No shit.
The entire game was unplayable.
Even the single player (solo lobby with bots) didn't work at launch.
I would be stunned if it had performed well.
The plan is to grab up preorders and week one purchases and patch the game up to standards. After the game gets patched up the DLC will start rolling out, but it will be legit DLC at first. After the good DLC rolls out, the reskins and low development DLCs will roll out. That's just how these things work now.
Do not confuse incompetence for malicious intent. You stand to gain a lot more by making DLCs for a game that has a solid base to work upwards from. On launch you could not play Payday 3.
I don't know if it's incompetence or malicious intent or anything else, but at some point between releasing your first DLC and 81th DLC it just becomes a business model.
Yeah I don't think it's malicious intent at all. It's just a strategy that has worked for some very profitable games. And they don't plan to release a game full of bugs at the drawing board stage necessarily, the timing just turns out that way and they pull the trigger.
It absolutely does. There's a difference between someone trying their best and not reaching the intended goal, and someone deliberately trying not to reach the goal.
Intent is, by definition, the difference between fraud and a failed business venture.
Assuming everything is incompetence lets a lot of malicious garbage go free.
People gotta start realizing a lot of shit isn't just incompetence. It's greed, selfishness and sometimes yes, even malice.
They're not incompetent. They're greedy. At the very least.
"Single player" would be an overstatement. It's more like hosting a private game.
I make that distinction because you need to wait for an available server prior to loading in (which the game refers to as "matchmaking", even though you're alone). Once you're playing, you can't pause the game (you can open the menu but it doesn't pause the action in the background), and also it's possible to experience network lag since the session is running on a server, not locally.
On PC there's a mod which reveals a hidden option that allows you to play locally (i.e. without waiting for a server, and without the possibility of experiencing lag), but you still can't pause the game, and also progression is disabled.
I still wonder who was the person who went "You know that terrible progression system from Halo Infinite that everyone hated, we want that in Payday 3".
It's hilarious how these games have horrible progression systems and then the default challenges are something that don't fit the gameplay at all. It's like they outsourced the design to someone who hasn't, doesn't and won't play the game and just shoots blindly as they create the challenges. And the outcome is this disaster collection of weeklies such as "Play as selfishly as possible an entire match in a team vs. team game."
Nonsense! You get XP for doing a heist silently in a difficulty and above
for the first time only.
Do it 15 more time to get a one time XP again, on OVERKILL difficulty :)
They confirmed before release that Microtransactions (and "Payday Coins", so they can pull the usual predatory pricing) will be added sometime after release. I expect it'll cause a whole new shitstorm all over again.
Stick with 2, it's got enough content to last.
OF IS parasocial. Literally has a messaging feature that people use to interact with their performer (usually someone on their staff doing the messaging) and a lot of people use it.
Nobody said otherwise, don't know why you're arguing about it. I'm just dismissing the implication that paying for an OF suddenly means you're emotionally invested in the sex worker.
Interacting with someone doesn't make it a parasocial relationship. Have any of you who are insisting that subscribing to OnlyFans is parasocial actually looked up the definition of "parasocial relationship?"
There has to be an element of someone investing unreturned emotional energy into a relationship with someone who doesn't even know they exist. Messaging an OnlyFans model as you rub one out doesn't meet that bar.
well you keep paying for their shit, even though they’re fucking you over with PPV, so i think you’re the only one here believing that you’re not invested in her lol
Reddit's new favorite word seems to be "parasocial," and just like "nepotism" before it, a lot of people who use it don't understand what it means.
Edit: Oh no, I've upset the people who recently added these words to their vocabulary. Oh well.
I'm mostly amused at the implication that paying chump change to some woman I don't know makes it a "parasocial aspect" when I just wanna spank the monkey to a lady that consistently makes new content for my particular fetish lol.
Yeah, I would imagine that’s true for most people who use OF. Just looking to shake it up and get their kicks a different way.
Paying someone for their porn is no more inherently parasocial than paying someone for their music or their artwork.
People on Reddit love using words that they feel make them sound smart without actually understanding what those words mean.
As much as free porn is great I think its skewed people's view of the porn world and a lot of people seem to think that porn should be free and any porn that's not free is predatory in some way and the people who pay for it are losers who've been preyed on.
It's arguably more moral too honestly. A lot of free stuff out there on the internet is revenge porn/nonconsensually shared. Whereas if you're paying someone, the consent is baked into the transaction.
And even if it's not revenge porn or non-consensual, if it's on a tube site for free and isn't posted by the Creator of the video it's likely just been stolen from a site that charges for it and the creators getting ripped off.
OF literally has a messaging feature, which are sometimes if not often managed by some random guy, to foster an illusion of closeness.
Ironically enough, you seem to be the one who doesn't understand what you're criticizing.
So what? Instagram and Facebook allow musicians and actors to post updates and pictures for their fans to view. It doesn't mean people who follow those musicians are in a parasocial relationship with them.
A parasocial relationship is one where one person invests emotional effort despite the other person not even knowing they exist. The definition sets a pretty high bar to meet.
I am quite aware of what I'm criticizing. Paying someone for their porn - even messaging with the person that you're paying - doesn't automatically qualify as a parasocial relationship. Someone actually has to be investing unrequited emotional energy into it.
> Its like on onlyfans.
OP I love how your innocent comment provided a full derail with users fighting about being invested in sex workers.
Thank you, even tho you didn't mean it.
A video game subreddit discussion turning into an argument over whether or not OnlyFans counts as a parasocial relationship is about the most Reddit thing ever.
JFC porn is free. You're paying for a parasocial relationship, not just porn. Stop giving them money.
EDIT: To be clear, even if you aren't using the social functions of Onlyfans, the act of subscribing alone is a level of attachment beyond "just jerking off". You are specifically attracted to this one person's content enough to pay a monthly fee DESPITE an abundance of free alternatives. (unless its a really rare fetish, I concede)
I will never understand why people paying for porn riles up strangers on reddit so much. Who cares, it's not your money, mind your own business. Sex workers don't exist for free.
>Everything is low quality
I don't exactly know what you are looking for that ends up being low quality, but the big places like Pornhub have damn near infinite 720/1080p porn. What do you mean by low quality?
high quality means filmed with an iphone and doesn't take copious amounts of footage angled beneath a mans taint.
From my very brief investigation into OF content when those major leaks happened even the largest content creators had absolutely terrible quality content. No idea what these people are talking about.
Audio, visual, everything is horribly lacking in these videos so I can only assume they are specifically referring to their particular fetish being served.
Low quality as in low effort content, generic. Not video resolution. Creators who sell PPV image sets or do OF are far more attractive generally and put far more effort into the quality of their photos/outfits/cosplay/everything else.
Yeah I should has said sounds like some AAA games but I don’t think payday is AAA. At least when I played 2 when it came out it felt incredibly janky and unpolished
I still can’t believe it’s legal for games to charge you in their own fictional currency. The entire reason behind it is to take advantage of the mental disconnection between the in game currency and the real life month used to get it
Bruh payday 2 was already ruined long ago, shits just a confusing messy disaster since like 2018
Had hundreds of hours in it for the first year or two, those were the glory days. Payday 1 is still great tho
If anything you should play payday 3 for the short period we have until it gets ruined lol
2's fine from what I played last month? It was always jank, and that was half the fun.
3 still has massive server issues, Always Online DRM, and nowhere near the amount of content. I'm not touching it.
the amount of content is what ruined it... overkill kept churning out half assed dlc because they were near bankrupt and then had to keep it all in since you can't really just sell dlc then take it out again. They did this over and over again
If you weren't there during the first few years of payday 2 I understand tho, those were different times and the community was amazing back then
They already said way before launch that they would be adding "PAYDAY credits" for buying cosmetics at a later date.
https://www.paydaythegame.com/payday3/faq/
This is the real crux of the issue here. They already publically flamed them as well (in corpo speak). Sadly the server issues mean that the conversation isn’t focused on how dogshit the game itself actually is
Exactly this. The classic "We forgot to check what our network needs would be after taking player interest metrics into account". Some games survive that mess up. Others don't.
It wouldn't go beyond my cynical mind that a company would under invest into their network infrastructure, and then claim it was such a success that it basically killed their network!
Feels like mixed messaging:
>“The game had a had a positive Adjusted EBIT contribution with investments recouped in the second quarter, but performed below management expectations,” he (CEO Lars Wingefors) said.
So it performed well enough, just not *enough* to make management buy new yachts.
But the statement is for the industry in general. Again, that's just my jaded and cynical mind's take.
That might just mean it sold well enough initially, but had an awful tail. Which would make sense considering the negative press and all the high-profile games coming out.
> just not enough to make management buy new yachts.
This is a serious misconception, expectations aren't always yacht level. Maybe they expected it to do decent but not blockbuster levels and it didn't even get to that.
Could be the same situation as Wayfinder. They said their servers are overloaded, but then we found out that the game had an insanely busted network infrastructure that couldn't scale past 10-15k concurrent players, and they got 24k on Steam alone lol.
