Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević will probably be stepping down as sport director of Payday 3, in accordance with an announcement from Starbreeze launched earlier at this time on the official Payday X account.
“Mio will probably be stepping away from his former position as Game Director and focusing his efforts as a designer elsewhere within the venture,” Starbreeze stated, whereas Payday lead producer Andreas Penninger and international model director Almir Listo will probably be appearing as “the artistic pressure behind the upcoming updates.”
Payday 3’s shift in artistic management comes on the finish of a rocky first yr for the co-op crime shooter. Catastrophic server woes rendered the sport practically unplayable at launch, whereas misguided development schemes left gamers feeling just like the sequel was extra of a step backwards, as Tyler Colp wrote in our Payday 3 evaluate. Attempts to enhance the state of affairs simply appeared so as to add extra dysfunction, as patch deployment points produced a weeks-long delay for Payday 3’s first replace.
Kovačević’s stepping down as sport director is not the primary management change to come back out of the Payday 3 turmoil. In March 2024, six months after Payday 3’s launch, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren left the corporate. Sjögren was seemingly ousted by a annoyed board of administrators, judging from a press release made by Starbreeze chairman Torgny Hellström in an accompanying press launch. “The board’s consolidated evaluation is that the execution of technique wants a special management,” Hellström stated. Before his departure, Sjögren had stated Payday 3 gross sales and participant counts had been “at considerably decrease ranges than we want.”
While Payday 3’s obtained common updates and new heists within the months since its disastrous launch interval, it is struggled to achieve any momentum with its participant base. By October 2023, its concurrent participant counts had sunk beneath Payday 2’s, and in accordance with Steamdb have remained decrease at each level since. At time of writing, there are lower than 700 gamers in Payday 3—lower than 10% of Payday 2’s 8,700.
