PAYDAY 3 is ‘on life support’ as players struggle to find matches

PAYDAY 3 has been out for just two months at the time of writing, and players already feel robbed of an enjoyable online experience thanks to a dwindling player base that has essentially put the game on life support.

The discussion began with a thread on the PAYDAY subreddit on Nov. 25, with the player in question claiming that they couldn’t find an online match in PAYDAY 3. Interestingly, they also claimed that the previous entry of the series had around 30 times as many concurrent players on Steam at the time of posting. This surprising statistic lines up with the Steam Charts listing for each game. 

Steam Charts also reveals that both games had a similar number of concurrent players, of around 28,000, during PAYDAY 3’s launch month of September. However, in the months following, PAYDAY 3 has been losing players, whereas 2 has maintained a consistent player count. 

Commenters on the thread listed several possible reasons why PAYDAY 3 has been bleeding players in the past couple of months. The rough launch of the game was a big blow to its first impressions, as early adopters couldn’t get into matches due to matchmaking errors. This isn’t an uncommon occurrence in modern games, but PAYDAY 3 is an online-only game, and players couldn’t play the game they had purchased.

Connection issues lasted for 11 days before being resolved, causing the player count to go from its all-time peak of 69,112 to 21,640, which was on par with PAYDAY 2. But in the following weeks, the sequel lost most of its remaining players once the game was functioning as intended due to balancing and leveling issues that ruined the game for fans.

Infamy (experience) point balancing is a huge part of PAYDAY’s main gameplay loop as it encourages players to replay levels to attain new weapons and upgrades, which is important to the longevity of the live-service titles. However, fans agree that PAYDAY 3 does not carry this out well, as comments from Reddit and PAYDAY 3’s Steam page echo similar sentiments about the state of its systems. 

A top-rated review from Troll Rex on Steam says that the basic IP challenges of PAYDAY 3, such as shooting a number of guards, are inferior to the previous titles, which rewarded mission-specific objectives. On top of this, they also highlight balancing issues surrounding these missions and the amount of infamy rewarded. Another Reddit user recently stated that one of the reasons that PAYDAY 3 is on ‘life support’ is due to fans hitting an IP wall.

Players opted to utilize exploits for these challenges rather than play the game as it was intended. YouTuber SwellHell found an easy IP exploit on the mission 99 Boxes that involves simply going in and out of the extraction point once the mission had ended to receive extra IP. At the end of the video, they recommend against using the exploit, but many players decided to take advantage of the trick as the missions involve a lot of grinding.

To end this all off, update promises from Overkill have not been met, and fans are losing hope with the studio’s ability to keep the game supported for the foreseeable future. After multiple delays for patches and major updates, the community simply doesn’t trust the dev team with their time and money on PAYDAY 3, especially when 2 is more stable, has better balancing and a wealth of content that often goes on sale for a steal.