Payday 3 is Bleeding Players as its First Patch is Delayed Once Again

The launch of Payday 3 has been an absolute disaster and, unfortunately, the misfortunes piling on top of Starbreeze’s co-op heist FPS will continue to accumulate a while longer. Although the team was finally able to address the server issues that plagued the game’s first two weeks following launch — the problem was borne from Payday 3‘s divisive always-online requirement — there have been numerous other issues plaguing the shooter that have yet to be addressed.

Originally, many of the community’s sticking points were to be resolved on October 5th with a patch containing over 200 fixes and improvements, but a last-minute delay was announced that very day. Starbreeze then set a loose mid-October timeframe for the eagerly awaited update, but that has now been delayed as well with no alternative timeline in sight.

Given that we are currently nestled in mid-October, Starbreeze took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to inform players that the patch is still not ready and it’s due to further identified issues.

The Steam stats for Payday 3 paint a grim picture with many simply walking away. The long-anticipated follow-up has barely broken 6,000 players in the past 24 hours, which is less than 10% of it’s all time peak of nearly 70,000. In fact, Payday 2 is having a much better time, garnering over 55,000 players in the past day. The longer Payday 3 remains in its current state, the worse its future looks. And that’s a shame since the game has solid bones to support much better than its offering at the moment, as we called out in our review.

However, the industry seems all too enamored with redemption arcs lately and we may see Payday 3 pull itself out of the ashes at some point, if it can just deliver that first patch to kick things off.