Payday 3 Director Steps Down After Disastrous First Year [IGN]

Payday 3 director Miodrag Kovačević is stepping down following a disastrous first year for the live service heist shooter.

Developer Starbreeze Entertainment posted on X/Twitter to announce the change in management, saying Kovačević will work as a designer on Payday 3 instead. Lead producer Andreas Penninger and global brand director Almir Listo will act as the “creative force” behind the game “in the interim,” though the long term future of Payday 3’s leadership remains hazy.

“Going into year two, [Kovačević] will be stepping away from his role as game director and focusing his efforts as a designer elsewhere in the project,” the post said.

“In the interim, while researching and planning year two, [Penninger] and [Listo] will be the creative force behind the upcoming updates we hope you keep enjoying and playing. Thank you for your continued support. We salute you.”

Payday 3 launched in September 2023 to strong player numbers that quickly withered away, due to server issues that forced then Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren to apologize. “We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn’t hold up as expected, and although it’s impossible to prepare for every scenario — we should be able to do better,” he said before leaving the company.

Almost a month after its launch and Starbreeze apologized again for its lack of communication, and then just a week later said sorry one more time for not delivering a promised patch and again going quiet. It said in January it was “well aware” fans weren’t satisfied.

Frustration with the studio and general disbelief spiked again in June when Starbreeze finally released what it called an “offline mode,” which players had been calling for since launch, but it required an online connection to access and made the game run worse than normal.

Starbreeze initially boasted Payday 3 had 3.1 million players as of October 2, 2023, but this number has dwindled, at least on Steam, as many more players are currently playing Payday 2 than its sequel. According to SteamDB, Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak of just 794 compared to Payday 2’s 11,868, despite the latter launching over a decade ago.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He’ll talk about The Witcher all day.