Starbreeze says what we already knew: Payday 3 had a “disastrous launch” (but it’s hoping to regain players’ trust)

Everyone pretty much already knew that Payday 3 had a really terrible launch, and in a recent interview developer Starbreeze has admitted as such, even as it makes some hopeful promises.

Right out the gate, Payday 3 was a struggle to run – matchmaking issues were constant, and only a month after it launched, its predecessor Payday 2 had 10x more players on Steam, not exactly what you want from a sequel as a developer. And now, in a recent interview with PCGamesN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo spoke about the games launch, and the studio’s hopes for the game going forward. Listo explained that Payday 3 “suffered from major technical issues, so the game was more or less unplayable for several weeks.

“When you have a launch like we did – a disastrous launch, where nobody is able to play the game – there is no place to hide… The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players.” The other issue was that Payday 2 had 10 years of dev time, something Starbreeze was well aware of. “To draw the exact right learning from a ten-year production is challenging, but also every game project is different from another one. I think a lot of small things built up,” Listo explained.

Penniger chimed in to this point, saying, “A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn’t do our due diligence well enough. We built Payday 3 while trying to understand what we wanted… It ended up being a product that people didn’t resonate with. I think we were a bit confident from the success of Payday 2 that we ended up making decisions too quickly.”

Of course, there’s still the future of the game to think about too. Penniger shared that the team is trying to listen to the community to understand why Payday 2 was so successful, noting that it was “trying to be too many things at once. Our focus needs to be a stronger core fantasy.”

Right now, Listo says that are three points Starbreeze is going to focus on to bring players back, the first simply being to make the game “better and better”, but secondly and notably, “regaining the trust and respect of the community.” For Listo, the last point that’s also important is telling “a great story. There’s a lot of heart and soul to the storytelling in Payday, and that’s what I’m looking forward to in the coming months.”

Neither Listo or Penniger offered any specifics on how they’re going to get to that point, but all you disappointed Payday 3 players will hopefully have something to look forward to at least.