Starbreeze, the developer behind the troubled Payday 3, has compared its launch to that of a rock band when “the whole stage collapsed and everyone left.”
In an interview with PCGN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo spoke about the shooter's disappointing debut, acknowledging that its “disastrous launch” wasn't the only problem.
“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 community leader.
“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.”
Upon release last year, Payday 3 struggled with matchmaking issues and unpopular online-only requirements, while its first major patch suffered repeated delays, finally arriving two months after the game's troubled launch. Starbreeze has since released two additional major bug fix patches under the name Operation Medic Bag and introduced an early offline mode. In the midst of all this, the studio revealed that it is working on a Dungeons and Dragons game.
Listo cites the launch issues as particularly problematic, but said it was “important that we didn't 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 nothing bad was happening, the game “would be dead at this point,” Listo also took the time to acknowledge the importance of feedback from the Payday community.
“If we just stuck our heads in the sand and moved on, the game would be dead at this point. But even the angriest Payday fans are still coming from a good place. They want the game to succeed, and their anger is just a reflex .of 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.”
Last year I gave Payday 3 three out of five stars, calling it a “shallow shooter that doesn't offer enough value for your ill-gotten money.”