Payday 2 has roughly 85 times as many players as Payday 3, oof

It’s pretty clear to see that Payday 3 has been a disastrous affair for the developer Starbreeze. Not only did they recently oust their CEO in order to hire someone new, in the hopes of turning around the ailing game, but the newest installment in the franchise is seeing fewer players than ever.

It’s such a stark difference between the latest game, and the best-selling Payday 2. The second installment currently has over 85 times the number of players than Payday 3. According to figures on SteamDB recent figures place the peak player count for the second game at around 31,866. While the latest title barely scraped over 350, with a figure of 378.

Payday 3 fell far short of targets for Starbreeze Studios

Payday 3 has had a rocky release; between poor communication between the developer and the audience and issues with servers upon launch, it seems players went back to the experience they know and love. Of course, the above figures don’t take console players into account, but SteamDB player figures do generally give us a good view of what’s occurring for each game.

The latest title from Starbreeze currently has a recent Steam rating of ‘Overwhelmingly Negative’ and an overall rating of ‘Mostly Negative’, taken from over 37,000 reviews from players. Many of the reviews cite the game being “dead” or “unfinished” while others are taking a moment to express just how bad they think the game is by saying, “More disappointing than that time Christmas was cancelled, my parents got divorced and I dropped my last bowl of macaroni and cheese on the floor.”

The sentiment seems to be that the game wasn’t really needed as Payday 2 was already doing everything right. The latest iteration needed to move things forward drastically and failed to do so, so why would players give up their progression and stats? Whether Starbreeze can turn things around is hard to say, but the bigger question is, will the fans even care?