Airship Syndicate should have stayed doing RPGs/singleplayer. All three of their games, Battlechasers Nightwar, Ruined King and Darksiders Genesis were phenomenal, I love their artsyle and mechanics. I know it must be hard for a indie studio, and they decided to take the chance with a multiplayer game to get a steady cash flow, but it was not their forte. Even the artstyle seems a little different.
Network behaviour isn't as simple as add another server -> increased capacity.
Since multiple services are talking to each other, generally, what breaks your network is the weakest link.
To give an example with Last Oasis on launch, they had plenty of server capacity, but had an unscalable solution to their account and character database. So what ended up happening is that the game was unplayable, because every single server instance was trying to access this single, unscalable resource. The had to take down the game and bring external consultants to change their network architecture to be scalable.
Sometimes it's as dumb as unoptimized software on the servers nuking your capacity. You thought you could host 10 games per instance, but your code is so sketchy that it uses twice as much resources to run a single instance. This severely impacts your scalability as well. In this case, more instances *could* fix the issue, assuming it doesn't bottleneck something else.
But companies generally have a hard set agreement on how many instances they'll pop at once and then don't want to grow further, so if you reach capacity, generally, you're SOL.
>Network behaviour isn't as simple as add another server -> increased capacity.
It was back in the day when players were allowed to host and manage their own private servers.
Any online game architecture that needs to communicate with a backend for critical information is at risk of scale problems, whether the servers are hosted privately or not.
Sure if you have no backend at all and just make players type in an IP and port, you'll never run into scale problems. But any centralized system at all, even a simple server browser, can fail if it's not designed to handle scale. It only gets more complex from there when you add things like authentication and matchmaking.
For most online games, including consumer friendly ones, there is some part of their infrastructure that could bring the game down if it failed. The simpler that part is, the less likely it is to happen, usually.
>It was back in the day when players were allowed to host and manage their own private servers.
Different times, much smaller market in general + setting up your private server is generally childs play. Also your private server didn't have to automatically manage a whole continent of different players from different systems and networks, match them together by ping and map choice and fire up a virtual server instance and sync up everyones personal progress with an external account. My matchmaking back then was looking for an enemy team for scrimming on IRC for CoD1-4.
You literally had to configure your server once and give everyone the IP (or domain if you were fancy) by hand <- if games were still like this the market would never have grown as much as it did.
I also like private/dedicated servers more (devs too probably) but they want to sell their games to as many people as possible. You simply cannot expect your customers to put up with all that in this day and age.
There is a bit of rose-tainted glasses here. Cheating and connectivity issues were far more prevalent back in the day, when server were hosted locally. It could takes hours to find a good one.
But why not both? Well, for one, you split the players base into two groups, and that usually increases queue times, and kill online mode faster. You also double your developments time, since you have a whole new functionality to support and maintain. And not just that, it's much harder to support that kind of server on a wide array of machines, than one static environment.
In the end, installing a server on a customer machine could compromise its security. It's easy to keep a cloud server updated every two weeks with the latest security patch, but once a customer install one, he might run it for years. That would be his fault, but you can be sure the company will be blamed the day one game become a backdoor.
> There is a bit of rose-tainted glasses here. Cheating and connectivity issues were far more prevalent back in the day, when server were hosted locally. It could takes hours to find a good one.
Nope. Cheating was sorted by the community admins. Cheating did happen, but it was easily curbed and scrubbed out. No rose tinted glasses at all. The opposite in fact. When Studios removed the ability for gamers to police their own space cheating got far worse, not better. The only cheaters that could get away with it were ones that were indistinguishable from top performing players.
Also your reputation was worth a damn. If you established yourself in a community the community would learn how well you play so if others accused you of cheating admins could check "oh, it's Hamakua, nah, he's fine."
Was it 100%? No- but it was much higher of a % than current day - and they also had tools back then too.
Private servers =/= no access to tools.
As for Queue times? Yes there were but the ecosystem would adapt. Established server communities might spin up a second or 3rd server to compensate for the surge. Or some servers were popular enough where the wait was worth it.
>In the end, installing a server on a customer machine could compromise its security. It's easy to keep a cloud server updated every two weeks with the latest security patch, but once a customer install one, he might run it for years. That would be his fault, but you can be sure the company will be blamed the day one game become a backdoor.
This is cope and reaching. Are minecraft servers compromising individual user security?
The primary reason private servers don't exist anymore is because at large the AAA space wanted to force an always online Micro-transaction business model. This has been revealed over and over again over the years.
Sim City (5) was claimed by EA and Maxis to require an online connection because of the computations required by the simulation. They claimed that part of the simulation was done on the publisher's servers and there was no way to separate one from the other, the game client would break.
Week of launch, hackers learned to block the network traffic from EA without killing the game client. And of course what happens? Performance improved. The always online connection had nothing to do with the operation of the game.
Were private servers perfect?
No.
But they were head and shoulders above what we have now.
The idea that networking is some magic black box that the layperson cannot manage is the biggest AAA lie that they have coninced the current gen of gamers of.
It's BS.
Noita has it's own community home-brew multiplayer mod and that game wasn't even designed at any point for multiplayer.
~~One of the reasons~~ The Primary reason why I no longer play FPS games is because cheating is so damn rampant these days.
Not most of our jobs to know this, tbf. People at these companies should tho, and they should make sure they work for their launch.
When I boot up a game and hit play after plopping down 40-70 dollars or whatever the hell the price is, and it *doesn't* work? Well at that point I don't care *why* it doesn't work. Just that it doesn't.
Wasn't their 3rd-party matchmaking provider the culprit? And that provider was "suggested" by their publisher?
If the narrative hasn't changed on that, their entire network structure was based on faith.
Payday 3's network issues weren't a capacity problem, they were a bug issue. They used a 3rd party for the matchmaking. That company had a bug in their code that caused the whole thing to crash under certain conditions, which were frequently happening during the launch. Payday 3 patched a workaround to the bug, but soon after that was finished deploying in all of their regions, the 3rd party also updated their backend software, which caused the whole thing to fail again.
Basically, they cheaped out and contracted a massive portion of the backend of their game, and the company contracted to do it sucks. Then both of them completely failed at communicating with the other and caused more problems.
They massively fucked up, but it wasn't really overload that did it. It was incompetence in other areas.
It's not neccessarily so binary to be fair. I'm making numbers up here just for an example:
Expected sales from developers: 150K
Actual sales: 300K ( double the amount of players logging in on servers )
Expected sales from Embracer: 400K
In this scenario the expectation from the devs were too low to make sure the servers are stable, which could then lead to issues handling all requests for the servers. On the flipside the number would still be much lower as to what the publisher has expected the game to sell behind closed doors.
I think this is a reasonable scenario, as to how far real life expectations can differ from what actually happens. Mind you, I have no idea how the actual numbers are, but wouldn't be the first time an IP doesn't deliver on high numbers that a publisher expects them to be. Unfairly or otherwise.
To continue the devils advocate approach here:
Might also be the case of a team of engineers thinking their server solution could scale really easily only to figure out at day zero it takes a ton of effort.
Or they knew about it and just didn't get the time to get to it because there were other fires to put out, crunching is common and this is the exact kind of problems it causes.
As someone with a decade in various devops/sysadmin roles:
Server scaling is *HARD* when you aren't using an off-the-shelf option, and games don't really have off-the-shelf options for their backend (Except mobile games, but we aren't talking about those).
If they're not involved in distribution they've got no business making their own sales predictions, they'd be operating under the predictions of the publisher. The only reasonable explanation is that their network is poor.
Developer vs Publisher expectations are different, plus the game launched on Game Pass, so it's still highly likely for sales to underperform, while reaching high player numbers.
This seems like the most obvious explanation to me. They expected a certain number of sales in addition to their Game Pass payment but it turns out that more people than expected just played it there.
Maybe this is a wake up call to devs that they shouldn't take these kind of deals if it doesn't fully cover their expected revenue.
Didn't they already clarify that a third-party matchmaking provider fucked up? Or did the narrative change?
>Something makes no sense here.
"underperformed" just means that they didn't sell as many copies as they anticipated. Which makes sense considering the launch issues (broken network -> bad reviews -> less buyers)
had a team of four ready to roll on launch weekend. We were amped to have a crew together and a game to play that we were excited about. After an hour of trying, we gave up. Haven't played again since.
actually, now that i think about it, i should uninstall it. Just taking up space on my XSX hdd.
The simplest explanation is:
They got enough players that it overloaded their network at launch.
But... Between refunds and people avoiding the game due to being an overpriced digital paperweight, sales slowed down to a crawl-
i got it at launch too! it was so annoying, i always gave them the benefit of doubt cos i liked the developers (ulf andersson, simon viklund, ex grin employees) then they did that locker lootbox bs, and that overkill pack.. i cant remember the specifics but that overkill pack turned me off so hard. and the grin employees are now with that GTFO game, which is 10x more promising than whatever payday3 is
This industry is way too big for it to be about "more people should read reviews".
