Payday 3 developer Starbreeze has announced it’s canceling one of the heist shooter’s most-requested features, namely the ability to play the game without an online connection.
As spotted by ResetEra user Santar, Starbreeze revealed the cancellation of Payday 3‘s offline mode during a second-anniversary livestream yesterday. The studio claims that the offline mode is “not feasible” for the “direction” in which it’s heading with Payday 3.
The announcement that you won’t be able to play Payday 3 offline comes after Starbreeze announced a major company policy shift yesterday, resulting in the cancellation of its live-service Dungeons & Dragons game and a pivot towards the Payday franchise as the studio’s primary focus.
That shift will also seemingly mean more games in the Payday franchise, as well as a sharper focus on the heist genre in general, so we may be about to see a slew of new Payday spinoffs and sequels in the future.
Of course, that’s assuming that Starbreeze can turn Payday 3‘s fortunes around. The game has had a pretty hard time of things since launching back in 2023; just a few months after its launch, Starbreeze admitted it was operating at “significantly lower levels” than the studio was hoping for.
Following that, in March 2024, then-CEO Tobias Sjögren stepped down from the company, and in September last year, game director Miodrag Kovačević followed suit, although he’s still working on Payday 3 as a designer.
Starbreeze’s financial results in February this year showed that sales dropped significantly when compared to the same period a year prior, but the studio still called the year as a whole “successful”.
The dropping of Payday 3‘s offline mode also comes just a few days after Starbreeze ran into controversy following the introduction of a subscription model for predecessor Payday 2‘s DLC, which itself followed on from a price hike for the premium one-off purchase for said DLC.
Starbreeze has insisted that the timing of the subscription service’s introduction was coincidental, but whether that’s the case or not, I’d imagine that what the studio needs now is quick and easy wins, not to upset its fanbase further. We’ll see whether it can achieve that in the coming months, I suppose.
