Payday 3’s Concurrent Steam Players Are Lower Than Payday 2

Payday 3’s launch party ended up being a launch disaster because of the titles’s faulty servers. This put Starbreeze Studios, in quite a pickle because of their over-reliance on online-only feature which made the game unplayable due to server issues. The game’s release was so nightmarish that Payday 3’s decade-old predecessor, Payday 2, had more concurrent players on Steam all week. 

As seen in the comparison ahead, Payday 2 had more concurrent players between September 28 and October 3 than Payday 3. There was only a brief period that saw Payday 3 have more players than its predecessor.

Furthermore, as official Steam Charts show, the difference between the player count of the two first-person shooter games was not that close. While the 2013 game fluctuated around 40k, the newly released Payday 3 rarely got past the 30k mark. Even at the time of the writing, Payday 2 has a higher number of players, at 24,600, compared to Payday 3’s 16,845.

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• Payday 3 Devs Hid The Game’s “Stealth” Trailer So Well, Nobody Could Find It For 5 Days

The server-related issues of the third installment of the Payday series are more astonishing and concerning when seen in the context that it took 6 years to develop it. The negative reviews and hard backlash against it are understandable. Especially since the fans had to wait 10 years to have their hands on the FPS title. In contrast, Payday 2 was released just 2 years after Payday: The Heist.

Moreover, a decade-old game having more people playing it than the recently released game is not a good outlook for the studio. Albeit of the same series. There have been several attempts by the developers to address server issues. However, so far, all of them have proven to be futile. The Steam Charts, which show no sign of improving, prove that.

Recently, Starbreeze announced the roadmap for future fixes they intend to bring to the title. The patches will include 200+ quality-of-life changes, new content, and gameplay issue fixes. The devs revealed that the Payday 3 DLC “Syntax Error” will be on sale this winter. The DLC will come as an add-on in the Silver and Gold editions of the game. They also communicated to the fans that the title’s unique player count surged up to 3.1 million by the end of September.