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It’s been a long road for Payday 3, but things are finally looking up. The long-awaited third entry in Starbreeze’s beloved heist FPS series arrived to plenty of fanfare in September 2023, but quickly saw player counts and its Steam review score plummet. Now, however, Starbreeze is celebrating a crucial turnaround as recent updates and improvements see user opinion finally begin to turn in Payday 3’s favor. Could we finally be seeing the start of a potential comeback?
The Payday 3 launch suffered from numerous agonizing woes. Matchmaking troubles, an always-online requirement, concerns over DLC pricing, and a slow rollout of updates resulting from backend technical issues meant players either returned to Payday 2 or walked away from the co-op FPS game altogether. Since then, Starbreeze has been working on plenty of updates, with two particular recent additions proving especially popular.
First on the cards was the reveal of the Payday 3 armor 2.0 system, which dramatically reworks how defensive tools are used. It aims to allow you to “build the armor you want to wear, and let you play the game the way you want to.” Following that came a smaller but similarly crucial tool – the ability to pause Payday 3 mid-heist.
Across the board, the developer appears to be targeting the most common community complaints, and it’s working. On Thursday October 3, the Payday 3 Steam review score average for the last 30 days finally ticked over to the 70% mark, pushing it from ‘mixed’ to ‘mostly positive.’
The overall score still sits at ‘mixed’ – with more than 40,000 reviews, that will be a harder task to claw back, although it’s still an improvement from the previous ‘mostly negative’ rating – but it certainly shows the improved sentiment. Starbreeze took to X (Twitter) to celebrate the milestone, and was happy to elaborate further when one commenter joked about the post.
“You know a game is cooked when its official Twitter account is celebrating its reviews going up to mostly positive,” one user responds. In return, the Payday account writes, “You know a game has been making progress despite a disaster launch when it is mostly positive from having been mostly negative. We’re listening to the community, we’re making progress with the game, and we celebrate the small wins. What else do you want? Not cooked, cooking.”
It’s a promising start – the player count is still far below that of Payday 2, which is maintaining concurrent users of around 15,000, but if sentiment continues to improve then there’s certainly potential for players to start coming back to see what’s changed. That’s especially likely if we see more Steam sales that bring the game’s price down, with a recent 60% discount showing that Starbreeze is eager to beckon players back.
Give it a year or two, and perhaps we’ll have another No Man’s Sky style comeback on our hands. Indeed, when I spoke to Crime Boss Rockay City lead Jarek Kolář in June about his own game’s revitalization, he asserted, “I think Payday 3 will definitely be successful; they just need time, as we needed, and as Payday 2 needed.” There’s undoubtedly a long road ahead, of course, but this small achievement could prove a key stepping stone in Payday 3’s story.
If you’re not quite ready to return yet, we’ve rounded up the best crime games in 2024, along with the best co-op games on PC right now that you and your friends can enjoy together.
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