In a recent financial update, Starbreeze’s leadership team revealed that it will shrink the team working on Payday 3 going into the game’s second year of content, and invest ‘significantly less’ overall. However, the company has assured players and shareholders that this won’t impact the value delivered to gamers worldwide.
Less is More
Starbreeze revealed in a recent financial report that Payday 2’s sales contributions were still a whopping 50% of the value of Payday 3’s contributions. That’s a representative example of the staying power of the second game, while the third game has long struggled with player retention.
In a statement, the interim CEO of Starbreeze, Mats Juhl, said that the company is ‘leveraging the strength of its franchises’ to continue succeeding going into 2025:
This time last year we had just launched PAYDAY 3 – a milestone for us as a studio, and a commercial success, but also a launch marred by a series of technical issues. Since then, we have worked tirelessly to improve the game and expand the amount of content and features.
By the end of the quarter, we had launched four major DLCs as well as a large amount of updates to both functionality and content for all of our players. At the end of October, one of our biggest updates since launch was launched, with a brand new user interface, server browser, VoIP and much more.
He mentioned midway through his statement that…
… ahead of year two, we are confident in being able to continue delivering amounts of value to our players with a significantly lower level of investment.
It was highlighted that the sentiment around Payday 3 is improving across all channels, which is true. The game has recovered somewhat from the terrible launch it underwent, even if the player base has dwindled considerably since release.
Starbeeze will continue to deliver content for Payday 3 going into 2025, but perhaps at a slower cadence. The team is hard at work on Project Baxter, and Juhl revealed that the company is on an expansion initiative, fleshing out roles to support the development of the new game.
For more GPlayr coverage, check out the news that Half-Life 2 has hit a new all-time high player count