Payday 3 sees massive player exodus on Steam

On Oct. 16, Starbreeze Studios announced a delay for the Payday 3 patch originally promised for mid-October. Things continue to seem dire for the game as the majority of the players have already left to play something else.

According to stats posted by the community members, the game has lost almost 90% of its players on Steam as they seem to be fed up with the current state of the game. Steam Charts data backs this up.

During the first week of the release, Payday 3 peaked at 69,000 players. While a decline in player count after release day is expected, the game’s peak in the past 24 hours was only 6,000 players, which is around eight percent of the initial player base.

The delayed mid-October patch was meant to deliver a set of quality-of-life changes and address issues that arose since the release of the game on Sept. 18.

Fans are now questioning Starbreeze releasing the game so soon and are wondering what actual changes the patch will bring since it’s not its first delay. Players claimed that if there won’t be any substantial changes they will “just straight uninstall and go back to pd2.”

In fact, many players have already gone back to playing Payday 2 at least until the game is in a more “acceptable” state. There are currently 33,000 active players in Payday 2 with a recent spike close to 50,000, and concurrent players barely ever dipping below 25,000 over the past few years.

The launch of Payday 3 was not ideal, to say the least, from gameplay to matchmaking issues. While there still are dedicated fans around supporting the developers, even Starbreeze acknowledges that there are only so many times it can apologize for not meeting its deadlines.

The next couple of months will be crucial for Payday 3, and if you are too concerned about the state of the game to pick it up, Payday 2 still has a healthy amount of players and content to have fun with.