It’s been a tough year for Starbreeze, and for Payday 3’s players, but the heist FPS has every chance of making a valiant comeback. At launch, the much-anticipated sequel to the beloved Payday 2 absolutely tanked, afflicted by so many technical issues that people literally couldn’t get into a match. Even when the servers were straightened out, many gameplay features that the series faithful had come to expect were missing. Core systems had been redesigned and the general experience, compared to Payday 3’s predecessors, was found wanting. Nevertheless, the crime shooter has just passed a crucial milestone, earning a ‘mostly positive’ Steam rating for the first time. Speaking exclusively to PCGamesN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo explain how Starbreeze is building a better future for Payday 3.
Everything was set. Payday 2 had been a massive success, the pre-launch campaign had earned even more goodwill, and initial beta tests seemed positive. On paper, Payday 3 was a grand slam – but the 77,000 players who flocked to the FPS game on Steam on launch day were quickly disillusioned. Servers were broken or impenetrable and when the shooter did work, it felt like a distant cry from the series’ glory days. Penniger remembers it well.
“Our energy was like ‘we’re a rock band, and we’re coming onto the stage, and we’ve got a new album.’ And the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left.”
“We suffered from major technical issues, so the game was more or less unplayable for several weeks,” Listo continues. “When you have a launch like we did – a disastrous launch, where nobody is able to play the game – there is no place to hide. But it’s important that we don’t use the technical issues as an excuse because we clearly missed the mark from an experience point of view as well. The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players.”
So what happened? By the time Payday 3 arrived, Payday 2 had been in active development for around ten years. DLC, updates, and ongoing community support had transformed the underground success of the first game into a bona fide megahit. Surely, by now, it was clear what worked for Payday and what players wanted. How did Starbreeze, in Listo’s words, “mess up”?
“It’s hard to make videogames, and it’s particularly difficult to follow up on the kind of success that Payday 2 was, not only at its launch, but also in the ten years succeeding that,” the community head says. “Andreas and myself were part of the Payday 2 development team at that time. Not everyone, ten years on, was still there. To draw the exact right learning from a ten-year production is challenging, but also every game project is different from another one. I think a lot of small things built up.”
“A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn’t do our due diligence well enough,” Penniger adds. “We built Payday 3 while trying to understand what we wanted, in parallel. It ended up being a product that people didn’t resonate with. I think we were a bit confident from the success of Payday 2 that we ended up making decisions too quickly.”
For a while after launch, going to work on Payday 3 was challenging. Criticism from players was forthcoming and plentiful. The concurrent user base on Steam dropped into the low hundreds, and there was a genuine risk that the game could die entirely. We’ve seen plenty of comebacks in recent years – Cyberpunk 2077, No Man’s Sky – but Payday 3 was on the precipice.
“That feeling of tripping on the goal line – you do years of work, only to see it dissolve into nothingness – was the worst situation to be in,” Listo says. “And we had to meet the community head-on. But it’s not what happens to you. It’s how you deal with it. I think we have a very strong team here at Starbreeze, especially when things go bad.
“If we just put our heads in the sand and continued on, the game would be dead at this point. But even the angriest Payday fans still come from a good place. They want the game to succeed, and their anger is only a reflection of that. They’re not hating on the game just to be haters – they’re telling us what they want the game to have, in order for it to improve.”
The mood started to change in June 2024, after the release of Payday 3’s second chapter, Boys in Blue. Combined with an overhaul to the game’s controversial armor system, and the ongoing Operation Medic Bag, whereby Starbreeze releases small but regular updates designed to optimize Payday 3’s gameplay, the community has begun to thaw. In the early days, Starbreeze was more determined to stick with the big iterations it had made on Payday 3, despite feedback. Listo says that’s over.
“I think we’re past that point. I think we had that view around launch, but it didn’t come from an objective state of mind – it came from the fact that we worked on something for a very long time, and we believed that a lot of the features weren’t appreciated because they just weren’t fleshed out enough yet. It took us time to zoom out and see that we just made bad decisions here. But now we’re able to see the game through that lens.”
“Something we’ve learned is to try and understand the community, understand what made Payday 2 successful, and then to try and translate that into a more modern context,” Penniger continues. “While we haven’t communicated what year two might be, for me, the game currently suffers from a split personality – trying to be too many things at once. Our focus needs to be a stronger core fantasy. Every heist needs to feel more tense, open-ended, and rewarding.”
The road back for Payday 3 may still be long, but at least Starbreeze can see it now. Both Listo and Penniger are confident the game can become what people were expecting, and recapture that original 70,000-plus player base.
“For me it’s three things,” Listo concludes. “One is to improve the experience and make the game better and better. Two, it’s regaining the trust and respect of the community. And three, it’s to tell a great story. There’s a lot of heart and soul to the storytelling in Payday, and that’s what I’m looking forward to in the coming months.”