Starbreeze reclaims Payday 3 publishing rights from Plaion, says it will ‘significantly accelerate our content development roadmap’

Starbreeze Studios has reached a deal to acquire the publishing rights to Payday 3 from original publisher Plaion, a move it says will enable it to “accelerate content development” for the struggling game.

Starbreeze said in today’s announcement that, with Payday 3 having launched in September 2023, “the timing is opportune” to take over responsibility for publishing the game. At the same time, it said the deal “also lays the groundwork for a long-term partnership between Starbreeze and Plaion on future Payday franchise projects.”

“This agreement enables Starbreeze to fully acquire the publishing rights to Payday 3 from Plaion, significantly accelerate our content development roadmap, and pursue broader strategic opportunities for the Payday franchise as a whole,” Starbreeze board member Thomas Lindgren said. “We appreciate Plaion’s support, which underscores their confidence in Starbreeze’ future and strengthens our strategic alignment with major global industry players.”

It’s all very upbeat and forward looking, and more updates at a quicker clip (if that’s how it works out) would definitely be welcome. But there’s no getting around the fact that after being stuck in the mud for a year and a half, Payday 3 is a game in deep trouble: The launch was a catastrophe and efforts to fix it went badly sideways; six months later, the CEO of Starbreeze was out, and six months after that the Payday 3 game director stepped down.

Through it all, player numbers have been decidedly not great: While the 12-year-old Payday 2 remains firmly embedded in the midst of Steam’s top 100 most-played games, Payday 3 is only occasionally peeking above 1,000 concurrent players.

That’s a tough one to turn around: There’s a little bit of hope here and there on Reddit and the Steam forums that removing the external publisher from the equation will speed up the flow of updates, as Starbreeze said. But there’s also plenty of doubt that Plaion was the real problem in the first place.

Regardless of whose “fault” it is, making Payday 3 into a successful game at this point would be a massive undertaking. Not out of reach necessarily, but Lindgren’s comment about pursuing “broader strategic opportunities for the Payday franchise” and future Payday partnerships with Plaion makes me think that Starbreeze may have reached the point where its priority is putting this whole mess behind it and trying again with something new.