Starbreeze fully acquires Payday 3 publishing rights from Plaion

Payday 3 developer Starbreeze Studios has entered into an agreement to wrest the publishing rights for the struggling online heist game from publisher Plaion. The deal is set to provide the studio with the opportunity to “accelerate content development” for the game and “pursue broader strategic opportunities” for future Payday projects.

News of the publishing rights acquisition was announced on Starbreeze’s website. “This agreement enables Starbreeze to fully acquire the publishing rights to PAYDAY 3 from Plaion, significantly accelerate our content development roadmap, and pursue broader strategic opportunities for the PAYDAY franchise as a whole,” writes Thomas Lindgren, Board Member of Starbreeze. “We appreciate PLAION’s support, which underscores their confidence in Starbreeze’s future and strengthens our strategic alignment with major global industry players.”

This agreement will likely provide Starbreeze the flexibility to invest more resources into Payday 3. However, it is unclear if such a move may be too little, too late for the troubled title. The game released to mediocre reception, with promised patches missing announced deadlines and Starbreeze’s CEO stepping down a few months after launch. The promised offline mode arrived nearly a year after launch, and still requires an online connection for many features.

It doesn’t speak well of the game’s popularity that, at time of writing, Steamdb advises that Payday 3 has a 24-hour peak player count on Steam of 679, compared to Payday 2‘s 23,994. Something drastic will need to be done to bring these disillusioned players from Payday 2 to the latest entry in the franchise. It will remain to be seen if Starbreeze fully taking the reins of the game’s future trajectory will be the injection of vigor it needs. Otherwise, the line about pursuing “broader strategic opportunities for the PAYDAY franchise as a whole” in the announcement post suggests that Starbreeze is keeping its options open regarding ways of expanding the Payday franchise beyond the maligned third entry as a potential reset. We will have to wait and see how things go from here.