Payday 3 developer likens launch to being a rock band when "the whole stage collapses and everyone leaves"

Starbreeze - the developer behind the beleaguered Payday 3 - has likened its release to being a rock band when "the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left".

In an interview with PCGN, lead producer Andreas Penniger and community head Almir Listo discussed the shooter's disappointing debut, acknowledging its "disastrous launch" wasn't the only issue.

"The game just felt unfinished. It was a bad experience for our players," Listo admitted.

"It's hard to make videogames, and it's particularly difficult to follow up on the kind of success that Payday 2 was, not only at its launch, but also in the ten years succeeding that," the community head added.

"Andreas and myself were part of the Payday 2 development team at that time. Not everyone, ten years on, was still there. To draw the exact right learning from a ten-year production is challenging, but also every game project is different from another one. I think a lot of small things built up."

"A lot of the problems were due to the fact that we didn't do our due diligence well enough," Penniger added. "We built Payday 3 while trying to understand what we wanted, in parallel. It ended up being a product that people didn't resonate with. I think we were a bit confident from the success of Payday 2 that we ended up making decisions too quickly."

"Our energy was like 'we're a rock band, and we're coming onto the stage, and we've got a new album'. And the whole stage just collapsed and everyone left."

On its release last year, Payday 3 struggled with matchmaking issues and unpopular online-only requirements, while its first major patch was hit with repeated delays, eventually arriving two months after the game's troubled launch. Since then Starbreeze has released two additional major bug fixing patches under the name Operation Medic Bag, and introduced an early offline mode. Amid all this, the studio revealed it's working on a Dungeons and Dragons game.

Listo cites the launch issues as particularly problematic, but said it was "important that we don't use the technical issues as an excuse because we'd clearly missed the mark from an experience point of view as well. The game just felt unfinished".

Admitting that if the team had just carried on as if there was nothing wrong, the game "would be dead at this point", Listo also took time to acknowledge the importance of feedback from the Payday community.

"If we just put our heads in the sand and continued on, the game would be dead at this point. But even the angriest Payday fans still come from a good place. They want the game to succeed, and their anger is only a reflection of that.

"They're not hating on the game just to be haters - they're telling us what they want the game to have, in order for it to improve."

I awarded Payday 3 three out of five stars last year, calling it a "shallow shooter that doesn't offer anywhere near enough bang for your ill-gotten buck."