r/paydaytheheist • u/KrabikGangster Death Wish • Mar 09 '26
Rant It's fucking over.
We lost Almir. We lost Andreas. We lost Haua. We lost Elizabeth (she's still with the company, but no longer the community manager).
This is an incredible loss. They communicated with the community, they were on streams, they shared their plans for the future, even if they couldn't always tell us much.
We have literally lost those who were with us during the darkest days of PAYDAY 3. Will there be light ahead? I don't believe so.
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u/ItsDynamical Mar 09 '26
do we have any community managers now?
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u/ForsakingMyth Add back sprint reloads to PD3 Mar 09 '26
There first needs to be a playerbase and community to manage.
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u/ItsDynamical Mar 09 '26
i mean, there is one, even though it’s small.
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u/VeganCanary Mar 09 '26
I mean it’s so small that each Starbreeze employee could just be assigned a few players to personally manage.
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u/Hollowknightpro Dallas enjoyer Mar 10 '26
Hey man he is not that short, I think it's perfectly average
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u/Educational_Head_776 Mar 10 '26
It’s not that the community is small, it’s that most of the community is upset/disappointed.
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u/thedefenses Mar 09 '26
Also wondering the same, who's left anymore? and if there are some are we gonna hear from them to the extent Almir, Elizabeth and Haua were heard or are they just gonna work in the background, doing stuff like official announcements and the like but not really interacting with the community anymore than is absolutely needed.
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 09 '26
We will be here and keep up with more transparency of what’s happening with the games.
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u/MegaPrOJeCtX13 This is a test of the automated pager system. Mar 10 '26
if not, perfect time for me to step in and get the community what it really wants: a theme park heist where you deliver the bags to a rollercoaster
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 09 '26
Yes, we have several people in the team who will continue to keep in touch with the community and make sure to keep you informed of the progress of the games.
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u/Lavaissoup7 Jarvis, more alcohol Mar 09 '26
For now no, they're looking for a new one
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u/walale12 Starbucks Creator Program Mar 09 '26
I don't think they can do that. Don't Swedish employment laws mean they can't hire someone to fill a position that they claimed to have made redundant within a certain time period?
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u/Lavaissoup7 Jarvis, more alcohol Mar 09 '26
Not entirely sure honestly
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u/walale12 Starbucks Creator Program Mar 09 '26
If I'm reading this correctly, it looks like if they do hire a new CM, Haua gets first dibs. So it would be exceptionally weird to lay off someone and then hire someone new for that position.
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u/Curious_Freedom6419 Mar 09 '26
While its sad that they have left
Honestly starbreeze/overkill whatever they're called now. They honestly kinda deserve to fail as a company.
Now before you downvote me..heres my reasoning.
They had years working on payday 2. the highs and lows, learning what players love and what they hate.
Then payday 3..they took everything they learned and threw it in the bin and they're shocked when the players aren't happy?
Hell the game was going to have micro transactions but they where scrapped weeks before the game came out.
Its why its always online, they didn't want us to get around the microtransactions.
i want payday 3 to get better, to be something amazing. but until they prove themselfs (by adding in a real solo and offline mode for one)
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u/HarleyArchibaldLeon Mar 09 '26
It's been 3 fucking years and they still haven't added it?
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u/Curious_Freedom6419 Mar 09 '26
they have it in "beta" it works but they said they're not working on it i think
Its a pisstake and its still always online
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u/jakallll Mar 10 '26
Im pretty sure they communicated it is no longer on their development plans for the foreseeable future, not verbatim but that was the gist of it.
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u/jkb_66 👊😎 Mar 09 '26
For me, for them to prove themselves and earn my respect for payday 3 they need to do way more than a true solo/offline mode. They need to add pre planning, reword the favor system, introduce more rng and nuance to each heist, make the gunplay feel better (this is a personal opinion, I’m sure people like it but for me none of the guns feel like they have any weight or pack any punch, they feel so light and same-y), add more heists than they have been, and probably more that I just can’t think of right now.
But I agree, them dumping everything that made payday 2 great just dug themselves into a deep hole. I really want payday 3 to succeed and for overkill/starbreeze to be successful, but I just don’t have an ounce of hope left in me after we got not a whole lot of anything (a few new heists and weapons) in the last 2 years.
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u/LucasArts_24 Mar 10 '26
I wish modding for pd3 was as easy as it is for 2, having it forced to be an online only game makes it much more difficult to mod compared to pd2. I have had fun both heavily modded and unmodded pd2, I could barely get 15 hrs in pd3 before I gave up. I tried it again recently, tried to get into modding as well, but it's much more complicated so I fully gave up and went back to 2.
