Swedish based developer and publisher Starbreeze Studios -- developer/publisher of games like Payday 2, Brothers: A Tale of Two Son, and Dead by Daylight -- has revealed its financial results, showing that the company earned SEK 345.5 million in revenue, up 58% from the SEK 218.4 million posted over the same period last year, while profit climbed 45% to SEK 57.1 million.

Leading the charge for Starbreeze during this period was Behaviour Interactive's asymmetrical horror title Dead by Daylight, which launched for PC in June last year, with Starbreeze as its publisher.

The title accumulated 1.8 million sales by the of the calendar year, and contributed SEK 54.6 million to the company's Q4 revenue. This is more than half of the SEK 99.4 million the company earned as a whole. And with the publisher's other big IP, Overkill's Payday, declining in revenue from SEK 47.7 million to SEK 37.2 million year-on-year, Dead By Daylight's big performance was much needed.

Starbreeze has also confirmed that production of Payday 3 has started, with the game at the "full design stage." According to CEO Bon Andersson Klint, that the game will get as much time as it needs, as it is the company's single most important brand today, and the cornerstone of its business.

On the company's Q4 performance, Klint added the following:

"We're proud to yet again show a triple digit growth for [Q4], and the highest EBITDA since the launch of Payday 2. It is a solid performance that shows our ability to deliver profitability while we are scaling our business to secure future growth."

Looking forward to the rest of this year, the company has Overkill's The Walking Dead game, a mobile game based on the Payday IP, a console release for Dead by Daylight, and a co-op version of Smilegate's Crossfire.  It is also working with the Croatian developer Lion Game Lion on Raid: World War II and the indie project AntiSphere. Lastly, it recently invested $8 million to bring Double Fine's Psychonauts 2 to market.

The company currently has 550 employees.