Highlights

  • Payday 3 has faced controversies and poor decisions, leading to a decline in player count and negative reviews.
  • It is being outperformed by its predecessor, Payday 2, which has a larger player base and more content updates.
  • Payday 3's always-online requirement and lack of offline play have been major issues, alienating solo players and causing launch problems.

Payday 3 has found itself in a bad spot, something predicted before the title was even released. With a barrage of controversies and poor decisions at launch, many players are already flocking away from the latest Payday game to an earlier entry in the franchise.

After 10 years without a new game in the series, Payday 3 hasn't made the desired splash. Not only are its most recent Steam reviews Mostly Negative (and Mixed overall), it's been losing players by the truckload. The game already dropped from an average of over 28,000 players in its September 2023 launch month to an average of just under 6,000 in October. The title then plummeted tenfold in January to an average player count of 655.

Payday 3 Default Control Scheme
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Why Payday 2 Is Doing Better Than Payday 3

A quirk of Payday 3's rapid decline is how it's been consistently surpassed by its predecessor. As Payday 3's player count shows, it has failed to catch on to the degree that Payday 2 has easily outdone it. The latter has maintained an average of over 25k players online, at least on Steam. Stats may differ on the more tight-lipped platforms, but the difference is nonetheless dramatic. Whilst there are undoubtedly many reasons for this phenomenon, a few can be narrowed down as sticking out among the rest.

Payday 3 Didn't Incentivize Invested Players To Switch

After 10 years without a sequel (save for the mobile game Payday: Crime War, which only had a brief life), Payday 2 became pretty well-ingrained within its genre and multiplayer titles as a whole. Over that time, Overkill released over thirty DLC packages in addition to dozens upon dozens of content updates. Safe to say, any sequel had a hard job. When Payday 3 launched with matchmaking issues out the gate, it's no surprise that Payday 2 players decided to skip the headache and just stick with where they'd already invested hundreds of hours.

Whilst Payday 2's microtransactions were controversial, forcing many a U-turn on the part of the developers, there's no question that many bought into them and the adjacent DLC. Many likely ended up spending a great sum on Payday 2, so it was a big ask to get those players to get into a new entry. Moreover, Payday 3 has already been called content-bereft by many, so naturally, it compares especially poorly to the decades-worth of content updates received by Payday 2. Any new Payday game would have to arrive swinging with bold new features and a rich body of content to compete. Payday 3 simply didn't deliver—in fact, it drove those players away with its messy launch.

Payday 3 Is Unfriendly To Solo Players

On that topic, Payday 3's always-online requirements have backfired massively. Payday 2 allows for offline play, but Payday 3 lacks this feature, leading in part to its launch-day fiasco. With no means of heisting offline, solo players were immediately forced onto online servers with dozens of other fans. This overloaded said servers and caused many of the issues the launch faced, giving all players a hard time.

Payday 3 is similar to Rocksteady's Suicide Squad in this regard, with the latter facing almost the exact same issues in its early access period. In the vein of its 2023 release year, Redfall also suffered from this, with always-online requirements making up just one item on its lengthy list of controversies. It's easy to see why, too; it's an issue of access—denying those with a shaky connection or without an online subscription from giving the title a go. Moreover, many gamers see these requirements as being measures to usher them into a microtransaction ecosystem. This is not without reason, considering especially all the microtransactions in Payday 3 and other games like it.