Starbreeze puts in new Payday 3 team leaders to try to boost its player numbers

The launch of Payday 3, the long-awaited next game in the popular crime-themed shooter series, got off to a bad start in late September 2023. Major server issues at the time of release kept many people from playing the game. Developer and publisher Starbreeze made efforts to fix those server problems over the next few weeks.

However, the online player count for the game was, and continues to be, far less than the numbers for Payday 2. Right now there are 731 players online on Valve's Steam service for Payday 3, according to SteamDB. However, the much older Payday 2 currently has over 10 times as many online players on Steam at 8,989, according to SteamDB as of this writing.

In March 2024, Starbreeze's board of directors announced that its CEO, Tobias Sjögren, had departed the company. Today, a few days before Payday 3's first anniversary, Starbreeze revealed some other changes related directly to the game.

In a post on the game's official X account (Via Eurogamer), Starbreeze revealed that Payday 3's game director Miodrag Kovačevićas will be leaving that position so he could work as "a designer elsewhere on the project."

Two current team members, Andreas Häll Penninger and Almir Listo, will now be the leaders of Payday 3's updates, according to the post, and will help guide the team toward its Year 2 content updates.

Listo, who previously was the global brand director and head of community for the Payday franchise before today, posted a message on his own X account after the official announcement, stating, "I am thrilled about the upcoming content we are preparing for you all!".

At the moment, the development team is working on Fear & Greed, the first part of Payday 3's anniversary update which will be released on September 16.