Starbreeze has changed its management again, as the studio already did in March…

The director of Payday 3 was Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević, but he has now left his position, as the official Payday Twitter page announced that Mio will no longer be in the role and will be working as a designer somewhere else on the project. The “successors” have already been named, as Payday’s Executive Producer Andreas Penninger and International Brand Director Almir Listo will be the creative force behind the upcoming updates. So there is no specific director for the game yet, and a specific successor will likely be named in time.

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— PAYDAY 3 (@PAYDAYGame) September 11, 2024

The change in creative leadership is no coincidence, as Payday 3 had a very troubled first year. When it was released, the game was nearly unplayable due to server issues and the progression system was not right for the fans, so many people backed out of the game and went back to playing Payday 2. The development only complicated the situation, and the patch release wasn’t smooth either, so the first update for Payday 3 had to wait weeks…

But what about March? It was the six-month anniversary of Payday 3, and that’s when we heard that Tobias Sjögren, CEO of Starbreeze, had left the company, most likely at the urging of the board, if we take chairman Torgny Hellström’s comment as a starting point. Before Sjögren left, he said that Payday 3’s sales and player numbers (as it is a live service title) were at a much lower level than expected.

As of October last year, Payday 3 had fewer players than Payday 2, and according to SteamDB, that hasn’t changed since. We took a quick look at SteamDB… Payday 2 is currently being played by 9048 people and Payday 3 by 443. The 24 hour concurrent player records were 11868 and 794 respectively. That seems ridiculous!

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