PayDay 3 Devs Explain Botched Launch
PayDay 3 (or rather, its servers) did not delight the fans at launch. Starbreeze revealed what caused the game's problems.
Starbreeze has no reasons to be happy. Suffice it to say that the three in the title of the new installment of the PayDay series perfectly matches the game's average reviews on Steam. Currently, out of more than 31,000 reviews, only 33% are positive, which rather displeases the team. The developer addressed the situation, explaining the reasons for the huge problems with servers for the release.
"Successes" of PayDay 3
It was the inability to connect to the servers that was the main reason why even the biggest fans of the series loudly expressed their dissatisfaction. Yes, there are also complaints about gameplay elements, and one or another Internet user mentions technical problems of the game itself.
Nevertheless, for a game that requires a permanent connection to the Internet, reliable servers are a key issue. Meanwhile, in this respect PayDay 3 failed across the board. Suffice it to take a look at Steam: at launch 42% of reviews were positive, and barely a day later they accounted for only 30% of all platform user reviews.
The fact that the game's current score can be considered an improvement over last week emphatically shows the "warm" reception of the otherwise anticipated title.
Ironically, Starbreeze has launched a new announcement on its official website with... bragging about the success of PayDay 3. These boil down to the number of registered users of the mandatory Starbreeze Nebula platform for the game (almost 3.8 million) and people playing the game at the same time (more than 218 thousand, counting all platforms).
A saboteur partner?
More importantly, however, the announcement included information about an unexpected bug in partner company's matchmaking software, through which the servers of PayDay 3 performed worse than during technical beta testing. The glitch was not detected either at the time or during early access due to "the nature of the rapid influx of users and load balancing."
The relevant fix was gradually uploaded in subsequent regions, but on Sunday the partner updated the system, "reintroducing the instability." For now, Starbreeze will focus on "providing players with the best possible gaming experience," but in the long term the studio intends to partner with another company and "reduce the dependency of PayDay 3 on network services."
At the same time, Tobias Sjögren, CEO of Starbreeze, assured that the team believes in the "quality of PayDay 3" and will try to regain the strained trust of players. Time will tell whether the studio will succeed in this difficult task - it would not be the first such a case in the game industry. For now PayDay 3 has not yet alienated all the fans (on Steam alone, about 20 thousand people are playing at the moment), but the developers will have to do their best to ensure that an exodus of players does not start.
Stream and promises of the developers
In addition, the developers held a broadcast to answer player questions. The Stream on Twitch has already come to an end, and during it producer Almir Listo assured that the developers have not put a cross PayDay 3 just yet.
Although the "yet" at the end of his statement did not escape the attention of gamers (via threads on Reddit), Starbreeze also made a number of more concrete declarations, including regarding bugs (including a glitch in the PS5's targeting support, which is due to be fixed on October 5) and offline mode (it's not in the plans for now, but the developer is considering the option).
