Starbreeze hands off Payday 2 to another developer as it goes all-in on trying to salvage the beleaguered Payday 3

Things are not going well for Payday 3 but, conversely, Payday 2 has never looked in ruder health. Payday 3 launched in 2023 and has struggled to find anything like the audience of its predecessor: at the time of writing SteamDB shows just over 500 players on 3, while around 27,000 are on its 12 year-old predecessor.

It's an issue for Starbreeze, which has a long history of great and interesting games but for the past decade has been basically a Payday studio. Thing is, Payday 2 is so popular that it's had to continue to support the older game, which now has so much DLC that last month saw the launch of a subscription service (which is actually a pretty good deal, though some groused about it anyway).

Now Starbreeze has announced that Payday 2's maintenance and future content is all being handled by Sidetrack Games, which has previously created several pieces of Payday 2 DLC.

"We're excited to announce that we’re partnering with Sidetrack Games to support the PC-versions of Payday 2 with quality-of-life improvements and general game fixes," says the Starbreeze statement.

"Sidetrack (formerly known as the M.U.G. Team) is a talented team with deep roots in the Payday modding community. Their work on RAID: World War II showed that they have the skill and perseverance to deliver quality updates over a long time. They know the Payday 2 engine inside and out, and they've already gotten started."

Players won't have to wait long to see the first fruits: Sidetrack's first update arrives on Thursday, October 23, and is "focused on the stability of the game and improving the overall player experience."

For its part, Sidetrack will now work on both Raid: World War II and Payday 2, and calls this "a big opportunity for us."

This is almost certainly good news for Payday 2 fans, but all eyes will now be on Starbreeze and whether it can somehow turn Payday 3 around. The game's initial reception was extraordinarily poor, and even the devs themselves admitted it was "a bad experience" at launch. But it's far from a bad game, and Starbreeze clearly thinks it's worth doubling down on: as well as the Sidetrack news, the studio recently cancelled a Dungeons and Dragons game in order to more completely focus on Payday 3's future.

"As our new CEO Adolf [Kristjansson] has mentioned in recent interviews, we are increasing our focus on Payday as a whole and Payday 3 in particular," Gustav Nisser, Starbreeze's head of commercial, told us last month.

Starbreeze's most recent statement on Payday 3 was October 3, where it announced it was "more than doubling the team size for Payday" and that "we want to fix all of it. Not only fix [the issues], we want to surpass your expectations and give you the game you didn't even know you wanted. A Payday that's great today, and amazing 10 years from now."