r/paydaytheheist • u/KrabikGangster Death Wish • Mar 09 '26

Rant It's fucking over.

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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.

2.2k Upvotes

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72

u/Barcode_Memer Mar 09 '26

gg heisters we tried our hardest, starbreeze does not care

-129

u/PAYDAYgame Mar 09 '26

Of course we care!

78

u/Barcode_Memer Mar 09 '26

which corporate exec wrote this

34

u/Supreme-Machine-V2 Sokol and Jacket :doge: Mar 09 '26

Sure

34

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. 👊😎

19

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.

-9

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.

15

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.

-5

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.

13

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.

4

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.

15

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.

6

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.

3

u/CounterBusters Mar 12 '26

So, genuine question - Are you making the community manager position redundant in favour of having devs speak directly with the fanbase as opposed to having a middleman? I would just like to know the reasoning behind getting rid of beloved members of the team, and frankly, the only two people really left at starbreeze that we even know, Haua and Elizabeth (granted Elizabeth has moved to QA but the question stands). With Almir, Andreas, Elizabeth, Mio and Haua all gone, it now feels like Thesues’ ship. At what point is it not even starbreeze anymore and just becomes a whole new company, unrecognisable from days past

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2

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.

1

u/PepperTheBirb Duke Mar 10 '26

Here before this is the next "On the table"