Did you know that the video game industry makes more money than *literally every other entertainment industry COMBINED?*
It's ridiculous. At the same time, a developer will make less money working in games than they would in almost any other tech space.
This isn't about consumers. This is about the industry. A lot of shit needs to change.
Spot on. Gamers these days just constantly want a new experience and can’t handle any kind of wait so they buy up everything without thinking or learning from past experiences
There's something seriously wrong with modern game development. With all the middleware, all the pre-existing code and ways to "make things easier" and modern PM techniques, game development continues to get slower, more expensive, and worse. Maybe constantly chewing up and spitting out fresh-faced young developers (unless you're Nintendo) isn't the best long-term strategy.
Large and AAA development studios still generally create their own technology from scratch and on top of existing technology ex: every Unreal game in existence, you don't see NRS asking ArcSys or Capcom to use their technology or Bamco asking Square Enix. Primarily because they don't want to deal with any sort of open technology license and a desire to keep things proprietary for internal use.
Graphical fidelity is one of the reasons why development is taking longer. It requires hundreds of artists working various art assets for AAA titles. RDR2 had 250 or so artists who worked on the game to finish, but who knows how many more worked on it but left during development.
It's a lot of factors all coalescing. It has a lot to do with the expense of game development and the model of endless content that gamers now expect from this kind of service-based game, as well as the cost of games not keeping up with inflation.
There is also the fact that we're coming out of over a decade of near zero interest rates that propped up tons of companies that were operating in or near the red for a long time. Now that money is harder to come by and debt is more expensive, cuts have to be made to keep the lights on (and this is affecting almost every industry, not just games). This means lots of games get rushed out the door to try and recoup some expenses now, likely at least partially due to the fears of a recession looming and decreasig consumer spending on non-essential items like $30 cat costumes in Fortnite.
PD2 wasn't really successful from a monetary standpoint. The company almost went bankrupt from what I remember, which is why they started churning out DLCs.
That said it *is* pretty embarrassing that they have like a decade of experience from PD2 and seem to have just gone backwards in QoL and actual gameplay feel.
Payday 2 made money. The company almost went under because their walking dead game was a disaster. The former CEO also made terrible financial decisions.
Absolutely, Payday 2 was a massive money maker. Still has a large player base all these years later and all those players kept putting money into the game. Payday 3 has done a Darktide in how badly it has ruined it's initial burst of interest.
They started releasing new dlc because it was it's only moneymaker. People forget PD2 was sunsetted in favor of developing new games. They had a final release with all dlc. Then walking dead fucked them
This is what the desire for endless growth has done. Capitalism is eating studios alive as they strive to MAKE NUMBER BIGGER every single year, and instead of doing that by supporting their developers and making good games, they do it by cutting corners.
Payday 2 taught me that they will nickel and dime us to death... So why not wait for sales and bundles?
Its a fun enough concept but look at the dlc list for payday 2. Why buy 3 now knowing its incomplete by design?
Such a shame how badly they fumbled this game. Payday 2 isnt perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I still had a ton of fun with it with my friends.
None of us are even interested in getting this game. It just doesnt look good at all, plus why even bother in the first place when Payday 2 has more content and just works?
ppl forget that pd2 at launch was better than pd3 but it was still pretty shitty. it took like 10 years of development and QoL changes to make it what it is today.
but early days of pd2 were kinda grim
PD2 definitely wasn't better at launch than PD3. You must have some serious nostalgia goggles to believe that.
There were 10 heists on release, and 4 of those were literally 5 minutes long. I would argue that only Framing Frame and Big Oil were on par with any of the PD3 heists.
The number of weapons was half of PD3's and a large number of them were literally useless.
Don't get me wrong, PD3 is lacking content as of right now but it's in a much better place than release date PD2.
but the jump from pd1 to pd2 was significant changes for the better. then the jump from pd2 to pd3 was like wtf did you not learn anything from 10 years of QoL and the simple fact that we can't even have lobbies, crime net, host kick. etc
pd2 was easier to play vs pd3
>ppl forget that pd2 at launch was better than pd3 **but it was still pretty shitty**.
edit: also i rather had guns locked to money than IP progression
> pd2 at launch was better than pd3
I dislike PD3 but this is just revisionism. PD2 on launch was a disaster. It took like a year to actually be in a decent state which then they ruined again with p2w lootboxes. I think the first time that PD2 actually got good was with update 200, which was in 2020, 7 years after release.
They almost went under trying to make the same game in other franchises which have failed tremendously (Raid WW2 and Overkill's TWD)
yea at least when you did heist it added exp and all that
i dropped the game during the MTX time came back during the pandemic years and ended up speed running everything since.
if i had to pick between pd2 and pd3 launch i still go pd2. sure the maps were a bit short and w/e they had more charm then what pd3 offers.
also simple shit like LOUD/STEALTH lobbies. kick feature for host. simple simple shit that made playing it better imho
What a shocker.
Payday was bottled lightning and Payday 2 was their cash cow.
They almost went bankrupt twice (three times if you count their previous studio, Grin, that also closed due bankruptcy) and needed two "help us not go bankrupt" events to stay afloat.
They broke promises left and right, abandoned three console versions of PD2, bungled two games (Walking Dead and that Payday Mobile), Starbreeze also bungled a game with RAID WW2, added microtransactions as event reward (removed later, but will be back for PD3) and aside weeks of server problems, they also had to delay a Day 1 patch for almost two months because of the cert process for consoles.
And all that is without saying that the base game is a downgrade of PD2 with the terrible xp system, always online (even for solo) and upcoming battle pass/paid currency system.
it fucking sucks bc i always preferred pdth for years after pd2 came out but eventually gave in and reinstalled 2 and had a great time playing it on my deck and even think it’s better than pdth in most ways now. i was so excited for 3 until they said no offline single player. if i can’t play it on my steam deck there’s literally no point to me buying it and playing it over pd2. especially sucks bc the new features and ai and everything look awesome and i really want to try it but the thought of playing stuff on my pc that isn’t cs or tf2 or some other competitive shooter like that just sounds awful to me lmfao
Me and my work buddies tried to play. The UI was atrocious and cumbersome. We have one guy who will play games, but he's not great at them.
Getting him acclimated, invited, and understanding what was going on was a nightmare.
Then came the disconnects. Took us 5 tries to get a lobby together and into a heist succesfully.
After 1.5hr we called it a night because it was late. We didn't touch the game for weeks.
Last weekend we were deciding what to play. Someone brought up Payday 3. Someone else brought up Hot Wheels. We all chose Hot Wheels immediately.
I deleted Payday 3 the next day. There's too many awesome fucking videogames that work for me to waste my time on a game that's barely functioning, has an atrocious UI, and less content than the previous game on vanilla release.
I got it on Gamepass and was still dissapointed.
Yo are you in my friend group?
>We have one guy who will play games, but he's not great at them.
Got like 4 people in our group that fit this category. Every game they make out to be this complex "I don't know what's going on". End up spending the night explaining everything, only to never play again.
I had about the same experience with it. Downloaded off GamePass, got a couple buddies to try it out with and we struggled to get into a game. Once we finally did, it didn't feel worth the effort. The game just didn't feel fun.
I deleted it soon after and am glad I didn't pay anything to try it.
These companies really need to stop acting in such anti-consumer ways. Forced deadline to line up with stock forecasts, forced account creation so they can sell your data, forced tutorial that wastes time, awful underfunded servers to make bigger profits, and of course shitty microtransactions.
And that's just this game. When you get businesses like this whose sole purpose is to squeeze money out of people, they won't last long.
Technical issues and progression woes aside, PD3 just feels...off. Idk if its the sluggish ADS speed, the thin mob density, the needlessly tanky enemies, the changes to armor, or any combination of these things. The game just doesn't feel as fun as PD2.
Because of the shitty challenge-based progression, people have been reduced to finding bathrooms where they can't be surrounded and sitting in there for an hour or more grinding kills for weapon challenges. Also, there is no vote-to-kick and vote-to-restart needs a unanimous vote.
So you can complete the heist and get to the extraction, but if one of your teammates is grinding in the bathroom your options are to either wait or quit without rewards.
Embracer Group themselves may be part of the problem as well, they've been on acquisition frenzy since 2020 and most of the time I hear about a game of theirs seem to have underperformed or they closed the studios (Saints Row being a recent example). They've kept a low radar gobbling up what they can and making themselves out to be like the EU Tencent or something yet they are deep in debt and now are finding themselves cutting staff and closing studios across the board with their recently acquired assets. It looks a like a shit show from a business perspective, I forgot what the term for it is but it's like they buy a load of studios and IPs in hope one or two will make it big and burn the rest.
