It’s been a challenging year for Starbreeze and the players of Payday 3, but the heist FPS has every opportunity to make a strong comeback. At launch, the much-anticipated sequel to the beloved Payday 2 faced significant difficulties, plagued by numerous technical issues that prevented players from joining matches. Even after the servers were stabilized, many gameplay features that longtime fans had come to expect were missing. Core systems had been redesigned, and the overall experience, compared to its predecessors, fell short. Nevertheless, the crime shooter has recently achieved a crucial milestone, earning a “mostly positive” Steam rating for the first time. In an exclusive interview with PCGamesN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo discuss how Starbreeze is working towards a brighter future for Payday 3.
Everything was in place. Payday 2 had been a massive success, the pre-launch campaign had generated significant goodwill, and the 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. The servers were broken or inaccessible, and when the shooter did work, it felt like a far cry from the series’ glory days. Penniger recalls it vividly.
“Our energy was like, ‘We’re a rock band coming onto the stage with a new album,’ and then the whole stage just collapsed, and everyone left.
“We faced significant technical issues, making the game more or less unplayable for several weeks,” Listo continues. “When you have a launch like ours—a disastrous launch where nobody can play the game—there’s nowhere to hide. However, it’s crucial that we don’t use these technical issues as an excuse, because we clearly missed the mark in terms of the overall experience as well. The game simply felt unfinished. It was a disappointing experience for our players.”
So what went wrong? By the time Payday 3 was released, 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 the Payday franchise and what players wanted. How did Starbreeze, in Listo’s words, “mess up”?
“It’s hard to make video games, and it’s particularly challenging to follow up on the kind of success that Payday 2 achieved—not only at its launch but also in the ten years that followed,” the community head explains. “Andreas and I were part of the Payday 2 development team at that time. Not everyone from ten years ago is still here. Drawing the right lessons from a decade-long production is challenging, and every game project is different from the others. I believe a lot of small factors contributed to the outcome.”
“A lot of the problems stemmed from the fact that we didn’t do our due diligence well enough,” Penniger adds. “We developed Payday 3 while trying to understand what we wanted at the same time. As a result, it became a product that people didn’t connect with. I think we were a bit overconfident from the success of Payday 2, which led us to make decisions too quickly.”
For a while after the launch, working on Payday 3 was challenging. Criticism from players was both 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 brink.
“That feeling of tripping on the goal line doing years of work only to see it dissolve into nothingness was the worst situation to be in,” Listo says. “We had to face the community head-on. But it’s not about what happens to you; it’s about how you deal with it. I think we have a very strong team here at Starbreeze, especially when things go bad.”
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