a year ago, payday 3 released into disasteras the always-online game quickly went away, with the outage lasting more than a week. When people were finally able to play it, it turned out they didn’t like it that much, when Important patches always miss deadlinescommunication breaks down, and ultimately Senior people shook their heads. But developer Starbreeze doesn’t seem to be giving up.
to describe payday 3The disastrous rollout was generous. When the Heist ’em up sequel first launched in September 2023, its servers crashed due to the number of players as 1.3 million people tried to play the game at the same time. Things didn’t really improve, the patch took a long time and didn’t get enough fixes, one look steam database Tell me, 13 months later, as I write this, 729 people are playing the co-op FPS. This is less than ten percent of the total number of people Currently playing 2013 payday 2.
In March, Starbreeze fired CEO Tobias Sjögren and replaced him with interim Juergen Goeldner, who then replaced him as CEO, after sales expectations fell short of expectations and more people played the previous game than the new one. . he A month later, another interim CEO, Chief Financial Officer Mats Juhl, met with him. although Rearrange several other senior chairsthere seems to be Let him hold two positions since.
You might think that this game would be viewed as a terrible defeat at this point, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. talking PCGNlead producer Andreas Penniger made it clear that the studio will stick to payday 3.
The whole stage collapsed
The game is still there “Mixed” reviews on Steamalthough a more positive view can be pointed to in recent reviews, which indicate a year of very slow, very incremental improvements being made to the game, Pennig told PCGN Things started to improve around June.
After explaining how bad the release was – “Our energy was like, ‘We’re a rock band, we’re about to hit the stage, we have a new album.'” The whole stage just collapsed, and everyone All left. “I think we had that view on the launch, but it didn’t come from an objective mindset… It took us a while to figure out we made the wrong decision here. But now we’re able to look at the game through that lens.
Pennig says the goal is to better understand what makes payday 2 So successful and recaptures this “into a more modern context.” However, he went on to say that the game now “suffers from a split personality – trying to do too many things at once.” He wants it to become more focused , and makes every heist “feel more tense, open and rewarding.”
The problem is that when the game only attracted 1,000 players a day at its peak, it far outperformed its predecessor from 10 years ago as well as competitive games in 2020 Borderlands 3 Still attracting ten times as many people, it’s really hard to see how to turn things around. Even if the game does get better as it enters its second year, there’s no telling what it can do to keep audiences coming back. Still, it would be surprising to see if it actually works.
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