Payday 3’s Offline Mode is No Longer in Development

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This week, both Microsoft and Starbreeze faced scrutiny. Microsoft received criticism for changes to its Game Pass service, while Starbreeze canceled their cooperative Dungeons & Dragons game, Project Baxter. Development on Project Baxter has stopped, and staff have been moved to work on the future of Payday, though some employees were unfortunately laid off.

Despite many requests, *Payday 3* won’t be getting an offline mode. In a recent stream, the game’s general manager, Jonas Skantz, explained that adding this feature isn’t possible, according to a report from WCCF Tech.

Let’s discuss offline mode. The team really wanted to include it, and they’ve put in effort trying to make it work. However, we need to be realistic – it just doesn’t fit with the direction we’re taking the game.

Let me clarify. We have a limited number of people, so we need to focus their efforts on the most important aspects of the game – things like how players progress and the core gameplay loop. Also, our update process has changed. Now, it takes weeks to release an update, which means fixing even small issues, like incorrect values, can take a significant amount of time. This isn’t due to our team being slow, but rather the lengthy process of updating everything on our end.

It’s strange to mention a limited team size after the recent layoffs. However, the team’s goal is to collaborate more closely with players and quickly release updates. To do this, they need to be able to easily adjust the game’s settings and features directly from the server side, allowing for faster and more frequent improvements.

As a fan, what I really hope is that the developers can start experimenting with changes earlier in the process. If they felt confident they could tweak things based on what they learn, it would speed everything up so much! Plus, it would make our feedback as players actually *mean* something. They are working on improving the online experience, of course, but it’s just tough to make big changes happen quickly right now.

Despite recent improvements, *Payday 3* is still attracting far fewer players than *Payday 2*. The game recently peaked at just 2,123 players on Steam in a 24-hour period, compared to *Payday 2*’s peak of 29,702. This is even more notable considering *Payday 2* has been facing its own issues, including a price hike for the Infamous Collection and the introduction of a new DLC subscription service.

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2025-10-05 23:11