Dead Island - Marketing

Marketing

In Australia, a collector's edition was available to pre-order exclusively from EB Games. The collector's edition came with a Turtle Beach X12 headset, Ripper weapon DLC and Bloodbath Arena DLC.

The collector's edition in Canada has the Ripper and Bloodbath DLC.

On July 20, Dead Island became available for pre-purchase on Steam as a single copy of the game for full price, or a four pack with one copy free. Both the single copy and the four pack include the Ripper and Bloodbath DLC.

In PlayStation Home (North American version), the PlayStation 3's social gaming network, users could pre-order Dead Island from a special kiosk in the Central Plaza (Home's central meeting point redesigned for this promotion and includes a "Zombie Survival" minigame) and receive an "Exploding Zombie Outfit" (features a remote option for users to explode) for their Home avatar.

Deep Silver funded a four-part series of comedic short films written and starring hosts of Talkradar from the video game journalistic website GamesRadar, entitled Dead Island: Secret Origins. The film depicts fictionalized versions of the hosts who travel to Dead Island and become zombies out of choice.

There was also a novelization with the same name, released by Bantam Books on the same date to accompany the game. The novelization differs slightly from the game, with more mature themes and an alternate ending that were presumably unsuitable for the game.

On March 21, 2011, gaming licenser ESRB announced that the original version of the Dead Island logo was not suitable for release in North America, and Deep Silver was told to change it. Instead of the hanging corpse in the original logo, it was changed to a zombie standing by the tree. This logo change appears on the boxart of the North American release (the logo in-game, however, remains unchanged), with the logo remaining unchanged in other territories.

In Australia, the game was released a day early, instead of its intended release date, September 9 by EB Games.