Despite its age, 2013’s Payday 2 is still making fun of last year’s sequel’s player base on a bad day.
It’s been six months since the release of Payday 3, and the game, which uses a live service model, is being played by a ridiculously small number of people. As a result, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren has been removed from his position because the board of directors believes that a change in leadership is needed. Sjögren became interim CEO in October 2020 when his predecessor Mikael Nermark resigned. He was given the job in March 2021 and lost it three years later. There’s no exact reason for his ouster, but the board didn’t like the direction the company was taking.
“The company has a clear strategy focused on creating attractive games based on our own and licensed IPs. It is the Board’s collective assessment that the execution of the strategy requires different leadership. We thank Tobias for his achievements over the past three years and wish him well in his future endeavors,” Starbreeze chairman Torgny Hellström wrote in a press release. Nowhere is Payday 3 mentioned, but apparently the reason is its failure. Below average gameplay, deeper technical bugs and delayed fixes – many people quickly abandoned the game because of this, which also played a part in the lack of communication between Starbreeze and the public, so players thanked the studio for their failure and then rushed back to Payday 2, and that’s no joke…
Sjögren admitted in February that Payday 3’s sales and player activity were well below target. According to SteamCharts, the maximum number of concurrent players in the last 24 hours was 353. Payday 2, on the other hand, had over 31,000 (remember, it was released in 2013!). That’s easily 85 times the number of players. On March 11, Payday 3 had less than 130 players, even though it had 77,938 at launch.
Sjögren will be temporarily replaced by Juergen Goeldner, former CEO of Focus Home Interactive and member of the board of directors of Starbreeze, with more than 40 years of experience in the games industry.
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