A year ago, Payday 3 released into misfortuneas the Always Online game was immediately unavailable and the outages lasted for more than a week. When people finally got to play, it turned out they didn’t particularly like it, which made things worse Important patches repeatedly missed their deadlinescommunication broke down and eventually Senior heads rolled. But it seems that Starbreeze developers haven’t given up.
Describe Payday 3The disastrous start is generous. When the Heist ’em Up sequel first released in September 2023, the servers collapsed under the number of players as 1.3 million people tried to play at the same time. Things haven’t really improved, patches have taken forever and haven’t fixed enough, and a look at that SteamDB
In March of this year, with sales expectations not being met and more people already playing the previous game than the new one, Starbreeze fired its CEO, Tobias Sjögren, replaced him with an interim player, Jürgen Goeldner, and then replaced him him with another interim CEO a month later, CFO Mats Juhl. And still rearrange a few other senior chairsseems to have it left him in both positions since.
At this point, you’d imagine the game would be dismissed as a terrible defeat, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. In conversation with PCGNMain producer Andreas Penniger made it clear that the studio is sticking to it Payday 3.
The whole stage collapsed
The game is still running “Mixed” reviews on SteamHowever, can point to Mostly Positive’s more positive opinion when it comes to more recent reviews, pointing to the very slow, very incremental improvements made to the game over the year, as Penniger tells it PCGN
After explaining how bad of a start it was: “Our energy was like, ‘We’re a rock band, we’re coming on stage and we’ve got a new album.’ And the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left.” – The developer talked about how Starbreeze took too long to move on from its own mistakes. “I think we had that perspective when we launched, but it didn’t come from an objective mindset… We needed time to zoom out and realize that we were just making bad decisions here. But now we can see the game through that lens.”
According to Penniger, the aim is to better recognize what has been done Payday 2 so successful, and recapturing that “into a more modern context.” However, he goes on to say that the game currently “suffers from a split personality – trying to be too many things at once.” He wants it to be more focused and make each heist feel “more tense, open-ended and rewarding.”
The thing is, when at its peak the game barely attracts 1,000 players in a day, being significantly outclassed by its decades-old predecessor and must-see games like 2020 Borderlands 3 With the number of people still ten times as high, it’s really hard to see how this can change. While the game really is much better in its second year, it’s unknown what it can do to keep its audience coming back. Still, it would be amazing to see if it really can.
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