and flow during matches pulls down the experience for the victim side. F13 includes individual moments of fun: a victim quickly swerves to avoid Jason with the car, Jason walks into a trap, or a fleeing counselor squeezes through the door and locks it just in time. A successful match where players work together and encounter many close calls is great, but these great moments come between long expanses of predictable gameplay. The moment-to-moment starts with going into a house, looting every drawer, locking doors if Jason approaches, and jumping out a window if he breaks in. Rinse and repeat. Players don’t have enough distinct abilities, offensive options, or unique environments to make for a consistently engaging set of decisions.
The boredom is unavoidable for players who want to maximize progression. The highest XP a player is able to earn in a match is by staying until the end. This means that a player who dies to Jason 2 minutes in has to wait up to 18 minutes to get their full reward. Hiding is also a challenge, as players who move get flagged by Jason’s Sense ability. The other option, hiding in a locker for the rest of the match, isn’t an exciting prospect. Such a system makes playing as a victim an experience with high highs but low lows.
Alternate experiences like Dead by Daylight handle player downtime by making stealth more viable and failure less punishing. Stealth is much more effective because of the killer’s limited first-person perspective. The grass and obstacles around levels become useful means of escape when the killer doesn’t have Jason’s omniscient Sense and wide camera. Even when the killer does catch up, they don’t immediately slaughter their victims. The killer must place the victims on hooks to prepare them for sacrifice to the Entity. Victims still have multiple options from this point: having a teammate blind the killer with a flashlight, squirming off of the hook once the killer leaves, or getting pulled off the hook by a passing victim. No instant death affects players here like in F13.
The singleplayer mode in TCM faces a monotony similar to the in-between moments of multiplayer. The challenges have several outcomes but offer little content. A challenge typically involves waiting for a character to move to a different position and hitting a button for a cutscene. In one attempt, the player has to kill a character when they’re smoking; in another, Jason has to kill them when they’re peeing in the woods.
What can game designers learn from the Friday the 13th game’s failure?
Game designers can learn positive lessons from F13 about how to handle a rough live service rollout with poise. The game faced issues with performance, migrating to dedicated servers, and licensing, but the developers worked hard to make sure the game was a worthwhile purchase considering the challenges.
The development team delivered on their promises despite the game’s rocky life cycle. Gun Media did set up dedicated servers even after they were forced to stop adding content due to the lawsuit, showing their commitment to making sure the player experience was still workable. Bots and singleplayer challenges came post-release to make the game replayable in the face of network issues and future server shutdowns. Community backlash and licensing issues didn’t prevent IllFonic and Gun from supporting the game for a long time, which must have made it easier for IllFonic to retain community trust for their upcoming Halloween game and Gun for their Texas Chainsaw Massacre game.
The issues with licensing were impossible to get around, but problems with little content and bugs on release show how valuable early access and open betas are for multiplayer launches. Players are more forgiving of a low amount of content in an early access title. Revenue is also able to come in before the game is finalized and polished, giving the studio more time to iron out the kinks. Once the game is ready for release, the issues with gameplay and performance have been fixed and the team is ready to dedicate themselves to adding post-launch content.
Problems in a multiplayer game are difficult to identify without a sizable playerbase to stress test it. Some bugs are rare enough that they only show up once thousands of players are online. Issues with the netcode, syncing animations, and collisions that otherwise don’t happen with low player counts have the potential to occur once the system reaches its limit. More time in early access would have given the opportunity to upgrade versions of Unreal Engine and add dedicated servers before a full release as well. As it was, the switch in versions of Unreal Engine meant they were dealing with collision/physics/animation issues even 2 years after launch.