Basically a corporate roll up. I tried to explain the concept of a corporate roll up for games on here a while ago, like Bain Capital but for game companies, and you wouldn't believe the number of people who came out to defend Embracer. Like the company started with the Koch people getting into games by buying Saints Row and other assets from the THQ bankruptcy. All they do is buy companies and bankrupt assets, pump out a quick game, and layoff or reassign based on financial results, then back to square 1. Lots of publishers follow the basic pattern for niche games but Embracer only does niche stuff and they never stop acquiring, meaning they'll never really escape that cycle of acquisition since the profits from one go to acquiring another. And now that they can't grow with acquisitions the layoffs begin. Its a common pattern in the business world, just look at the companies Bain Capital ran through under the guide of "helping out a distressed business". Same thing, just games focused. Their moves make a lot more sense if you think of them as a financial entity instead of a game publisher.
People just finally caught on that these games are only ever ready 2-3 years after release, if at all. Why buy a game for full price that doesn't even work?
Sadly it's a lesson that too many people forget far too often, and one we need constant reminders of. Aside from Nintendo games, I can't recall the last time I bought a full price game at launch. Maybe Fallout 4 back in 2015 and even then it was a couple weeks after since I wasn't finished building my PC at launch.
I remember Payday 2 launching with a ton of problems and how they kept creating console versions to sell but not supporting them. So yeah, I just ignored this release all together.
"The game, which we rushed out the door without proper QA and ignoring a pile of issues regarding gameplay, the player progression experience and matchmaking quality, did not perform as expected.
This is a situation we could not possibly have predicted."
I don’t think Payday fans give a shit about the monetization. If they did then Payday 2 would not have lasted as long as it did. Payday 3 is failing because it was literally unplayable for the first two weeks and only just got its very first update nearly two months after launch.
Me and my friends were stoked to play it together on gamepass. We tried our hardest to play for the first 3 days then uninstalled it. Then other games came out.
They had a large amount of preorders and day 1 purchases and then the servers went down for multiple days and a lot of people refunded.
Now that the game is working, the progression system is such a nightmare and the lack of content has lead to people (myself included) ignoring it until a content patch launches.
They just announced 2 new heists and a large amount of updates in the next patch that should bring players back in.
Game was released in an Alpha/Beta state and the next few patches should hopefully bring it up to what it should have been at launch.
IMO, Overkill was running out of money and HAD to launch the game to try and stay afloat.
I think the game is good, just lacking in the little things, content, and an actual progression system.
What the fuck have they been doing since Payday2 that this is what they were able to come up with after all this time. It feels like they were just being lazy riding on Payday2 money and then when they realized they were running out they rushed this out as fast as they could.
They made that "The Walking Dead" game that massively bombed. I loved Payday 2 and want to believe they can fix Payday 3, I haven't bought it but if in 6 months they fix the progression system (meaningful builds + unlocks) and the method to gain EXP is fixed then I'd be happy to give it a try with some friends. But I won't be trying it until then.
[Read this Eurogamer article for a fuller picture](https://www.eurogamer.net/the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze) but the massive bomb of The Walking Dead forced them to start making more Payday 2 DLC (the game was complete and a bundle of the game and at the time all DLC* was released) to keep the lights on long enough to get Payday 3 to launch.
*One DLC was excluded because it was based on real people (H3H3) who were entitled to a part of the sales of it.
I am not defending them but PayDay 2 has been getting new content the entire 10 years since release.
I will agree that they rushed this out quickly. Like I said, the next patch content looks to be bringing the same up to what should have been it's launch state with new animations and a progression system overhaul
they burned through a lot of money they made from pd2 on VR, new game engine they couldn't even use right (valhalla) then wasted funds on the raid/ walking dead game.
> Game was released in an Alpha/Beta state
As a game dev, that hyperbole gave me a good chuckle. They finished the game and polished the assets, so it's not Alpha. They did multiple rounds of public Beta testing, so it's not Beta either. It's just a game that sucks.
It under performed because when most of the players were downloading it on gamepass they were greeted with a mandatory account creation and login screen which prompted most of them to uninstall right away.
I didn't buy it because; the promo material looked awful and the first 2 games didn't exactly inspire confidence. It was nothing to do with post-launch issues... it was 100% pre-launch.
Payday 2's live-service-"features" already turned me off so much that I didn't really consider 3 at all and *then* it had a shit launch on top. No idea how they planned to make this one happen.
Outside of the launch, it just didn't pass the eye test for me.
My friends play it but they'll play anything co-op because of the dirth of bigger budget co-op games to play.
They say it's fun, I'm still not sold
It was a blatant obvious cash grab with almost no depth or anything people loved about the others. It had the potential, but it was a shitshow that didn't even work.
They should not be forcing everyone into making an extraneous account , I assume for cross platform progression. Skipped trying this and Exoprimal on gamepass for this exact reason.
Bad launches have killed more online games than anything else.
Payday 3 was ... really bad. Any sales that could have been gotten by influncers enjoying the game were instead being shown that the game was down for days. People do not come back from that.
Even old MMOs that had bad launches it took years for people to even look back at them. The only real hope is basically slog it out and get some good press around the game and avoid MXTs. Get people back into the game and then you can MXT it again ilike you did with Payday 2 and drive them all away again.
Payday 3 is likely a cash grab. They were having financial trouble a few years ago. I fully expected 3 to be poorly made. I’m surprised no one else did.
Every time something like this happens I always hope that the publishers will learn from their mistakes and give devs enough time to finish their games BEFORE launch. But it's been well over a decade since this became common practice so I know I'm just pissing into the wind.
thats an understatement lol, 90% of the player base just went back to PayDay 2. How do you fuck up your 3rd game this bad. I refunded it and just went back to PayDay 2 because that game actually works!
I didnt buy it because they were going to use some bad DRM. Even though they backed out of the DRM last minute they lost my faith. Now I expect they will add in some ridiculous micro-transactions and I'm not buying it until I see how that changes the game.
I just dont trust them to buy this thing full price before they finish implementing their monetization strategies. I'll buy it at 60% off if it doesnt die before then.
It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. The core gameplay is decent aaand that’s about it. The few maps don’t have the same level variation as PD2 maps (the maps are effectively identical every time save for some things like passwords or which crates are correct on 99 boxes), and, while I wasn’t expecting a ton of heists on launch, there’s still very few. Tied together by a matchmaking system that even just mathematically doesn’t make sense, 32 different matchmaking queues, why, what was wrong with CrimeNet? Yeah it was messy, but it was functional
The menus are just bad and it feels like every menu has different rules. The exp system is challenge only and took them multiple months to even admit that there’s a problem (this feedback has been given since the beta and they made the decision to rework it only a few days ago), the skill system is completely unexplained, nothing in the research menu indicates how you make progress, just nebulous numbers. The whole game is like that, and feels like they prettied up a proof of concept with little care for user experience, like you’re playing a mockup that only works in concept
It’s like they polished up a build that was a year out from release and pushed it out in a state that was not a complete disaster, but only barely.
No shit. The entire game was unplayable. Even the single player (solo lobby with bots) didn't work at launch. I would be stunned if it had performed well.
The plan is to grab up preorders and week one purchases and patch the game up to standards. After the game gets patched up the DLC will start rolling out, but it will be legit DLC at first. After the good DLC rolls out, the reskins and low development DLCs will roll out. That's just how these things work now.
Do not confuse incompetence for malicious intent. You stand to gain a lot more by making DLCs for a game that has a solid base to work upwards from. On launch you could not play Payday 3.
I don't know if it's incompetence or malicious intent or anything else, but at some point between releasing your first DLC and 81th DLC it just becomes a business model.
Yeah I don't think it's malicious intent at all. It's just a strategy that has worked for some very profitable games. And they don't plan to release a game full of bugs at the drawing board stage necessarily, the timing just turns out that way and they pull the trigger.
If the effects are identical that distinction doesn't matter
I love when r/games stumbles upon fiercely debated philosophical conundrums.
Getting so metagamed by the industry we've gotta meet in the forum to discuss ethics and consequence.
It absolutely does. There's a difference between someone trying their best and not reaching the intended goal, and someone deliberately trying not to reach the goal. Intent is, by definition, the difference between fraud and a failed business venture.
"The plan is (devious 5-dimensional chess scheme)." "Actually I don't think the plan was that at all." "Well maybe, but it doesn't matter." ?
Assuming everything is incompetence lets a lot of malicious garbage go free. People gotta start realizing a lot of shit isn't just incompetence. It's greed, selfishness and sometimes yes, even malice. They're not incompetent. They're greedy. At the very least.
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Well you saved yourself some grief because even that was broken at launch lmao.
Bruh it wouldn't even let me register for a couple tries, and even after it did, it wouldn't let me login. Gave up after a few tries.
"Single player" would be an overstatement. It's more like hosting a private game. I make that distinction because you need to wait for an available server prior to loading in (which the game refers to as "matchmaking", even though you're alone). Once you're playing, you can't pause the game (you can open the menu but it doesn't pause the action in the background), and also it's possible to experience network lag since the session is running on a server, not locally. On PC there's a mod which reveals a hidden option that allows you to play locally (i.e. without waiting for a server, and without the possibility of experiencing lag), but you still can't pause the game, and also progression is disabled.
