Payday 3 has not had a very good time of things. Upon launch the game suffered dreadfully with server woes and this was followed by the promise of a patch that would fix a lot of issues, but kept getting pushed back again and again.
Now, Payday 3 once again gets a kick in the teeth as its older sibling, Payday 2, is outperforming it on Steam. The latest iteration of the Payday franchise was released 21 September and has been struggling ever since, with the game quickly receiving a "Mostly Negative" score on Steam and it seems players are giving up on it.
Payday 3 looked promising before release but didn't live up to expectation
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Payday players have given up on the third installment and are back to playing Payday 2. As it stands currently the third game's player count is hovering around 2,500 players via SteamDB. In comparison, the second game in the franchise is severely outperforming it sitting at around 25,000 concurrent players. That's ten times the players.
There is still hope for the heist shooter, Starbreeze, the developers of the game, are hard at work on a patch to stabilise servers, while also bringing in quality of life updates. Sadly, it seems players are perfectly fine with playing Payday 2 for the meantime. Whether the players will jump back over to the latest release will depend on how long it takes to push out the much-needed patch.
At the time of writing, Payday 3 has only had 3,032 players in the past 24-hours which, for AAA gaming, is considered a flop. This is amplified when you look at other co-op shooters on Steam, such as Vermintide II which had a peak player count of 7,780 over the same 24-hour period.
Hopefully Starbreeze can remedy the situation and see the players flock back to the latest release.