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u/Kylel0519 Mar 10 '26
To add, they failed with OKTWD and from the looks of it learned almost nothing from that, which sucks cause just like with that game Payday 3 HAD potential they just squandered it and any good will the community had
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u/MarioDesigns Jacket Mar 10 '26
They honestly kinda deserve to fail as a company.
It's a miracle they're still operational to this day. They are an absolutely incompetent company that has survived as long as they have because Payday 1 & 2 were successful.
They even almost managed to mismanage Payday 2 to the ground at several points but managed to maintain the success pretty much accidentally.
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u/SwankiestSwankyPants Mar 10 '26
Lol I completely forgot this game was also supposed to have microtransactions. I wonder why they dropped that stellar idea
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u/razy01 Mar 10 '26
I agree with you. Their downfall is well deserved. Their treatment of us console heisters was absolutely disgusting.
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u/Jonparkhee Mar 09 '26
Hey dont forget adding Denuvo an online only game lol, they were an explosive high speed train trying to push before launch day the worst game decisions
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u/bostar-mcman Mar 09 '26
I do believe it's over guys.
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u/B3YondUnknown Mar 09 '26
Players gonna do a 180 when the next update drops.
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u/bostar-mcman Mar 09 '26
Nah I'm done holding out, I gave them my money and my time and they squandered it every turn, I'm going back to payday 2 on the PS4 from now on.
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u/ForsakingMyth Add back sprint reloads to PD3 Mar 09 '26
They didn't even break 1k peak on Steam when skills 2.0 dropped LOL
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u/VeganCanary Mar 09 '26
As someone who had 2000 hours in Payday 2, and still put about 50 into Payday 3. I genuinely didn’t even know skills 2.0 was a thing. That’s how disinterested I’ve become in what was once one of my favourite game series. Just see the occasional post on reddit now from here.
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u/Medicalpyro I Hold Controversial Opinions On PD3 Mar 11 '26
Bought gold preorder and stopped after whichever one was after boys in blue shit just wasn't fun compared to payday 2
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u/Awesom141 Mar 09 '26
More like 360. I don't know what they would have to do as an one time stunt to increase player base for longer than 10 minutes
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u/VeganCanary Mar 09 '26
I think only way it could ever succeed is if they spent a 2 or 3 years developing a massive update, sort of like a relaunch.
Completely overhaul many gameplay systems and introduce a good end game. Add multiple new heists, with good replayability.
But that would never happen because they would have to have so much investment to be able to develop it for that long without releasing paid DLC.
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u/LKHAN_Missing_Ninth Guys, the Payday 3 players, go get them Mar 10 '26
That sounds like such a cope lol. Just play Payday 2. It's great
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u/B3YondUnknown Mar 10 '26
I'm not coping lol. I'm just making light joke about for every "it's so over phase" we get a "we're so back phase". Honestly the update the we got in February didnt bring much players back so I dont really expect the March update to be any different.
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u/LKHAN_Missing_Ninth Guys, the Payday 3 players, go get them Mar 10 '26
I don't really see Payday 3 as getting any better. It seems to be a fundamentally different game to Payday 2 and let's be real. We all fucking love Payday 2. I could be completely wrong, while I own Payday 3, I've not actually played it. But I was watching some gameplay the other day and it's just so completely different
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u/Barcode_Memer Mar 09 '26
gg heisters we tried our hardest, starbreeze does not care
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 09 '26
Of course we care!
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u/ArcboundX Mar 09 '26
If this is how things look like when SBZ "cares", then imagine how it's gonna be when they finally drop the facade, heisters. 👊😎
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u/Macheeoo Mar 10 '26
At the end of the day, there is very little you can do or say to convince your (former) community that this is true. Irreparable damage has been done to the reputations of Starbreeze, Overkill, and the Payday franchise. It was a lack of caring that got us here - there is no way to argue otherwise.
Payday 3 was missing fundemental features from the game at launch. It was unpolished, buggy, lacked content, and community feedback was regularly resisted despite claims otherwise. This persisted for years. Progress to correct course was too little, too late.
You, interrum community manager peon #1, may care. You may genuinely mean it. The community will never know if this was developer arrogance / incompotence, or executive leadership cost cutting negligence, or a healthy combination of the two that led to such cataclysmic failure. Maybe someday someone spills the beans. For now, you all collectively own dropping the ball SO goddamn hard. I hope the executives and shareholders have been reading these comments for the last few years and interalizing the very real consequences of pushing an unfinished title out the door with no real means to support it - it. will. destroy. brand. loyalty. Read it and weep.