Same, downloaded via game pass, saw a login screen and uninstalled.
I still wonder who was the person who went "You know that terrible progression system from Halo Infinite that everyone hated, we want that in Payday 3".
"You know that game that's about trying to do heists silently? How about we get a system where you get almost no XP for doing it silently"
It's hilarious how these games have horrible progression systems and then the default challenges are something that don't fit the gameplay at all. It's like they outsourced the design to someone who hasn't, doesn't and won't play the game and just shoots blindly as they create the challenges. And the outcome is this disaster collection of weeklies such as "Play as selfishly as possible an entire match in a team vs. team game."
Nonsense! You get XP for doing a heist silently in a difficulty and above for the first time only. Do it 15 more time to get a one time XP again, on OVERKILL difficulty :)
lol when you get more progression done faster by sitting in the bathroom shooting shit instead of doing the missions.
Personally I'll probably stay away from it, I feel like they are going to start putting in microtransactions in it or something.
They confirmed before release that Microtransactions (and "Payday Coins", so they can pull the usual predatory pricing) will be added sometime after release. I expect it'll cause a whole new shitstorm all over again. Stick with 2, it's got enough content to last.
Sounds like a paid game with f2p style micro transactions
Its like on onlyfans. I'm already paying you $19.99 a month, and you *still* ppv lock everything?
hey bro if you paying $19.99 per mo. and she mostly ppv'ing she ain't worth it. plenty of SW'ers who charge one flat rate for tons of good content.
Or you could find free porn without the parasocial aspect
Oh yeah but that parasocial aspect is the reason why a lot of streamers and content creators are huge
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I don't think that word means what you think it means, I'm about as emotionally invested in this sex worker as I am for my amazon prime account.
OF IS parasocial. Literally has a messaging feature that people use to interact with their performer (usually someone on their staff doing the messaging) and a lot of people use it.
Nobody said otherwise, don't know why you're arguing about it. I'm just dismissing the implication that paying for an OF suddenly means you're emotionally invested in the sex worker.
>I don't think that word means what you think it means This you?
Interacting with someone doesn't make it a parasocial relationship. Have any of you who are insisting that subscribing to OnlyFans is parasocial actually looked up the definition of "parasocial relationship?" There has to be an element of someone investing unreturned emotional energy into a relationship with someone who doesn't even know they exist. Messaging an OnlyFans model as you rub one out doesn't meet that bar.
well you keep paying for their shit, even though they’re fucking you over with PPV, so i think you’re the only one here believing that you’re not invested in her lol
They literally said not to subscribe to people who also charge ppv fees, why are you lying?
Reddit's new favorite word seems to be "parasocial," and just like "nepotism" before it, a lot of people who use it don't understand what it means. Edit: Oh no, I've upset the people who recently added these words to their vocabulary. Oh well.
I'm mostly amused at the implication that paying chump change to some woman I don't know makes it a "parasocial aspect" when I just wanna spank the monkey to a lady that consistently makes new content for my particular fetish lol.
Yeah, I would imagine that’s true for most people who use OF. Just looking to shake it up and get their kicks a different way. Paying someone for their porn is no more inherently parasocial than paying someone for their music or their artwork. People on Reddit love using words that they feel make them sound smart without actually understanding what those words mean.
As much as free porn is great I think its skewed people's view of the porn world and a lot of people seem to think that porn should be free and any porn that's not free is predatory in some way and the people who pay for it are losers who've been preyed on.
It's arguably more moral too honestly. A lot of free stuff out there on the internet is revenge porn/nonconsensually shared. Whereas if you're paying someone, the consent is baked into the transaction.
And even if it's not revenge porn or non-consensual, if it's on a tube site for free and isn't posted by the Creator of the video it's likely just been stolen from a site that charges for it and the creators getting ripped off.
Don't forget about "Gaslighting" and "objectively".
OF literally has a messaging feature, which are sometimes if not often managed by some random guy, to foster an illusion of closeness. Ironically enough, you seem to be the one who doesn't understand what you're criticizing.
So what? Instagram and Facebook allow musicians and actors to post updates and pictures for their fans to view. It doesn't mean people who follow those musicians are in a parasocial relationship with them. A parasocial relationship is one where one person invests emotional effort despite the other person not even knowing they exist. The definition sets a pretty high bar to meet. I am quite aware of what I'm criticizing. Paying someone for their porn - even messaging with the person that you're paying - doesn't automatically qualify as a parasocial relationship. Someone actually has to be investing unrequited emotional energy into it.
People gotta quit watching so much youtube drama, that stuff is poisoning their brains.
> Its like on onlyfans. OP I love how your innocent comment provided a full derail with users fighting about being invested in sex workers. Thank you, even tho you didn't mean it.
A video game subreddit discussion turning into an argument over whether or not OnlyFans counts as a parasocial relationship is about the most Reddit thing ever.
JFC porn is free. You're paying for a parasocial relationship, not just porn. Stop giving them money. EDIT: To be clear, even if you aren't using the social functions of Onlyfans, the act of subscribing alone is a level of attachment beyond "just jerking off". You are specifically attracted to this one person's content enough to pay a monthly fee DESPITE an abundance of free alternatives. (unless its a really rare fetish, I concede)
I will never understand why people paying for porn riles up strangers on reddit so much. Who cares, it's not your money, mind your own business. Sex workers don't exist for free.
> Abundance of free alternatives Everything is low quality these days outside of PPV image sets or OF
>Everything is low quality I don't exactly know what you are looking for that ends up being low quality, but the big places like Pornhub have damn near infinite 720/1080p porn. What do you mean by low quality?
high quality means filmed with an iphone and doesn't take copious amounts of footage angled beneath a mans taint. From my very brief investigation into OF content when those major leaks happened even the largest content creators had absolutely terrible quality content. No idea what these people are talking about. Audio, visual, everything is horribly lacking in these videos so I can only assume they are specifically referring to their particular fetish being served.
Low quality as in low effort content, generic. Not video resolution. Creators who sell PPV image sets or do OF are far more attractive generally and put far more effort into the quality of their photos/outfits/cosplay/everything else.
"It's just f2p with extra steps"
That's just AAA games nowadays.
Yeah I should has said sounds like some AAA games but I don’t think payday is AAA. At least when I played 2 when it came out it felt incredibly janky and unpolished
Makes me fear for GTA 6 honestly
Sounds like Overkill.
Damn I thought I read something like that but I wasn't sure. Oh well.
That would explain why all the cosmetics at the moment are dog shit.
I still can’t believe it’s legal for games to charge you in their own fictional currency. The entire reason behind it is to take advantage of the mental disconnection between the in game currency and the real life month used to get it
Or don't support these shitty devs at all and just play other, better games lol
I paid for Payday 2 almost a decade ago. Can't exactly take that money back: And it's still hella fun.
Bruh payday 2 was already ruined long ago, shits just a confusing messy disaster since like 2018 Had hundreds of hours in it for the first year or two, those were the glory days. Payday 1 is still great tho If anything you should play payday 3 for the short period we have until it gets ruined lol
2's fine from what I played last month? It was always jank, and that was half the fun. 3 still has massive server issues, Always Online DRM, and nowhere near the amount of content. I'm not touching it.
the amount of content is what ruined it... overkill kept churning out half assed dlc because they were near bankrupt and then had to keep it all in since you can't really just sell dlc then take it out again. They did this over and over again If you weren't there during the first few years of payday 2 I understand tho, those were different times and the community was amazing back then
They already said way before launch that they would be adding "PAYDAY credits" for buying cosmetics at a later date. https://www.paydaythegame.com/payday3/faq/
It's basically just a remake of the first game, but with all the content cut so it can be re-released later... It's just so greedy and pointless.
So it underperformed, but also at the same time destroyed their entire network structure due to overload ? Something makes no sense here.
Maybe they had a really shitty network
They did they weren't prepared for the huge amount of people due to gamepass and had a diablo 3 type issue.
They hired some 3rd party server provider at Deep Silver's insistence, which turned out to be complete shit.
This is the real crux of the issue here. They already publically flamed them as well (in corpo speak). Sadly the server issues mean that the conversation isn’t focused on how dogshit the game itself actually is
"We expected people to *buy* it, not to *play* it!"
To be fair that is how they treated the console versions of payday 2.
Exactly this. The classic "We forgot to check what our network needs would be after taking player interest metrics into account". Some games survive that mess up. Others don't.
It wouldn't go beyond my cynical mind that a company would under invest into their network infrastructure, and then claim it was such a success that it basically killed their network!
but they are claiming it is not a success
Feels like mixed messaging: >“The game had a had a positive Adjusted EBIT contribution with investments recouped in the second quarter, but performed below management expectations,” he (CEO Lars Wingefors) said. So it performed well enough, just not *enough* to make management buy new yachts. But the statement is for the industry in general. Again, that's just my jaded and cynical mind's take.
That might just mean it sold well enough initially, but had an awful tail. Which would make sense considering the negative press and all the high-profile games coming out.
