This Ceo Just Paid The Price For Payday 3 Failure
Welcome back everyone so with players pointing at dwindling concurrence in a game that is in the middle of being reconstructed things are not looking good for payday 3 and star Breeze, in fact there was yeah pretty interesting article from muda over at some ordinary gamers I thought it was interesting how the payday team responded on Twitter yeah anyway this usually would be the part though where we talk about you know 10% of a Workforce being laid off or something kind of nly like that you know the workers kind of paying the price for bad management, today though it's actually a bit different we don't have to do that because instead, in a move that is far too rare it actually seems that senior leadership at the company are the ones that are paying the price.
Yeah, it doesn't normally go down like that, and we can pay the price of rent and wages with today's sponsor. Learning how the world works is actually interesting; it's actually fun; it just needs to be delivered right, and I think we all know that old-school boring rot learning just ain't effective.
In the real world, we have to solve problems with our own skills, and that's why Brilliant is focused on learning by doing, and overall, they've got great lesson plans; they're all bite-sized. Right then payday 3 has obviously been an example of just how to not do a sequel right the game actually sold pretty amazingly at launch, that being said you know ref are probably decently High but the narrative basically is that players are not sticking around to play the game there are too many problems there's not enough content a regression in features and a player base that's just not willing to come back especially when they can just go and play Payday Two right, the solution to not liking payday 3 is simple go play the better game this is the worst fate that a sequel can be in and we've kind of talked about how this happens all the time to sequels I think a big example is Destiny 2, where Destiny 2 launched, kind of without a lot of the refinements that Destiny 1 had and while Destiny 2's launch was amazing it then well trailed off extremely.
Extremely quickly of course, with many other games, we've had similar issues. Take a look at, say, City Skylines 2. It's not getting as much attention as it should, and it's another great example of a sequel to a game that, in some ways, has fewer features and just hasn't really found its audience.
It's absolutely a case where inertia is your biggest killer, and when you look at Steam, it's absolutely brutal. I mean, these numbers have not gotten better since the last time we checked in on them, right? I mean, look at this 14,400. People are playing Payday 2 (132).
That being said, there are some caveats to that. As an example, since Payday 3 is a Game Pass game, there'll probably be way more people playing it over on console, but still, even though this technically isn't an Apple to Apple comparison. And it's like those are good things, but they're not the substance of people's issues.
Now, this is a really challenging thing from the developer's perspective. Doing smaller things like that, a few people can just go do that, fix it, and then move on to their next feature, whereas some of the larger, far more foundational changes actually just require a larger team for more time. The problem is that these things are easier to ship sooner, but if they are shipped sooner, then people will look at them and say.
Well, why are you doing these things instead of actually working on the big substantive things that we actually want to be changed? I would posit that this is probably not them having the wrong focus. This is probably just a little bit of prioritizing and executing. Mixed in with some larger things inherently take more time from more people, so there's probably just some little hanging fruit that are very easy to get, like just to get through now, so while these changes are good, ultimately people want reform; they want structural reform to progress to content.
Even though you have kind of abandoned Payday 3, even though making Payday 2 content would just be a pragmatic way to make some money now, it's a little bit of a screwy situation. Ultimately i think the developers will just have to, you know, grin and Barett; that's essentially the situation. Now is where things get interesting.
Is the leadership of the company all too often what happens is leadership, screws up a game there are production issues it's bad for the players it's bad for the developers, and even though it's the fault of leadership the people who end up actually feeling the hurt from that end up being the devs we've seen many layoffs you know we don't really need to go over all of that the interesting thing here though is the CEO to buy a shogran is stepping down from company leadership, with immediate effect this is quite something this is literally a case where it's went tits up and the person who Bears responsibility ultimately the CEO has decided to immedi imediately Ste down now they're still going to be working at the company Tobias will be helping basically his interim replacement get settled and they're going to be like going out and looking for a new permanent CEO so it's a very interesting situation, now they spoke to game industry.
Biz I'm just going to recount a little bit of that to you star Bree's chairman of the board and by the way there's a lot of Scandinavian names I'm going to strouble, so we've got torney hellstrom okay hellstrom I can do who said that they feel like they need new leadership to execute on their vision and as for the Strategic Vision they basically just say to make attractive games using IPS that are third party and our own which is a fairly uncontroversial, statement I'm pretty sure that's just what game development is so I don't really know if that's much of a strategy but anyway what they're actually referring to here to properly dive into it by licensed IPS is their thirdparty publishing arm as well as project bter which is a collaboration with Hasbro that's going to see Star Brees making a co-op multi player D and game scheduled for 2026.
