In perhaps a not particularly surprising move, Starbreeze is reducing the size of the team working on Payday 3.
Everyone knows that Payday 3 had a pretty bad launch. Even Starbreeze knows it! And while the developer is hoping it can regain its players’ trust, it’ll be doing so with a smaller team working on the game, as outlined in a recent interim report from acting Starbreeze CEO Mats Juhl. In the report Juhl explained that “in the coming months, investment will be lower as we round off ‘Operation Medic Bag’ for Payday and therefore enter Year 2 with a smaller team focused on continuously updating the game with new content.”
Juhl didn’t clarify how exactly that will affect the game, and whether players can expect less frequent or smaller updates, though the “continuously” does suggest at least semi-regular updates. The report does note that Starbreeze “remains financially strong”, and there are no mentions of layoffs anywhere, so despite acknowledging that Payday 3 sales still have “great potential to improve”, for now hopefully that smaller team is a result of staff being repositioned elsewhere as opposed to losing their jobs outright. Later on Juhl also shared that the game’s most recent DLCs have also been well received, so maybe Starbreeze can turn things around.
Funnily enough, “relatively stable sales of Payday 2” are helping to support Payday 3’s comparatively weaker sales, which isn’t surprising considering a lot of players actually went back to the second game.
The report also talks of Project Baxter, a Dungeons & Dragons project that apparently “continues at full speed”, sharing that internally playtests are taking place, and that there are “active discussions with a number of industry-leading players regarding potential collaborations around Baxter’s development and launch.”
For now, let’s hope everyone gets to keep their jobs so the number of layoffs over the past year doesn’t increase further still.
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