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.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
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.
well if everyone’s upset about it the best thing to do is just stop playing it and let it die.
They were still expecting money? I thought it was a 1 time purchase multiplayer type like Counter-Strike. I had fun for the first month or two of the game. No need to really go back and play anymore.
yeah fucking right. they need money from microtransactions because even after countless cross promotions that they obviously did not make for free (whether we paid for it or not), begging for donations from the Hype Train event for a two year old game, 30+ paid DLC’s (and more to come, I’m sure), the downgrade in quality of paid DLC’s every time they go by, the obvious neglection of bug fixes and optimization, the abandonment of last-gen console updates and the lack of new console updates, the $250,000 tournament that just went missing in action (that we funded), the successful Starbreeze (their publisher) financial reports and the 48 month extension of support that I doubt has not already been funded by Starbreeze, they still need to find more ways to fuck us of our money built off empty promises. We’re still waiting on content FROM LAUNCH. Worst “indie” (my fucking ass. indie devs dont have 75 member teams, a publisher and stocks) devs ever. They have screwed us over worse than any Ubisoft or EA ever could.
If overkill make payday 2 free to play I’m completely done still waiting on all the missing content they “forgot” to add to ps4 and Xbox 1 bunch of lying ass bastard devs