Starbreeze: PAYDAY 3's launch numbers look promising, but technical issues persist

During launch weekend, PAYDAY 3 had a peak of concurrent players (CCU) across all platforms of 218,250, and a peak of 1,347,510 unique players (DAU). Starbreeze Nebula currently has 3,794,172 registered users. The numbers look promising, but the technical issues experienced late last week have persisted, angering the community. Based on the preliminary figures, PAYDAY 3 seems to have the prerequisites for long-term success, provided it can fix the technical issues and regain the trust of its community.

Since Thursday’s official launch, PAYDAY 3 has experienced problems with its matchmaking servers. At its core, the problem hinders players from playing the game. An initial fix was rolled out on Friday, which had the game working again. However, since then, the matchmaking issue has been recurring. Throughout the weekend, Starbreeze and its third-party matchmaking partner have been rolling out patches to solve the issue, but the instability remains.

The player community has reacted negatively to this persisting issue, which is reflected in the ‘Mostly Negative’ rating (23,400 reviews) the game currently has on Steam. Undoubtedly, the negative reviews reflect the disappointment in the technical issues rather than the game itself. Feedback regarding the game has been mostly good, with players praising the gameplay improvements over the previous iteration.

Our estimates project approximately 4 million copies sold within the first 12 months. It’s important to note that our projection was made before the Game Pass deal. Thus, the number of copies sold will likely be lower. However, we expect that Starbreeze has been adequately compensated, mitigating any significant impact on the overall revenue stream. It’s worth highlighting that the Game Pass deal introduces complexity in interpreting the numbers released by Starbreeze, as we do not have a way of separating out players who bought the game versus players accessing it through their Game Pass subscription.