While it never made the final cut or was intended to be in the game, publisher Deep Silver still issued an official apology, stating: "These unfortunate actions were of one individual at developer company Techland and do not in any way represent the views of publishing company Deep Silver."
Techland also issued a statement, which read: "It obviously violates professional and ethical standards at Techland and should never have happened. We're investigating this right now and we'll issue a statement later. For now, I can only express my sincerest apologies for this incident and assure you that whoever acted so irresponsibly did not represent the views and opinions of Techland. I'm equally sure that aside from the author of that unfortunate line of code, everyone at the office is as disturbed by this as you are."
Dead Island was released in retail on PC and console with the proper build. The mistakenly released Xbox 360 debug build on Steam was patched a few days ago.