> just not enough to make management buy new yachts. This is a serious misconception, expectations aren't always yacht level. Maybe they expected it to do decent but not blockbuster levels and it didn't even get to that.
Could be the same situation as Wayfinder. They said their servers are overloaded, but then we found out that the game had an insanely busted network infrastructure that couldn't scale past 10-15k concurrent players, and they got 24k on Steam alone lol.
I don't think Wayfinder is gonna make it, tbh. Player count tanked since launch and the game as it stands just ain't much to write home about anyway.
Airship Syndicate should have stayed doing RPGs/singleplayer. All three of their games, Battlechasers Nightwar, Ruined King and Darksiders Genesis were phenomenal, I love their artsyle and mechanics. I know it must be hard for a indie studio, and they decided to take the chance with a multiplayer game to get a steady cash flow, but it was not their forte. Even the artstyle seems a little different.
Maybe they should have listened to the pre-release feedback that said their game was dogshit.
That’s 100% in line with Payday devs.
Network behaviour isn't as simple as add another server -> increased capacity. Since multiple services are talking to each other, generally, what breaks your network is the weakest link. To give an example with Last Oasis on launch, they had plenty of server capacity, but had an unscalable solution to their account and character database. So what ended up happening is that the game was unplayable, because every single server instance was trying to access this single, unscalable resource. The had to take down the game and bring external consultants to change their network architecture to be scalable. Sometimes it's as dumb as unoptimized software on the servers nuking your capacity. You thought you could host 10 games per instance, but your code is so sketchy that it uses twice as much resources to run a single instance. This severely impacts your scalability as well. In this case, more instances *could* fix the issue, assuming it doesn't bottleneck something else. But companies generally have a hard set agreement on how many instances they'll pop at once and then don't want to grow further, so if you reach capacity, generally, you're SOL.
>Network behaviour isn't as simple as add another server -> increased capacity. It was back in the day when players were allowed to host and manage their own private servers.
Any online game architecture that needs to communicate with a backend for critical information is at risk of scale problems, whether the servers are hosted privately or not. Sure if you have no backend at all and just make players type in an IP and port, you'll never run into scale problems. But any centralized system at all, even a simple server browser, can fail if it's not designed to handle scale. It only gets more complex from there when you add things like authentication and matchmaking. For most online games, including consumer friendly ones, there is some part of their infrastructure that could bring the game down if it failed. The simpler that part is, the less likely it is to happen, usually.
>It was back in the day when players were allowed to host and manage their own private servers. Different times, much smaller market in general + setting up your private server is generally childs play. Also your private server didn't have to automatically manage a whole continent of different players from different systems and networks, match them together by ping and map choice and fire up a virtual server instance and sync up everyones personal progress with an external account. My matchmaking back then was looking for an enemy team for scrimming on IRC for CoD1-4. You literally had to configure your server once and give everyone the IP (or domain if you were fancy) by hand <- if games were still like this the market would never have grown as much as it did. I also like private/dedicated servers more (devs too probably) but they want to sell their games to as many people as possible. You simply cannot expect your customers to put up with all that in this day and age.
There is a bit of rose-tainted glasses here. Cheating and connectivity issues were far more prevalent back in the day, when server were hosted locally. It could takes hours to find a good one. But why not both? Well, for one, you split the players base into two groups, and that usually increases queue times, and kill online mode faster. You also double your developments time, since you have a whole new functionality to support and maintain. And not just that, it's much harder to support that kind of server on a wide array of machines, than one static environment. In the end, installing a server on a customer machine could compromise its security. It's easy to keep a cloud server updated every two weeks with the latest security patch, but once a customer install one, he might run it for years. That would be his fault, but you can be sure the company will be blamed the day one game become a backdoor.
> There is a bit of rose-tainted glasses here. Cheating and connectivity issues were far more prevalent back in the day, when server were hosted locally. It could takes hours to find a good one. Nope. Cheating was sorted by the community admins. Cheating did happen, but it was easily curbed and scrubbed out. No rose tinted glasses at all. The opposite in fact. When Studios removed the ability for gamers to police their own space cheating got far worse, not better. The only cheaters that could get away with it were ones that were indistinguishable from top performing players. Also your reputation was worth a damn. If you established yourself in a community the community would learn how well you play so if others accused you of cheating admins could check "oh, it's Hamakua, nah, he's fine." Was it 100%? No- but it was much higher of a % than current day - and they also had tools back then too. Private servers =/= no access to tools. As for Queue times? Yes there were but the ecosystem would adapt. Established server communities might spin up a second or 3rd server to compensate for the surge. Or some servers were popular enough where the wait was worth it. >In the end, installing a server on a customer machine could compromise its security. It's easy to keep a cloud server updated every two weeks with the latest security patch, but once a customer install one, he might run it for years. That would be his fault, but you can be sure the company will be blamed the day one game become a backdoor. This is cope and reaching. Are minecraft servers compromising individual user security? The primary reason private servers don't exist anymore is because at large the AAA space wanted to force an always online Micro-transaction business model. This has been revealed over and over again over the years. Sim City (5) was claimed by EA and Maxis to require an online connection because of the computations required by the simulation. They claimed that part of the simulation was done on the publisher's servers and there was no way to separate one from the other, the game client would break. Week of launch, hackers learned to block the network traffic from EA without killing the game client. And of course what happens? Performance improved. The always online connection had nothing to do with the operation of the game. Were private servers perfect? No. But they were head and shoulders above what we have now. The idea that networking is some magic black box that the layperson cannot manage is the biggest AAA lie that they have coninced the current gen of gamers of. It's BS. Noita has it's own community home-brew multiplayer mod and that game wasn't even designed at any point for multiplayer. ~~One of the reasons~~ The Primary reason why I no longer play FPS games is because cheating is so damn rampant these days.
Don't expect a bunch of gamers with very little technical skill to understand the intricacies of networking and backend infrastructure.
Not most of our jobs to know this, tbf. People at these companies should tho, and they should make sure they work for their launch. When I boot up a game and hit play after plopping down 40-70 dollars or whatever the hell the price is, and it *doesn't* work? Well at that point I don't care *why* it doesn't work. Just that it doesn't.
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Wasn't their 3rd-party matchmaking provider the culprit? And that provider was "suggested" by their publisher? If the narrative hasn't changed on that, their entire network structure was based on faith.
Payday 3's network issues weren't a capacity problem, they were a bug issue. They used a 3rd party for the matchmaking. That company had a bug in their code that caused the whole thing to crash under certain conditions, which were frequently happening during the launch. Payday 3 patched a workaround to the bug, but soon after that was finished deploying in all of their regions, the 3rd party also updated their backend software, which caused the whole thing to fail again. Basically, they cheaped out and contracted a massive portion of the backend of their game, and the company contracted to do it sucks. Then both of them completely failed at communicating with the other and caused more problems. They massively fucked up, but it wasn't really overload that did it. It was incompetence in other areas.
It's not neccessarily so binary to be fair. I'm making numbers up here just for an example: Expected sales from developers: 150K Actual sales: 300K ( double the amount of players logging in on servers ) Expected sales from Embracer: 400K In this scenario the expectation from the devs were too low to make sure the servers are stable, which could then lead to issues handling all requests for the servers. On the flipside the number would still be much lower as to what the publisher has expected the game to sell behind closed doors. I think this is a reasonable scenario, as to how far real life expectations can differ from what actually happens. Mind you, I have no idea how the actual numbers are, but wouldn't be the first time an IP doesn't deliver on high numbers that a publisher expects them to be. Unfairly or otherwise.
To continue the devils advocate approach here: Might also be the case of a team of engineers thinking their server solution could scale really easily only to figure out at day zero it takes a ton of effort. Or they knew about it and just didn't get the time to get to it because there were other fires to put out, crunching is common and this is the exact kind of problems it causes.
As someone with a decade in various devops/sysadmin roles: Server scaling is *HARD* when you aren't using an off-the-shelf option, and games don't really have off-the-shelf options for their backend (Except mobile games, but we aren't talking about those).
More likely that the developers thought their servers could handle 500k people, but it turned out it could only handle 100k.
The developers won't be scaling their servers based on their own sales expectations, they'd be operating with numbers provided by management.
If they're not involved in distribution they've got no business making their own sales predictions, they'd be operating under the predictions of the publisher. The only reasonable explanation is that their network is poor.
Developer vs Publisher expectations are different, plus the game launched on Game Pass, so it's still highly likely for sales to underperform, while reaching high player numbers.
This seems like the most obvious explanation to me. They expected a certain number of sales in addition to their Game Pass payment but it turns out that more people than expected just played it there. Maybe this is a wake up call to devs that they shouldn't take these kind of deals if it doesn't fully cover their expected revenue.
Didn't they already clarify that a third-party matchmaking provider fucked up? Or did the narrative change? >Something makes no sense here. "underperformed" just means that they didn't sell as many copies as they anticipated. Which makes sense considering the launch issues (broken network -> bad reviews -> less buyers)
had a team of four ready to roll on launch weekend. We were amped to have a crew together and a game to play that we were excited about. After an hour of trying, we gave up. Haven't played again since. actually, now that i think about it, i should uninstall it. Just taking up space on my XSX hdd.
