Apparently PayDay 2 needs microtransactions to survive

Over the last week, Overkill Studios have found themselves in quite a bit of trouble after introducing microtransactions to PayDay 2. The studio didn't offer any official comment until the weekend, when Overkill's Almir Listo responded to questions in a Reddit AMA, explaining that PayDay 2 needed the extra revenue stream to keep development going.

For the last couple of years, PayDay 2 has been supported by fans buying DLC. This model seemed to work well, the studio even signed a publishing deal with 505 Games to ensure future content until 2017 but it seems this wasn't enough. On Reddit, Almir offered the following explanation to fans: “Two and a half years ago, during development of Payday 2 and in the build-up for its release, myself and then Game Director David Goldfarb said that there would be no microtransactions…if you asked me then, there would be no way we would've added a system like we just did”.

“We have a deal to produce a specific amount of content until 2017. However, we at Overkill want to create more than what we and 505 Games agreed on. We want to do everything we can to make Payday 2 as awesome as possible. In order to do that, we made the decision to triple the size of the crew. To ensure that we can keep the size of the team, we decided that the best approach was to introduce the Black Market update to the game.”

A while back, Overkill cut the price of PayDay 2 permanently and the game is often on sale along with its DLC. The studio had hoped that this would generate enough sales to keep things going but results fell short of expectations. Overkill may even consider making the base game free to play if it makes sense financially in a year's time.

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KitGuru Says: Overkill is obviously facing some financially rough times with its current development plans and team size. Things may have turned out better if the studio had been open and honest about that from the beginning, rather than dropping this bomb on the community entirely out of the blue. 

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