Payday 3 – not off to a good start (Picture: Deep Silver)

The number of people playing Payday 3 on Steam has fallen to just a few thousand, as the game’s desperately needed new patch is delayed.

The problem with Cyberpunk 2077 and its recent redemption is that it sends a bad message to other companies, telling them that launching a broken game isn’t necessarily that big an issue and that you never really have to say sorry, as long as the game turns out okay in the end.

Payday 3 launched last month with too many bugs and too little content, but it seemed to be a success at first anyway, with a peak player count of 69,112 on Steam (as usual there’s no way to know console numbers).

However, that number has already dwindled to a 24-hour peak of just 6,099 and at time of writing there are only 2,069 people in the world playing the game.

Payday 2 has been around for a decade and yet its sequel already seems to have tanked its popularity in just a few weeks.

In fact, Payday 2 is doing much better. It’s 24-hour peak on Steam is 55,426 and there’s currently 30,552 people playing. That’s not surprising, because at this point the playerbase for Payday 3 is much smaller, but at this rate it will never catch up.

The immediate problem for developer Starbreeze Studios is the game’s litany of bugs and performance issues, as well as broken matchmaking and problems created by the game being online-only – even when playing alone.

Originally, Starbreeze said the patch would be out the middle of this month but now it has no ETA at all, as the developers reveal, ‘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.’

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‘We’re spending additional time revamping our patching process to ensure that we can have a steady cadence and momentum with patches going forward,’ reads the message on the game’s Discord.

‘We are careful with giving you an ETA right now, as we want to make sure we can deliver before we do so. Please bear with us. The patch (and more news) are coming.’

It’s not a good look and while over 200 fixes have been promised for the update, the longer it takes for it arrive the more the game is going to bleed players.





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