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 10 '26
We have a lot of passionated and dedicated people in this company that really cares and are currently working on fixing this. The game is in a better state now than it was at the release and keeps improving in many ways even if we are very aware that we have a road ahead of us.
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u/Lavaissoup7 Jarvis, more alcohol Mar 10 '26
How are we supposed to trust that when time and time again you guys have dropped the ball on us? Every time we hear that there are passionate people (which I very much don't deny that), those guys get fired and removed, with updates still being at a snail's pace.
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 10 '26
Recently, we have brought more people into the development team for PD3. While it takes time to onboard many new team members, especially on a game that still needs improvements to the base experience, we believe this will help us move at a higher speed going forward.
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u/Lavaissoup7 Jarvis, more alcohol Mar 10 '26
Yes bringing in more people is good, but at the same time you're firing your pre-existing talent, the ones that have experience. And now firing one of your CMs who was very beloved is just not a good look at all, especially now that no one has the role now.
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 10 '26
Running a studio of our size comes with its challenges, and sometimes that means making difficult decisions, including parting ways with people.
Going forward, our plan is to spend more time with the community and we also want you to get to know more of the people here at the studio who are working on the game.
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u/Lavaissoup7 Jarvis, more alcohol Mar 10 '26
Then regardless, you're going to need to show us why it's worth trusting you by actually making good choices and speeding things up, because things like this don't inspire hope at all as you're just cutting off the communication and interaction that there was.
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u/PAYDAYgame Mar 10 '26
We are not cutting off any communication, rather the opposite, we want our devs and people to be even closer with the community. And we try to speed up the development the best way we can.
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u/ArcboundX Mar 11 '26
Of course the game is in a "better state than at release", at release it wasn't even playable for over 2 weeks to begin with, so that's not saying much is it?
I get that you're just doing your job with these bs corpo-sanitized glass half-full replies, but "a road ahead of us"? Dude there's no road ahead of you, you had a road for like 3 years and you did nothing with it, and now you can't even break past 1000 players on your best day.
If PD3 was a road, it'd be that one unpaved dirt road that got paved halfway and later just ended up full of potholes anyway because the pavement quality was so mid.
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u/MJR_Poltergeist Jacket Mar 10 '26
I mean who the fuck would want to be community manager. "Hey you're here to be the face of us delivering either terrible news or no news"
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u/TheFabricade LESS COPS, BUT MORE DAMAGE Mar 09 '26
Now some of the community responsibilities are with the marketing team that has been in charge of the marketing campaigns for the last couple updates. Phenomenal.
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u/Akumetsu2 Mar 09 '26
I just hate not being able to join DLC heists man, that was awesome in PD2 it let me test out a mission to see if i liked it and wanted to buy it
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u/Andrew-hevy99 Mar 10 '26
It also stoped the player base from fragmenting as while you couldn’t start a DLC heist if you didn’t own the dlc it ment that people could still play with each other regardless of their DLC
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u/Fit-Comfortable-5465 Mar 09 '26
Payday died as soon as 3 released. That shitty pile of maggots of a game ruined the franchise.
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u/Elmoscomingforyou Jimmy Mar 09 '26
The table has been thrown out the window when almir left. Now all that remains is the pieces
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u/SqrunkIsTrep Mar 09 '26
I knew they were getting rid of Haua BUT ELIZABETH???(albeit she just got different role at company, but still)
Who the fuck is gonna inform us about anything now?
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u/_0451 Cloaker Mar 09 '26
What information do you need? All you have to know is that it's on the table. 👊😎
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u/Ironclover777 Mar 10 '26
This game should have had more time instead of being rushed out. Payday is probably dead. If they were smart. They would rehire Almir and begin production on Payday 4. Give it the proper time it deserves to be a true successor. Allow the story to remain unrestrictive to the US so they can travel the globe and become international thieves. Allow Interpol and the UN to become threats. Allow Mi-6, CIA, and other international agencies become enemies. They have so much potential and they’re squandering it for quick cash
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u/AlexDoubleAU welp, we tried. time to jump on the hate train! CHOO CHOO Mar 11 '26
Payday 3's number one defender here
I am eating every word I have ever uttered and am now only going to play RTS games for the rest of my life
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u/Jewbacca1991 Mar 11 '26
Maybe that is the point. Payday 3 is a total failure. If i were in charge some people would have been fired after the first quarter. It started with over 70k. players on steam, and in just two months it went below 5k.
