In September 2023, Starbreeze finally launched the long-awaited Payday 3, the next game in its popular heist co-op shooter series. Unfortunately, the game was immediately hit with server issues that kept many people from playing. While those server issues were finally fixed, the game has not been as well received by fans, and sales of the game have not been as high as predicted.
Today, Starbreeze announced that Tobias Sjögren, its CEO for the past three years, has departed. The press release did not come out and say that he was fired, but it did say Starbreeze's board of directors felt that it "needs different leadership."
The board has appointed Juergen Goeldner, who previously was the CEO of Focus Home Interactive and has been a member of Starbreeze's board since 2023, as its interim CEO. The board will conduct a search to find a permanent CEO.
Payday 3's PC version on Steam hit an all-time peak of 77,938 concurrent players just after its launch, according to SteamDB. However, those numbers went down rapidly and currently are around 370 concurrent players as of this writing. By contrast, Payday 2, which launched in 2013, currently has a 24-hour peak of 31,866 concurrent players online.
It seems clear that the vast majority of Payday 2 gamers have decided not to move on to Payday 3. In February, Starbreeze released a major patch for Payday 3 that it called Operation Medic Bag. It included optimizations for performance gameplay and other features. So far the patch has not made any improvements in the number of players online.
In December 2023, Starbreeze announced plans to develop a new game set in the Dungeons and Dragons fantasy universe. It will use Epic's Unreal Engine 5. Currently, Starbreeze says it plans to release the D&D game sometime in 2026.
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