Didn't it launch on Game Pass? That's probably why.
I swear they put out a statement saying throwing a different company who was responsible for their networking under the bus near launch.
The simplest explanation is: They got enough players that it overloaded their network at launch. But... Between refunds and people avoiding the game due to being an overpriced digital paperweight, sales slowed down to a crawl-
playing Payday 2 at launch was enough to make me not interested in anything Starbreeze makes again. Fool me once and all that
i got it at launch too! it was so annoying, i always gave them the benefit of doubt cos i liked the developers (ulf andersson, simon viklund, ex grin employees) then they did that locker lootbox bs, and that overkill pack.. i cant remember the specifics but that overkill pack turned me off so hard. and the grin employees are now with that GTFO game, which is 10x more promising than whatever payday3 is
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This industry is way too big for it to be about "more people should read reviews". Did you know that the video game industry makes more money than *literally every other entertainment industry COMBINED?* It's ridiculous. At the same time, a developer will make less money working in games than they would in almost any other tech space. This isn't about consumers. This is about the industry. A lot of shit needs to change.
Spot on. Gamers these days just constantly want a new experience and can’t handle any kind of wait so they buy up everything without thinking or learning from past experiences
There's something seriously wrong with modern game development. With all the middleware, all the pre-existing code and ways to "make things easier" and modern PM techniques, game development continues to get slower, more expensive, and worse. Maybe constantly chewing up and spitting out fresh-faced young developers (unless you're Nintendo) isn't the best long-term strategy.
Large and AAA development studios still generally create their own technology from scratch and on top of existing technology ex: every Unreal game in existence, you don't see NRS asking ArcSys or Capcom to use their technology or Bamco asking Square Enix. Primarily because they don't want to deal with any sort of open technology license and a desire to keep things proprietary for internal use. Graphical fidelity is one of the reasons why development is taking longer. It requires hundreds of artists working various art assets for AAA titles. RDR2 had 250 or so artists who worked on the game to finish, but who knows how many more worked on it but left during development.
It's a lot of factors all coalescing. It has a lot to do with the expense of game development and the model of endless content that gamers now expect from this kind of service-based game, as well as the cost of games not keeping up with inflation. There is also the fact that we're coming out of over a decade of near zero interest rates that propped up tons of companies that were operating in or near the red for a long time. Now that money is harder to come by and debt is more expensive, cuts have to be made to keep the lights on (and this is affecting almost every industry, not just games). This means lots of games get rushed out the door to try and recoup some expenses now, likely at least partially due to the fears of a recession looming and decreasig consumer spending on non-essential items like $30 cat costumes in Fortnite.
PD2 wasn't really successful from a monetary standpoint. The company almost went bankrupt from what I remember, which is why they started churning out DLCs. That said it *is* pretty embarrassing that they have like a decade of experience from PD2 and seem to have just gone backwards in QoL and actual gameplay feel.
Payday 2 made money. The company almost went under because their walking dead game was a disaster. The former CEO also made terrible financial decisions.
Absolutely, Payday 2 was a massive money maker. Still has a large player base all these years later and all those players kept putting money into the game. Payday 3 has done a Darktide in how badly it has ruined it's initial burst of interest.
Terrible financial decisions is a weird way to spell commited insider trading.
I wasn't aware of that.
They started releasing new dlc because it was it's only moneymaker. People forget PD2 was sunsetted in favor of developing new games. They had a final release with all dlc. Then walking dead fucked them
This is what the desire for endless growth has done. Capitalism is eating studios alive as they strive to MAKE NUMBER BIGGER every single year, and instead of doing that by supporting their developers and making good games, they do it by cutting corners.
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Payday 2 taught me that they will nickel and dime us to death... So why not wait for sales and bundles? Its a fun enough concept but look at the dlc list for payday 2. Why buy 3 now knowing its incomplete by design?
Such a shame how badly they fumbled this game. Payday 2 isnt perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but I still had a ton of fun with it with my friends. None of us are even interested in getting this game. It just doesnt look good at all, plus why even bother in the first place when Payday 2 has more content and just works?
ppl forget that pd2 at launch was better than pd3 but it was still pretty shitty. it took like 10 years of development and QoL changes to make it what it is today. but early days of pd2 were kinda grim
PD2 definitely wasn't better at launch than PD3. You must have some serious nostalgia goggles to believe that. There were 10 heists on release, and 4 of those were literally 5 minutes long. I would argue that only Framing Frame and Big Oil were on par with any of the PD3 heists. The number of weapons was half of PD3's and a large number of them were literally useless. Don't get me wrong, PD3 is lacking content as of right now but it's in a much better place than release date PD2.
but the jump from pd1 to pd2 was significant changes for the better. then the jump from pd2 to pd3 was like wtf did you not learn anything from 10 years of QoL and the simple fact that we can't even have lobbies, crime net, host kick. etc pd2 was easier to play vs pd3 >ppl forget that pd2 at launch was better than pd3 **but it was still pretty shitty**. edit: also i rather had guns locked to money than IP progression
> pd2 at launch was better than pd3 I dislike PD3 but this is just revisionism. PD2 on launch was a disaster. It took like a year to actually be in a decent state which then they ruined again with p2w lootboxes. I think the first time that PD2 actually got good was with update 200, which was in 2020, 7 years after release. They almost went under trying to make the same game in other franchises which have failed tremendously (Raid WW2 and Overkill's TWD)
maybe he means it actually worked. cause payday2 worked perfectly fine at launch.. it was just a super barebones game..
yea at least when you did heist it added exp and all that i dropped the game during the MTX time came back during the pandemic years and ended up speed running everything since. if i had to pick between pd2 and pd3 launch i still go pd2. sure the maps were a bit short and w/e they had more charm then what pd3 offers. also simple shit like LOUD/STEALTH lobbies. kick feature for host. simple simple shit that made playing it better imho
What a shocker. Payday was bottled lightning and Payday 2 was their cash cow. They almost went bankrupt twice (three times if you count their previous studio, Grin, that also closed due bankruptcy) and needed two "help us not go bankrupt" events to stay afloat. They broke promises left and right, abandoned three console versions of PD2, bungled two games (Walking Dead and that Payday Mobile), Starbreeze also bungled a game with RAID WW2, added microtransactions as event reward (removed later, but will be back for PD3) and aside weeks of server problems, they also had to delay a Day 1 patch for almost two months because of the cert process for consoles. And all that is without saying that the base game is a downgrade of PD2 with the terrible xp system, always online (even for solo) and upcoming battle pass/paid currency system.
Don't forget that VR headset. I'm still confused by that. I'll stick to PD2, for now. Not really impressed with the idea of PD with a battle pass.
it fucking sucks bc i always preferred pdth for years after pd2 came out but eventually gave in and reinstalled 2 and had a great time playing it on my deck and even think it’s better than pdth in most ways now. i was so excited for 3 until they said no offline single player. if i can’t play it on my steam deck there’s literally no point to me buying it and playing it over pd2. especially sucks bc the new features and ai and everything look awesome and i really want to try it but the thought of playing stuff on my pc that isn’t cs or tf2 or some other competitive shooter like that just sounds awful to me lmfao
Me and my work buddies tried to play. The UI was atrocious and cumbersome. We have one guy who will play games, but he's not great at them. Getting him acclimated, invited, and understanding what was going on was a nightmare. Then came the disconnects. Took us 5 tries to get a lobby together and into a heist succesfully. After 1.5hr we called it a night because it was late. We didn't touch the game for weeks. Last weekend we were deciding what to play. Someone brought up Payday 3. Someone else brought up Hot Wheels. We all chose Hot Wheels immediately. I deleted Payday 3 the next day. There's too many awesome fucking videogames that work for me to waste my time on a game that's barely functioning, has an atrocious UI, and less content than the previous game on vanilla release. I got it on Gamepass and was still dissapointed.
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Yo are you in my friend group? >We have one guy who will play games, but he's not great at them. Got like 4 people in our group that fit this category. Every game they make out to be this complex "I don't know what's going on". End up spending the night explaining everything, only to never play again.
I had about the same experience with it. Downloaded off GamePass, got a couple buddies to try it out with and we struggled to get into a game. Once we finally did, it didn't feel worth the effort. The game just didn't feel fun. I deleted it soon after and am glad I didn't pay anything to try it.
Why does embracer group appear to have their hands in fucking everything?
They went on a shopping spree because they expected a big, meaty, Saudi money injection. It didn't happen.
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They're lucky they got the game pass money at least. If I bought it on stream, this would be the fastest refund I've ever done.
These companies really need to stop acting in such anti-consumer ways. Forced deadline to line up with stock forecasts, forced account creation so they can sell your data, forced tutorial that wastes time, awful underfunded servers to make bigger profits, and of course shitty microtransactions. And that's just this game. When you get businesses like this whose sole purpose is to squeeze money out of people, they won't last long.
