The real heist was Overkill trying to sell this abomination to consumers.
I was almost prepared to give up actually, the last time I took any notice of Payday 3 and subsequently its player count, was when I recalled the dismal broken and malnourished state the game had launched in, with far less actual content on offer than its predecessor, Payday 2.
At the time both Payday 3 and Payday 2 were trading blows in terms of 24 hour consecutive player figures at around 25,000 – 30,000 players at peak over a single day, now thankfully consumers have been made more wary of just how catastrophic Overkill and Starbreeze had dropped the damn ball.
Which is fucking hysterical given how Payday 3 allegedly had countless years of developmental time allocated towards it, for a game that is supposedly ten years in the making compared to 2013’s Payday 2, the brand new sequel looks like a generic cookie cutter asset flip made on the Unreal Engine, because that’s exactly what the game is.
Overkill have pulled apart what fans loved about Payday 2 and seemingly spat into the faces of the tens of thousands of fans they’ve accumulated from its success by launching the game as an always online title with no offline mode of play, with barely any content, their servers were overloaded, with the game prioritizing in-game cosmetics to the point where you can be assured that Overkill will be charging real life currency in exchange for Payday 3’s illusive “C-Stacks” in the not to distant future.
Never mind the fact that Overkill / Starbreeze have been radio silent regarding just how fucking embarrassing Payday 3’s launch has been, with the games first major update being postponed.
I know that the standards of modern consumers is already so damn low but even they couldn’t stomach the ongoing trainwreck that is Payday 3, since the last time I’ve glanced towards the series back in September the player counts have seemingly vanished by the thousands.
At the time of writing, Payday 2 still holds firm with over 28,000 players on concurrently, with the game now peaking at over 35,000 on the daily.
For a decade old game this is tremendous, and it just goes to show exactly how spectacular of an online game Payday 2 turned out to be even despite Starbreeze / Overkill’s attempts at murdering their golden goose with butchered updates and shifts towards the Epic Store services.
Now let’s compare Payday 2’s figures with Payday 3 over the past month.
Oh dear, it would seem that the titanic is sinking, perhaps it wasn’t such a spectacular idea to launch an alleged sequel to a game with less than half the overall content such as in-game heists, player customization and the abolishment of individual skill trees all wrapped up inside a lovely always online package that requires you to make an account with Starbreeze themselves.
But what do I know about how game development works, I’m just a goddamn journalist pointing out the obvious, and obviously what’s going on is that consumers are sick and tired of being treated like mere cattle by the likes of Overkill with Payday 3 now sporting a staggeringly low peak player count of just 2,751.
1,761 players are online right at this moment playing the game, comparing that to Payday 2’s current figures, the overall peak concurrent count from Payday 2 to Payday 3 is -92%.
In other words, there is almost thirteen times (13X) more people playing the predecessor than there are playing Payday 3 on a daily basis.
That is beyond an embarrassment, this is a fucking achievement. But why stop there? Let’s compare Payday 3’s current daily averages to its launch player count.
Payday 3 managed to peak at over 77,938 players concurrently, comparing that to today’s peak figure Payday 3 has lost over 96.45% of its player count, but the game managed to attract around ~70,000 players for several days since it released for the general public to beta test, with the game plummeting from 66,286 players down to 38,574 in a single day from September 24th to September 25th.
A 41.8% decline in just one day, well done Overkill you’ve outdone yourselves.
And ever since the 26th of September, Payday 3’s player count has continued to crater, failing to reach the levels of Payday 2 ever since and hopefully Payday 3 never will resurge in popularity, it’s far better for gamers if the game remains in this comatose dead state and Starbreeze goes under as a result.
Because these useless peices of shit are more focused on producing “Fortnite Islands” than actually remedying their dead game, Starbreeze are seriously prioritizing efforts on Fortnite over Payday 3 by teaming up with “Torus Games” to produce “Turtle vs Turtle”.
I’m so fucking done with this garbage studio.
