Summary
Payday 3was such a success at launch that the servers completely buckled. Because you can’t play it offline,nobody was able to get into the game for nearly a week. In hindsight, it was a pretty damning omen of Payday 3’s future, as within mere months, it would dip to a peak of only 500 players.
For context, Payday 3 opened to a peak of 77,000.
While the game did claw back some of its community, reaching a height of 5,000 players, it’s been on a downward spiral ever since last August. But with a new heist out, and news that developer Starbreeze has reclaimed the publishing rights from Plaion, announcing that it will “significantly accelerate” its “content development roadmap”, there’s newfound buzz around this underappreciated sequel.
In the last 24 hours alone, Payday 3 reached 2,908 players on PC, a 146 percent increase from last month. It’s a promising outlook for the future of the game if Starbreeze can hold onto that momentum, especially with the long-awaited skill rework due sometime in the coming months.
It’s Still Lagging Behind Payday 2
Unfortunately, however, even with a boost in popularity thanks to its new heist, Payday 3 isn’t close to toppling its predecessor. It might have launched a decade ago, but Payday 2 is still pulling in around 30,000 players a day, and that’s just on Steam.
It’s at least outperforming the first Payday, which peaked at 50 players in the last 24 hours.
It’s hardly surprising given that Payday 3 still has a “Mixed” user score, andan aggregate of just 63 on OpenCritic. While the new heists are exciting, and have clearly served to pull people back in, a glance at the reviews shows that there arefundamental problems the community wants to see addressedbefore they move on from the second game completely.
Many criticse its progression system, “bullet sponge” enemies, and lack of content, arguing that it was released in an unfinished state, though hopefully the skill rework starts to address some of these issues.
With the rights to Payday 3 back in Starbreeze’s hands, and an uptick in players thanks to its newest update (which also overhauled the armour system), the game might be on track to winning back players. We’ve seen bigger redemption stories: just look atNo Man’s SkyandStar Wars Battlefront 2. It’s not all that far-fetched to think that maybe Payday 3 is next on the list.
