In December last year, Overkill Software, developer of heist-em-up Payday 2 announced that it was ceasing development on the game to focus on other projects. This news came out around the same the developer's parent company Starbreeze entered 'Reconstruction' (the Swedish equivalent of administration. A year on, the new CEO has announced that Payday 2 is coming down from the shelf and will be getting new paid and free updates.
"At one point in time, our company believed that the interest and engagement in Payday 2 would decline over time, as new internal games were released," Starbreeze CEO Mikael Nermark writes in an update post. "Resources were needed on new projects and production of Payday 2 was scheduled to stop and no more updates to come. By popular demand this deadline was extended a few times, but development on Payday 2 ultimately shut down December 2018."
At the same time as it ended production of Payday 2, Overkill announced Payday 2: Ultimate Edition, a cheaper method of buying all the DLC for the game in one package - making it simpler for new players to pick up everything the game had to offer. At the time, the developers promised that would be everything you would need to buy of Payday 2 until the next game was released. That's now changed.
"We want to move forward and make more of Payday 2, and to do so we need your support to continue producing content," Nermark says. "New DLCs will be a mix of paid and free updates." The Ultimate Edition is now being renamed the Legacy Collection, and the team is also allowing players to again by individual DLCs instead of the full whack in a single collection.
Starbreeze entered reconstruction because it was desperately low on cash. Many staff were laid off and the company was restructured so it could operate more cheaply. In part, the studio ended up in such a difficult spot because it had spent a great deal of money on the Walking Dead licence to make Overkill's The Walking Dead, a game which struggled to find an audience when it launched in November 2018.
As well as restarting work on Payday 2, Starbreeze announced in a financial note that it plans to release Payday 3 in 2022 or 2023. So, these new DLC and updates are how Overkill will be bridging the gap until release. One question is, what has Overkill been working on in the last ten months if not Payday 2, Payday 3, or The Walking Dead?
Featured Image Credit: Starbreeze