Starbreeze Sacrifices a D&D Game to Save the Sinking Corpse of Payday 3
Just when you thought the games industry couldn't get more depressing, Starbreeze has announced it's laying off a chunk of its workforce and canceling a new Dungeons & Dragons game, all to try and salvage the dumpster fire that is Payday 3.
This is the kind of corporate logic that makes you want to start drinking at 10 AM. The studio behind one of the most beloved co-op shooters of all time is in a death spiral, and their brilliant plan is to double down on the game that's actively killing them.
A Heist Gone Wrong
Let's not mince words: Payday 3 has been a catastrophic failure. The game launched in a sorry state and has been bleeding players ever since. At its peak, it barely scraped 69,000 concurrent players. Its 12-year-old predecessor, Payday 2, hit an all-time peak of over 247,000. Right now, as I'm writing this, the old game has more people playing it than the brand-new sequel. That's not just a bad launch; it's an extinction-level event.
The timing of this whole disaster is just dripping with irony. This news comes just a week after Starbreeze had the gall to roll out a new subscription service for Payday 2's DLC, a last-ditch effort to milk their one remaining cash cow before, presumably, putting it out to pasture.
Killing the Future to Save the Past
The real tragedy here isn't just related to the layoffs, as incredibly shitty as those are. There’s another casualty of this panicked flailing: a new Dungeons & Dragons IP, codenamed Project Baxter. It was slated to be a co-op live-service title set for a 2026 release. It sounded interesting. It sounded new. And now it's dead, sacrificed on the altar of a failed sequel.
Starbreeze CEO Adolf Kristjansson spun the news with the usual corporate jargon, talking about how "PAYDAY is a genre we created" and how they're "doubling down on what our players love." What players seem to love is Payday 2, a game they've seemingly forgotten how to make. The plan is to redeploy talent and pump more resources into Payday 3 in a desperate attempt to make it successful.
The Industry Death Rattle
This isn't happening in a vacuum. The entire industry is a mess of layoffs and cancellations. Funcom just laid off a bunch of people after their biggest launch in history. It's a grim pattern of short-term thinking and executive panic that leaves a trail of dead projects and unemployed developers in its wake.
So, here we are. Starbreeze has fired 44 people, canceled a promising new IP, and is betting the entire farm on a game that players have already abandoned. They believe this will make them "cash-flow positive in 2026." I think they're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The heisting genre they claim to own might just be robbing its own grave.