Pay Day 3 released almost a month ago and most players still haven’t been able to have a steady stream of gameplay with servers being a disaster. The game launched on September 21 and had a player base peak of 69,112 players, now only a month after release the average player count is below 16,000 players. For reference the average player count of Pay Day 2 (Add link to player count, which released over a decade ago, is 26,000 according to Steam Charts.
We have finally heard some feedback from the developers a month after release. They released a statement on Twitter, along with various subtweets in the same thread.
Heisters, we’re sorry for the lack of communication regarding the first patch. We have identified some issues that need to be fixed before we can bring it to you, but rest assured that this is the main priority for our teams. https://t.co/IBDPctk0ce
— PAYDAY 3 (@PAYDAYGame) October 16, 2023
Pay Day fans are not happy with the lack of communication coming from Starbreeze studios, with many asking why the studio didn’t just delay the game a couple months instead of going radio silent for the past month. Despite the players finally hearing news from the developers themselves, it seems that there is still no concrete date for when the patch will be released, finally making the game playable for the majority of the player base. This comes after another tweet on the Pay Day 3 account back on October 5 ensuring players that there would be a mid-October patch that would fix all said problems. That patch is now being delayed indefinitely as mentioned previously.
Fan backlash to the horrendous state of the game upon release has led the newest entry in the series to sit at a whopping 3.0 user score on Metacritic, on top of the Critic rating a 68. The majority of the user reviews praise the low price point for the game, sitting at $39.99, but apart from complaints about servers there are far more complaints about the game being a multiplayer-only title. In previous entries in the series the game could be played offline, but Starbreeze studios decided to part ways with that idea for undisclosed reasons. The online-only server failures have fans urging Starbreeze to implement an offline mode like all previous releases in order to compensate for the nightmare launch. Starbreeze as of now does not have any plans to move forward with an offline mode.