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Starbreeze admits Payday 3 is massively underperforming

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/starbreeze-admits-payday-3-is-massively-underperforming

The studio believes it can rehabilitate the struggling title but has warned there's no "simple" fix.

Payday 3 launched for Windows PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S in September 2023 but has seemingly struggled to win over players. The title currently has a 'mixed' rating on Steam with over 36,000 user reviews, although the vast majority of recent reviews have been 'mostly negative.'

Maybe release a game when it's ready, so many of these online games are releasing broken and getting their roadmap pushed back because they have to fix it asap.

25 comments

Rentlar

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Make your game require always online connectivity
Rush your development, causing network issues, bugs, missing QoL features
Push ahead with monetization schemes despite problems
Players vanish
Surprised Pikachu face

Congratulations Starbreeze, you made a game so shitty that it's not even worth pirating. They will practically have to relaunch the game to reclaim the playerbase at this point.

tux

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Don't forget taking forever for an initial patch release, despite there being multiple game breaking bugs.

The state the game was at release was absolutely awful.

The only folks who kept playing that I know were folks grinding for the final levels/achievements/weapons. Which consisted of playing in unenjoyable ways like using bad load outs, doing stupid crap like tagging a billion guards, etc. Who wants to pay money for an unenjoyable grind?

They released a decent patch, some new content and DLC but everyone has already moved on. They totally screwed themselves, sucks it's an IP that I like, but more games need to fail like this so publishers stop doing the same bullshit

Rentlar

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Yeah, I've played Payday 2 but I wasn't going to pick this up for any more than $10US.

This review from a Japanese player with 426hours playtime was really telling..., to summarize:

Way too late to form a strike team, are they even working to fix it?
Years ago the CEO put comments to the media about wanting to make a game to run over the long term. If you want that then don't put out a game that flops at the start.
The developers have full on ignored player feedback, and just putting in what they feel like and maybe a handful of Payday 2 brought in as a bonus. Infrequent updates on the Steam Community, never responding to users, releasing a DLC people couldn't play and saying "have a nice weekend" on X.
A patch finally comes but it introduces new bugs, many big issues still unaddressed, game still dropping frames and unoptimized.
Are the devs shitfaced drunk while making this game? If they can get money while hardly doing work I'd want to work there.
I uninstalled the game, and even if the game were to massively improve, I wouldn't return as the studio treats players like nothing but money generators.

NOSin

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Stop blaming Devs and blame corpo above them. Can't guarantee that's the case here but it's almost always their fault rather than the Devs when things go wrong on a launch like this.

yamanii

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Maybe they should unionize or walkout or something, costumers can't fight their fight.

As proven with Volition, if we don't buy their game in protest they are closed down anyway instead of getting another shot at something we actually want, nothing can change from this side.

NOSin

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It's easier said than done tbh. It seems to be slowly changing lately tho, there's hope still.

Sendpicsofsandwiches

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Echoes of the anthem launch (and eventual christmas themed death)

Glamborghini

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Man, was this game a disappointment. So many privacy agreements just to install the bloody thing. The entire experience was a letdown. PD2 was so so so much fun and this game arrived just wobbly and with pre-shat pants. What a damn dud.

Rentlar

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50 hours of gameplay! If you include the amount of time it takes to read the Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and End User License Agreement.

KingThrillgore

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The live service bubble is bursting.

GlitterInfection

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God I hope!

Katana314

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If they wanted to focus on live service, I’m surprised they made a trilogy of games. In the meantime a bunch of other devs just kept adding content to the one game their players play.

Not good for Payday’s fans to compete within their trilogy for attention.

Phegan

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I hope the take away from this is that no matter if a game is live service or not it needs to run, not nickel dime players, and be good. Or it will bust.

Hubi

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Damn. I knew it was bad but seeing this it's more like "catastrophic":

https://steamcharts.com/cmp/218620,1272080#6m

Paradoxvoid

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Holy shit, it's actually impressive to tank that hard - not cresting more than 1000 concurrent players in over a month, and hasn't been able to beat 5000 since November... I know people love throwing the 'dead game' meme around prematurely, but if this isn't dead yet, it's definitely got one foot in the grave.

caut_R

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IMO Payday 3‘s biggest problem is that Payday 2 exists

Badeendje

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Yeah, and they had so much DLC that was not even always bad value for money.. but you need to have a hell of a proposition for people to leave that investment behind.

Zoidsberg

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9715698

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Damn it's weird seeing that meme in such high resolution.

jballs

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I played it a lot at launch. Frankly it's just boring after a while. There's only something like 6 or 7 missions. You get no rewards for completing missions except for random achievements and cash, which is pretty useless overall.

aluminium

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This game also brilliantly exposed how easily certain YouTubers get corrupted.

yamanii

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Not like this actman...

beetus

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Could you elaborate on which? I've seen a lot of sketchy reviews recently

MilitantAtheist

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Not sure why they even released this. In the other hand, Overkill's the walking dead was really enjoyable. I wanted to play that game a lot. But it got taken down from steam in a heartbeat.

Cold_Brew_Enema

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I would rather shit in my mouth than play this