Starbreeze, the developer behind the embattled Payday 3, has compared its downfall to that of a rock band when “the whole stage collapsed and everyone left.”
In an interview with PCGN, government maker Andreas Penniger and population chief Almir Listo mentioned the shooter’s disappointing debut, acknowledging that its “disastrous launch” was not the only factor.
“The game seemed unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players,” Listo admitted.
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“It’s difficult to make video games, and it’s particularly difficult to follow the kind of success that Payday 2 had, not only at its launch, but also in the ten years since,” added the head of the population.
“Andreas and I were part of the Payday 2 development team at the time. Not everyone, ten years later, was still there. Getting the exact learning from a ten-year production is a challenge, but also each game project is different from another. I think a lot of little things accumulated.”
“A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn’t do our due diligence well enough,” Penniger added. “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 little confident about the success of Payday 2 and ended up making decisions quickly too.”
“Our energy was like ‘we’re a rock band, we’re going on stage and we’ve got a new album.’ And the whole stage collapsed and everyone left.”
In its final year of release, Payday 3 struggled with matchmaking issues and unpopular online-only requirements, then its top spot plummeted with repeated delays, and finally arrived two months after the game’s founding. Starbreeze has since released two additional primary Trojan resolution patches under the name Operation Medic Bag and offered an early offline form. In the midst of all this, the studio saw that a Dungeons and Dragons recreation was running.
Listo cites the base issues as particularly problematic, however he mentioned that it was once “important that we not use the technical issues as an excuse because we had clearly failed from an experience standpoint as well. The game just felt unfinished.”
Admitting that if the team had continued as if there was nothing wrong, the game “would be dead at this point,” Listo also went out of his way to acknowledge the usefulness of the feedback from the Payday population.
“If we just stuck our heads in the sand and persisted, the sport might be useless at this level. But even the angriest Payday enthusiasts come from an excellent background. They would like to see the sport succeed, and their anger is simply an image reflected from that.
“They’re not hating the game just to hate them; they’re telling us what they want the game to have to make it better.”
I gave Payday 3 3 out of 5 stars for maximum age, calling it a “shallow shooter that doesn’t offer enough value for your ill-gotten money.”
