Behaviour Interactive gave Twitch streamer TheBurntPeanut every paid character and perk in Dead by Daylight over Halloween weekend, absorbed a wave of online complaints, and had the content removed within days. The studio also told players it is handling the employee who made the gift as a confidential internal matter.
Dead by Daylight is Behaviour’s asymmetric horror game from Montreal, released on PC June 14, 2016. One player is the Killer, four are Survivors, and the Survivors have to repair generators and escape before they are hooked and sacrificed. Licensed characters from Halloween and Silent Hill sit alongside original killers, and the game passed 70 million lifetime players in June 2026.
Peanut plays in a peanut-shaped VTuber avatar on Twitch, YouTube and Kick. He won Best VTuber at the Streamer Awards in December 2025, and Streams Charts data put him first among all VTubers in 2025 with 60.2 million hours watched, ahead of Miko Ch. at 49.3 million. His audience grew on Escape from Tarkov and exploded on Arc Raiders.
Over Halloween weekend he played Dead by Daylight for the first time. Behaviour’s statement explains what happened next: “Members of our team saw a very large audience appear in the DbD Twitch directory watching a streamer who has not played DbD before.” A team member gave him every DLC character and perk plus in-game currency, reportedly about $300 worth, and chatted with him from the game’s official account.
The studio called the instinct normal in that same statement: “Moments like this are usually exciting for the dev team, as they are a chance to welcome new players.”
Viewers then complained about the gift, and Peanut offered to hand it back. “If you don’t want people on Twitter to be upset, I’ll take the heat and you can take away the DLC,” he said in chat. The official account answered: “WE CAN TAKE THE HEAT! THEY ARE YOURS TO KEEP.”
The reversal began November 1, when the DbD Pulse account posted: “We apologize to our community for letting you down.” The post also condemned threats against Behaviour staff. On November 3 the studio followed with a four-page statement, reproduced below. It says the gift went out without a review of the streamer’s history: “When collaborating with a new creator, we normally look thoroughly at their past content to determine whether they are representing the values of inclusion our community expects from us. In this case, this was not taken into proper consideration or discussed as a group.”
The statement places the failure on one person: “Our team member acted without a supporting system behind them to guide them to another outcome.” It also condemns the reply sent from the official account: “This message, along with some others in that session, showed a disregard for the context we were suddenly in and crossed the line of appropriate responses from our brand.” On the employee, it says: “We take this situation very seriously and are taking appropriate action internally.” The studio removed the content from Peanut’s account.
The objection came from players who point to his record of being edgy as if it’s a reason to cancel him. Kotaku reports he used an f-slur, unbleeped, on an Escape from Tarkov stream in 2025, hosts a segment called Slur Saturday, and drew protest when Fortnite made him a Sidekick during Pride Month in June 2026. Peanut told his stream he did not believe he had said anything about transgender people in two years of streaming. Whatever a viewer thinks of the jokes, they sit on the public channel that drew the audience, and the audience came anyway.
The reactions were not kind to the company for canceling him. Players who wanted the studio to hold its position saw the apology as a surrender.
John A. Douglas wrote on X: “Do you wanna go the way of Bioware? Cause this is how you go the way of BioWare.”
A user posting as Vegi wrote: “instead of spreading to new audiences, you are siding with the very psychopaths who were sending you death threats. cowardly move. you deserve your toxic community.”
Marc Foxx posted: “Pathetic, weak behavior.”
Asmongold’s verdict on the November 3 statement ran under the headline “Pathetic capitulation that will earn the respect of no one.”
Behaviour had the thing studios pay marketing teams to chase: a record-setting streamer’s audience watching someone discover the game. A team member acted on it, and the statement itself admits the dev team finds moments like that exciting. The studio’s answer was to apologize to the people complaining, remove the gift, rewrite its creator guidelines and promise to check a creator’s past content against “values of inclusion” before it says hello. If a past joke can cancel a free gift to a new player, how many of the players who built a ten-year-old game will the next vetting policy turn away?
Nuts!