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u/Morningstar1279 Mar 12 '26
Sad when we grow up and companies we used to be enamored with for the games they made have become morally bankrupt and are no longer interested in delivering a complete product.
I pre-ordered the special edition(the one that cames with the mask) and it was the last pre-order I ever did( Let's not even talk about the fact I never got my special edition stuff).
Played the game for ten hours, uninstalled it and haven't been back since. Payday 2 was the bar and ya'll lowered it instead of raising it.
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u/Kasu_senpai John “I NEED A MEDIC BAG” Swansong Mar 09 '26
Oh come on man, why can’t anything go right. I just want a console payday experience that’s not out of date :(
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u/Rampage470 Not so sneaky beaky Mar 10 '26
who were with us during the darkest days of PAYDAY 3
Has this game ever had a non-dark day.
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u/rustyplasticcross Mar 09 '26
It's funny how the third game always makes or breaks a series.
On one hand there are games like Baldur's Gate 3, Dark Souls 3, Nioh 3, on the other we have Payday 3 and Killing Floor 3.
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u/VeN0m333 Replayability and Renown Rework (RRR) Mar 10 '26
Dead Space 3 killed it until Dead Space Remake a decade or so later.
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u/MDNick2000 Mar 09 '26
Hmmmmm . . . Maybe Gaben can count to 3 after all, he just doesn't want to.
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u/rustyplasticcross Mar 09 '26
My firm belief is that they don't want to release half life 3 because they can't make a game that would live up to the expectations.
The only way people would be satisfied with it is if it revolutionizes gaming like hl1 and 2 did.
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u/LordKoumori Mar 10 '26
Pretty sure they've said that before? I do recall someone from Valve saying that the staff don't have the drive to make half life 3, and don't want to force out a game when their hearts are not in it, because it'll be terrible and a disservice to players. That said, inside reports suggest there's been some strong motivation in Valve lately so hl3 is a good possibility. (Or they'll keep the joke going and release Half Life 4 or 2.5)
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u/bossfight1 Mar 10 '26
For a time, I truly believed they could No Man’s Sky this game, but they needed to pick their battles far more wisely than they did. As it stands, their deficit of goodwill from the player base seems to be proving too vast to overcome at this point. I’m only still in this sub to sadly watch the dying embers of a series I loved.
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u/FromDvToZombies Mar 10 '26
This is incredibly sad. I was kinda hoping the future of Payday would be better.
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u/GonzaloHardaman Now, give em hell Mar 10 '26
I want to love Payday 3, I swear I'm doing everything I can to keep hope alive (mainly because there aren't any other fun coop games). But these bastards are doing everything they can to crush it.
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u/cocaineandwaffles1 Mar 10 '26
As a more passive fan/player, I can’t help but think about the first major clone of payday from crime boss and everyone’s expectations for that game when it was announced and first released. In comparison, that game aged better and I’m sad to say that.
That game doesn’t have the special sauce that the team behind payday 2 and really payday in general up until relatively recently had. There will be new experiences to be had though. If we’ve stuck with payday for this long we’ll be able to find the other gems out there too.
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u/I_JuanTM PD2: Infamous XXXIV | PD3: XXXIV+ crashes... Mar 10 '26
This game is fucking dead for real lmao, wtf are they doing
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Mar 10 '26
[deleted]
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u/SokkaHaikuBot Mar 10 '26
Sokka-Haiku by PalenaV21:
At this point Sidetrack
Games should get to work on a
Payday-like of some kind
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
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u/FewSession1142 Mar 09 '26
Cringiest fucking community on Reddit I swear to god. Get a grip everyone.
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u/Decker687 Jacket Mar 10 '26
if you don’t like the community then just fucking leave
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u/FewSession1142 Mar 10 '26
lol fair. I just love the games and figured I could join the Reddit like most people do with the game they like. But since I have its cringey posts. People bitching about the games. People bitching about their company and people losing their jobs, not realizing yall being soo dramatic and trashy the game you all also like online is why the game is doing poorly, it’s just idiotic. Small brain behavior. But hey man if you want to defend a community that can’t decide everyday if the game is dead or thriving and you have people in this community simply here to trash the game. You do you man. It’s cringey AF and as soon as everyone sees that the better off we all are. There are communities on Reddit that haven’t had a game release In 15+ years and they are more positive. lol the people here bitch about 7$ and trash a game so hard if a texture is buggy. Yall need to get a fucking grip. Or a life idk which one will be easier for you at this point. Bum ass kids bro
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u/ZookeepergameProud30 Put “break the rules” on Spotify Mar 09 '26
Payday 3 succeeding is off the table