Payday developer Starbreeze has canceled Project Baxter, its in-development live-service Dungeons & Dragons game, and a number of employees are being laid off across the studio as well.
According to a press release, Project Baxter, which was first announced back in December 2023, has been shut down so that the studio can deploy its resources to “accelerate the growth” of its “flagship Payday franchise”.
The cancellation will cost Starbreeze around SEK 255 million (roughly $27.2 million) in “non-cash impairment” form, and it’ll also result in the laying off of around 44 employees. Both decisions will, according to Starbreeze, allow the studio to become “cash-flow positive” next year.
It’s all part of a corporate refocusing on Starbreeze’s part, with the studio looking to leverage its Payday franchise and “the heisting genre” as a whole much more in the future.
According to Starbreeze, the new strategy will revolve around “deepening player engagement, broadening platform reach, and diversifying revenue streams”, and it’ll include expanding Payday “across platforms and experiences”.
As part of this new strategy, Starbreeze says it will create “new games and experiences that broaden the heisting genre” beyond the studio’s “core projects”. These will include “spin-offs, narrative-driven projects, and franchise expansion to new platforms”.
Another pillar of the developer’s new strategy is work-for-hire operations, through which Starbreeze will complete work on projects for other publishers and studios. That work could well cross over with Payday in future, as well, such as in the case of the upcoming PUBG crossover.
News of Starbreeze’s strategy shift comes just days after the company was widely pilloried for the introduction of a Payday 2 DLC subscription, which itself was introduced following a price hike for a one-off purchase of all currently-available DLC for the game.
Starbreeze, however, says that the price increase was unrelated to the introduction of the subscription model, although commercial exec Gustav Nisser admitted the studio “dropped the ball” with regards to the subscription’s rollout.
The shift to a focus on Payday also follows a pretty dismal couple of years for Payday 3, the latest game in the series, with plummeting sales and departing executives not exactly contributing to an optimistic overall outlook for the game.
