Two years ago, on September 21, 2023, Starbreeze Entertainment released Payday 3, a game that might’ve pushed the series forward in terms of its approach to stealth gameplay and its visuals, but was an abysmal mess with server issues, no offline mode, and a massive lack of content compared to Payday 2.
Two years later, Starbreeze is celebrating the 14th anniversary of the Payday series, though it’s a muted celebration, as it’s most recent release is far less popular than the game it made before. Looking at Steam concurrent numbers alone, Payday 2 still has thousands of players going on heists and enjoying the wealth of content available with its many DLCs. Payday 3, on the other hand, struggles to hit 1k players with any kind of consistency.
That’s probably why, as part of today’s anniversary celebrations, Starbreeze has introduced two noteworthy bits of news for Payday fans. Firstly, Payday 3 is getting an overhauled skill system as Starbreeze continues to try to shape Payday 3 into a game that Payday fans want to play more than Payday 2.
Second, while everyone who still wants to play a Payday game is playing Payday 2, Starbreeze has introduced a new subscription for (almost) all the 65+ DLCs available for the heist shooter. It’s not every DLC that’s been released for Payday 2, because it doesn’t include any DLC content that’s been retired or removed.
It’s a $5/month subscription to access the many DLCs available for Payday 2, which Starbreeze says it has introduced because, “Payday 2 has had a lot of DLCs released, and for many players, especially new ones, it can be difficult to know what DLC content you may be interested in. So we’ve introduced the Subscription to give an easy way to access all DLC content at a low monthly price.”
That might seem sensible and like a good deal on face value, even when considering that you will need to buy Payday 2 separately to access any of the content in the subscription. But that’s before you realize that Payday 2’s DLCs routinely go on sale, with the Legacy Collection and the Infamous Collection, the latter of which includes every DLC ever released for Payday 2, going on sale a few times a year for anywhere between 20% and 30% off.
In fairness to Starbreeze, it’s not the only studio trying something like this. Cities: Skylines offers a similar service, as do Crusader Kings II and Train Simulator, to name a few. But whether it’ll actually help Starbreeze keep the lights on while it tries to fix Payday 3 is another question, and so far it doesn’t seem to have gone over too well with the Payday community.
Not everything has to be a subscription you pay for monthly, and if you’re really someone who wants to get into Payday, then you’re much better off doing a bit of research as to which DLCs you’d maybe want to try, and waiting for everything to go on sale, because it will go on sale and ultimately be cheaper than having $5 chipped off your bank account for months on end.