In maybe a not notably shocking transfer, Starbreeze is lowering the dimensions of the crew engaged on Payday 3.
Everybody is aware of that Payday 3 had a reasonably unhealthy launch. Even Starbreeze is aware of it! And whereas the developer is hoping it will possibly regain its gamers’ belief, it will be doing so with a smaller crew engaged on the sport, as outlined in a current interim report from performing Starbreeze CEO Mats Juhl. Within the report Juhl defined that “within the coming months, funding might be decrease as we spherical off ‘Operation Medic Bag’ for Payday and due to this fact enter 12 months 2 with a smaller crew centered on constantly updating the sport with new content material.”
Juhl did not make clear how precisely that may have an effect on the sport, and whether or not gamers can count on much less frequent or smaller updates, although the “constantly” does counsel at the least semi-regular updates. The report does notice that Starbreeze “stays financially sturdy”, and there are not any mentions of layoffs anyplace, so regardless of acknowledging that Payday 3 gross sales nonetheless have “nice potential to enhance”, for now hopefully that smaller crew is a results of employees being repositioned elsewhere versus dropping their jobs outright. In a while Juhl additionally shared that the sport’s most up-to-date DLCs have additionally been nicely acquired, so possibly Starbreeze can flip issues round.
Funnily sufficient, “comparatively steady gross sales of Payday 2” are serving to to help Payday 3’s comparatively weaker gross sales, which is not shocking contemplating numerous gamers really went again to the second sport.
The report additionally talks of Challenge Baxter, a Dungeons & Dragons mission that apparently “continues at full velocity”, sharing that internally playtests are going down, and that there are “energetic discussions with quite a lot of industry-leading gamers relating to potential collaborations round Baxter’s growth and launch.”
For now, let’s hope everybody will get to maintain their jobs so the variety of layoffs over the previous 12 months would not improve additional nonetheless.