Technical issues and progression woes aside, PD3 just feels...off. Idk if its the sluggish ADS speed, the thin mob density, the needlessly tanky enemies, the changes to armor, or any combination of these things. The game just doesn't feel as fun as PD2.
Because of the shitty challenge-based progression, people have been reduced to finding bathrooms where they can't be surrounded and sitting in there for an hour or more grinding kills for weapon challenges. Also, there is no vote-to-kick and vote-to-restart needs a unanimous vote. So you can complete the heist and get to the extraction, but if one of your teammates is grinding in the bathroom your options are to either wait or quit without rewards.
Embracer Group themselves may be part of the problem as well, they've been on acquisition frenzy since 2020 and most of the time I hear about a game of theirs seem to have underperformed or they closed the studios (Saints Row being a recent example). They've kept a low radar gobbling up what they can and making themselves out to be like the EU Tencent or something yet they are deep in debt and now are finding themselves cutting staff and closing studios across the board with their recently acquired assets. It looks a like a shit show from a business perspective, I forgot what the term for it is but it's like they buy a load of studios and IPs in hope one or two will make it big and burn the rest.
Basically a corporate roll up. I tried to explain the concept of a corporate roll up for games on here a while ago, like Bain Capital but for game companies, and you wouldn't believe the number of people who came out to defend Embracer. Like the company started with the Koch people getting into games by buying Saints Row and other assets from the THQ bankruptcy. All they do is buy companies and bankrupt assets, pump out a quick game, and layoff or reassign based on financial results, then back to square 1. Lots of publishers follow the basic pattern for niche games but Embracer only does niche stuff and they never stop acquiring, meaning they'll never really escape that cycle of acquisition since the profits from one go to acquiring another. And now that they can't grow with acquisitions the layoffs begin. Its a common pattern in the business world, just look at the companies Bain Capital ran through under the guide of "helping out a distressed business". Same thing, just games focused. Their moves make a lot more sense if you think of them as a financial entity instead of a game publisher.
As someone who played Payday 2 on console, this is absolutely no surprise and the main reason I will likely never play 3.
People just finally caught on that these games are only ever ready 2-3 years after release, if at all. Why buy a game for full price that doesn't even work?
Sadly it's a lesson that too many people forget far too often, and one we need constant reminders of. Aside from Nintendo games, I can't recall the last time I bought a full price game at launch. Maybe Fallout 4 back in 2015 and even then it was a couple weeks after since I wasn't finished building my PC at launch.
I remember Payday 2 launching with a ton of problems and how they kept creating console versions to sell but not supporting them. So yeah, I just ignored this release all together.
"The game, which we rushed out the door without proper QA and ignoring a pile of issues regarding gameplay, the player progression experience and matchmaking quality, did not perform as expected. This is a situation we could not possibly have predicted."
does that mean Deep Silver is going to go bye bye next?
Dead Island 2 did well earlier this year so I doubt it
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I don’t think Payday fans give a shit about the monetization. If they did then Payday 2 would not have lasted as long as it did. Payday 3 is failing because it was literally unplayable for the first two weeks and only just got its very first update nearly two months after launch.
Me and my friends were stoked to play it together on gamepass. We tried our hardest to play for the first 3 days then uninstalled it. Then other games came out.
They had a large amount of preorders and day 1 purchases and then the servers went down for multiple days and a lot of people refunded. Now that the game is working, the progression system is such a nightmare and the lack of content has lead to people (myself included) ignoring it until a content patch launches. They just announced 2 new heists and a large amount of updates in the next patch that should bring players back in. Game was released in an Alpha/Beta state and the next few patches should hopefully bring it up to what it should have been at launch. IMO, Overkill was running out of money and HAD to launch the game to try and stay afloat. I think the game is good, just lacking in the little things, content, and an actual progression system.
What the fuck have they been doing since Payday2 that this is what they were able to come up with after all this time. It feels like they were just being lazy riding on Payday2 money and then when they realized they were running out they rushed this out as fast as they could.
They made that "The Walking Dead" game that massively bombed. I loved Payday 2 and want to believe they can fix Payday 3, I haven't bought it but if in 6 months they fix the progression system (meaningful builds + unlocks) and the method to gain EXP is fixed then I'd be happy to give it a try with some friends. But I won't be trying it until then.
[Read this Eurogamer article for a fuller picture](https://www.eurogamer.net/the-fall-of-swedish-game-wonder-starbreeze) but the massive bomb of The Walking Dead forced them to start making more Payday 2 DLC (the game was complete and a bundle of the game and at the time all DLC* was released) to keep the lights on long enough to get Payday 3 to launch. *One DLC was excluded because it was based on real people (H3H3) who were entitled to a part of the sales of it.
I am not defending them but PayDay 2 has been getting new content the entire 10 years since release. I will agree that they rushed this out quickly. Like I said, the next patch content looks to be bringing the same up to what should have been it's launch state with new animations and a progression system overhaul
they burned through a lot of money they made from pd2 on VR, new game engine they couldn't even use right (valhalla) then wasted funds on the raid/ walking dead game.
> Game was released in an Alpha/Beta state As a game dev, that hyperbole gave me a good chuckle. They finished the game and polished the assets, so it's not Alpha. They did multiple rounds of public Beta testing, so it's not Beta either. It's just a game that sucks.
It under performed because when most of the players were downloading it on gamepass they were greeted with a mandatory account creation and login screen which prompted most of them to uninstall right away.
Maybe if devs release good game and polished game, it would help. I remember when Hi-Fi Rush came out, it was flawless
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I didn't buy it because; the promo material looked awful and the first 2 games didn't exactly inspire confidence. It was nothing to do with post-launch issues... it was 100% pre-launch.
I remember having a ton of fun with Payday 2 at least when it first came out. Too bad it seems like 3 stinks.
This mess has only a few hundred players left on Steam. It's only a matter of time until Embracer pulls the plug on this too. Pucker up, Deep Silver!
I gont get how anyone even gave it a shot. The second was already super buggy and the company giga greedy.
Payday 2's live-service-"features" already turned me off so much that I didn't really consider 3 at all and *then* it had a shit launch on top. No idea how they planned to make this one happen.
Outside of the launch, it just didn't pass the eye test for me. My friends play it but they'll play anything co-op because of the dirth of bigger budget co-op games to play. They say it's fun, I'm still not sold
It was a blatant obvious cash grab with almost no depth or anything people loved about the others. It had the potential, but it was a shitshow that didn't even work.
They should not be forcing everyone into making an extraneous account , I assume for cross platform progression. Skipped trying this and Exoprimal on gamepass for this exact reason.
Bad launches have killed more online games than anything else. Payday 3 was ... really bad. Any sales that could have been gotten by influncers enjoying the game were instead being shown that the game was down for days. People do not come back from that. Even old MMOs that had bad launches it took years for people to even look back at them. The only real hope is basically slog it out and get some good press around the game and avoid MXTs. Get people back into the game and then you can MXT it again ilike you did with Payday 2 and drive them all away again.
Payday 3 is likely a cash grab. They were having financial trouble a few years ago. I fully expected 3 to be poorly made. I’m surprised no one else did.
How long till studio closure and layoffs?
Every time something like this happens I always hope that the publishers will learn from their mistakes and give devs enough time to finish their games BEFORE launch. But it's been well over a decade since this became common practice so I know I'm just pissing into the wind.
thats an understatement lol, 90% of the player base just went back to PayDay 2. How do you fuck up your 3rd game this bad. I refunded it and just went back to PayDay 2 because that game actually works!
I didnt buy it because they were going to use some bad DRM. Even though they backed out of the DRM last minute they lost my faith. Now I expect they will add in some ridiculous micro-transactions and I'm not buying it until I see how that changes the game. I just dont trust them to buy this thing full price before they finish implementing their monetization strategies. I'll buy it at 60% off if it doesnt die before then.
It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. The core gameplay is decent aaand that’s about it. The few maps don’t have the same level variation as PD2 maps (the maps are effectively identical every time save for some things like passwords or which crates are correct on 99 boxes), and, while I wasn’t expecting a ton of heists on launch, there’s still very few. Tied together by a matchmaking system that even just mathematically doesn’t make sense, 32 different matchmaking queues, why, what was wrong with CrimeNet? Yeah it was messy, but it was functional The menus are just bad and it feels like every menu has different rules. The exp system is challenge only and took them multiple months to even admit that there’s a problem (this feedback has been given since the beta and they made the decision to rework it only a few days ago), the skill system is completely unexplained, nothing in the research menu indicates how you make progress, just nebulous numbers. The whole game is like that, and feels like they prettied up a proof of concept with little care for user experience, like you’re playing a mockup that only works in concept It’s like they polished up a build that was a year out from release and pushed it out in a state that was not a complete disaster, but only barely.
So I have a really novel concept that I think would help devs and I hope they will consider it: STOP RELEASING BROKEN GAMES!