Not yet as popular as “Payday 2,” “Payday 3” development director resigns and becomes a designer 4Gamers

The end of September this year marks the first anniversary of the release of “Payday 3” (Chinese translation: Payday), but the situation of this masterpiece series has not improved, but has even worsened. After the replacement of the studio’s CEO, there are also new changes in the personnel at the helm of Starbreeze Studios. The game director who was responsible for the development for the past year has been replaced.

According to Starbreeze’s announcement, Miodrag Kovačević’s game director has confirmed that he will be stepping down from his leadership responsibilities and turning to an in-house designer to devote his energies to the project’s development. Andreas Häll Penninger and Almir Listo will share the position of game director. The latter was originally the director of “Payday”.

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— PAYDAY 3 (@PAYDAYGame) September 11, 2024

This personnel change is the second change at the helm of “Payday 3” since its release. Although the game peaked at 77,000 online when it was released last year, the vast majority of players complained about server instability and queues waiting to form. team It takes a long time, and even single-player games have to wait tens of minutes to play.

Although the content of “Payday 3” itself is playable, the overall gameplay has not changed much. The initial map and level content were limited, along with many server issues, bugs, and selling prices, which led to a failure in the word-. in less than two weeks, the maximum number of people online on Steam has fallen by 90%. After numerous revisions, it failed to bring the maximum number of online users back to over 10,000 and was replaced in March of this year.

According to SteamDB, “Payday 3” released the third installment of the “Houston Breakout” DLC in August this year, which revived the classic character from the original series, Houston Breakout. The breakout event was well-received, but its Steam active performance peaked at 4,694 concurrent players online.

Although the performance of the DLC seems to be improving, currently “Payday 3” has not yet emerged from the shadow of the series’ success, because the biggest rival of “Payday 3” is “Payday 2” so far active players online on Steam, “Payday” 2》 still maintains a peak of more than 10,000 online players every day.

The next DLC for “Payday 3” “Chapter 4: Fear & Greed” is expected to be released in September.Starbreeze to launch annual ‘Year 1 Edition’ in OctoberWhether it can regain the trust of the gaming community and restore its popularity depends on the development of subsequent content.

The cooperative shooter game “Payday 3” was released on September 21, 2023, with a standard price of NT$1,170. There was a half-off discount during this year’s Steam Summer Sale.