Episode 2 of Payday 3’s Dev Diaries is out, and this time, Starbreeze addresses the question of platforms. This is not just about what platforms Payday 3 will be available on, but what their platform strategy will be.
As a little refresher, all the way back in 2015, Starbreeze released Payday 2: Crimewave Edition for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. At this point in time, Payday 2 had amassed a sizable player base, not only on PC, but PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
The game was still only two years old at this point, so Payday 2 players on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 may have gotten a lot of playing out of the game already. However, most of them weren’t quite ready to update platforms quite yet.
So when Starbreeze announced that they would not be bringing the updates from Payday 2: Crimewave Edition to those older consoles, that same player base did get mad.
To complicate matters further, we need to acknowledge that Payday 2’s nature as a co-op online game meant that these players were playing in small groups of friends. This move could cause a lot of grief between those players, as some of those players had those newer consoles while their friends didn’t.
It also didn’t help matters that Starbreeze seemed quite glib about the issue when interacting with fans. They did give this explainer after they got an earful from said fans:
“We are confident that we have done everything we could cramming as much content we possibly could on both of the platforms. There are several technical reason as to why. For one, please understand that from a technical perspective, some of these consoles are almost a decade old. While trying to understand why we couldn’t develop more content, we learnt that they don’t have the fire power or memory to deal with 50 additional content updates that we have been developing for PAYDAY 2 after its release.
For those of you who play Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 and have been looking forward to new updates, you’ll be pissed when you hear this. We hate this too, because there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Jump to today, and Starbreeze’s Executive Producer, Craig Macleod and Global Brand Director, Almir Listo, explain what the studio is doing this time.
Starbreeze is introducing Starbreeze Nebula, their in-house account system where your purchases and progress will be tied to. Presumably, this will make it possible for Starbreeze to allow you to move across different platforms and bring that progress, purchases, and rewards along with it.
They also made it clear that they are only bringing the game to the newest consoles. This should conceivably avoid the issue of older console players getting left behind when Starbreeze makes content that outpaces what is possible there.
Starbreeze will have to negotiate this with the different platform holders, but hopefully, maybe, they can implement cross progression and cross platform play using Starbreeze Nebula as well.
Payday 3 will be released on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows, on both Steam and Epic Game Store. You can watch the second dev diary below.
