Payday 2 surges in popularity following disappointing Payday 3 launch

The release of Payday 3 has not exactly gone to plan. While this was supposed to be a big return for the co-op heist series, the game launched with various issues and it seems players are quickly dropping it in favour of returning to Payday 2. 

We're roughly one month on from the launch of Payday 3 and while the game's first patch was promised weeks ago, delays have pushed fixes back. At this point, players are beginning to drop the newer game in favour of Payday 2, which despite being a much older release, is still viewed as the superior game to the sequel.

On Steam, we can see that over the last 24 hours, Payday 3 has peaked at 3,200 players while Payday 2 sits more than 10 times above that, with a 24-hour peak of over 36,000 players. At the time of writing, there are 2,441 players in Payday 3 right now, while almost 18,000 people are playing Payday 2.

The good news for Starbreeze is that Payday is still popular, which means people are still interested in the IP as a whole. Now, we'll just have to wait and see if the developers can quickly fix things up and get Payday 3 to the level fans expect before investing their time and money in the sequel.

It is worth pointing out that Steam charts don't tell the whole story here for the wider playerbase. It is true that Payday has always been most popular on PC and has been a huge seller on the Steam platform. However, Payday 3 on PC is also available through Xbox Game Pass, so a chunk of players aren't being accounted for. We also don't have player numbers for the game on Xbox or PlayStation.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Payday 2 is a decade old but fans of the game appear keen to stick with it. We saw a similar situation take place with the Battlefield series after the launch of Battlefield 2042. After being disappointed by the game at launch, thousands of fans went back to older titles in the series, like Battlefield 1 and Battlefield V. However, after months of patches, players did finally start returning. Payday 3 could follow a similar pattern but it will take time and a lot of extra dev work.  

Become a Patron!