Payday 2 - acquired by Starbreeze, microtransactions removed!

[Fargus]

Haven't played the game for a fairly long time now, but all I really remember about it was that there were two kinds of people in the community: the ones who'd play it for the sake of enjoyment, and the ones who were obsessed with stealth.

This roughly sums up my experience with the latter:

Oh man so true. Back then when i used to play this game i hated the stealth obsessed fuckers and kicked them on sight. "Stealth?" was a substitute for "hi" when some faggot entered the lobby.

 

[Infinitron]

Payday 2’s Microtransaction Nightmare Just Got Worse

Payday 2 developer Overkill Software has been eerily silent about the game’s controversial microtransactions, a move that’s had the community upset for more than a week. Over the weekend, Overkill finally spoke out. They apologized for bungling communication, but the microtransactions are here to stay.

If you haven’t been following this story, here’s the quick version: Payday 2’s developers once declared the game would never get microtranscations. Then, it did! For $2.50, players could buy drills to potentially unlock specially skinned weapons that could also have better stats than standard weapon drops. Though Payday 2 is not a competitive game—it’s players vs. AI—it felt unfair, especially juxtaposed against the comments made by the developers. After much criticism, the drills were introduced as an item that could randomly drop for players, but this was many days after the developers pretended nothing was going on.

When Payday 2’s 10-day Crimefest promotion came to an end, the developer held an AMA on the game’s subreddit, a source of fandom that has not been kind to Overkill’s recent decisions. It’s not a surprise that players immediately started grilling the developer on the microtransactions question. To Overkill’s credit, they didn’t avoid it, and decided to address the issue head-on.


Overkill producer Almir Listo has been working on Payday 2 for years. He was part of the braintrust that publicly declared the game would never include microtransactions, a quote that’s been used to hammer Overkill for days now.

“To make sure there was no confusion, we said what we did [at the time] to make things absolutely clear,” said Listo. “If you asked me then, there would be no way we would’ve added a system like we just did.”

But more than two years after the release of Payday 2, that’s changed.

Listo first pointed blame at various media outlets—Kotaku was not specifically named—for “uninformed, clickbait articles about things that matter a lot to a lot of people, instead of doing some serious legwork to get their facts straight.”

(So far as I know, our pieces on this story have been considered accurate. Please let me know if that’s not true.)

A huge reason we’ve written several stories about this ongoing controversy is because Payday 2 fans have reached out to Kotaku, time and time again, asking for answers. When I’d look at the Payday 2 subreddit, I saw anger and confusion. When I’d load the Steam forums, I saw that same anger and confusion. A big reason people were upset was Overkill’s lack of communication. I tried to help. Instead of holding this AMA immediately, they waited 10 days to open up.

Listo revealed how the Overkill team has grown in size since the game’s release in 2013—it’s tripled from 25 to 75 developers.

“As our ambition for Payday 2 post-launch has grown, we’ve hired more people to help us make it happen,” he said.

Listo pointed out Overkill’s desire to keep supporting Payday 2, while having to earn enough money to actually pull that off. Six months ago, the game’s price was permanently reduced in an attempt to spur sales, but it didn’t work out.

“We didn’t see the result we anticipated,” he said, “and have had to think of other ways to make sure we can continue creating content in the pace we want in order to keep Payday 2 fresh and exciting.”

An interesting wrinkle: Overkill signed a contract with publisher 505 Games to keep supporting Payday 2 through 2017. Listo claims Overkill wanted to deliver more than what the contract required, explaining the dramatic increase in team size. But to pay those people, they turned their eyes towards microtransactions.

It’d be one thing if Overkill came to the community and plainly explained the situation before Crimefest kicked off, breaking down their rationalization for going back on a previous promise. That’s the exact opposite of what happened.

“The reason why we didn’t want to discuss this was that it wasn’t fully launched until after Crimefest,” said Listo. “Not in our wildest dreams could we anticipate the type of reaction that the update received during the first few days.”

Salary considerations aside, Listo doesn’t think the criticism is warranted:

There are several arguments as to why we think stat boosts are OK to have in PAYDAY 2, and here are three; - The game is balanced around the vanilla experience, that is, the game without any DLC. When we add any new difficulties, enemies, features, heists or otherwise, we balance this in relation to the base game. - PAYDAY 2is a player-versus-environment game. You and your three friends play together against the AI; you lose together and you win together. Any advantage your friends have will only benefit the success of the group. - Making sure that the boosts are balanced in such a way that it doesn’t impare [sic] on the player’s experience. This is an ongoing effort on our side.

While it’s true Payday 2 isn’t player-vs-player, Listo’s explanation conveniently sidesteps why folks were upset in the first place: the changes came out of nowhere and weren’t justified to the community. Potentially upsetting the balance of the game was part of it, but that ignores what was really driving this.

Despite “a lot of fury, anger and disappointment,” the microtransactions aren’t going away. According to Listo, they’re working.

“From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended,” said Listo. “Going forward, we hope we can convince the parts of the community that resist this change that this was the right decision to do to ensure the stability of Overkill as an independent developer and the future growth of Payday 2.”

In other words, people are buying the drills, and Overkill has bills to pay.

The reaction to Listo’s comments, at least in the AMA, have been disastrous.

The most popular thread right now is a moderator resigning over all this.

Based on the recent developments and Almir’s stubbornness, I’ve decided it’s best that I distance myself from everything. And this sucks! Payday was one of my favorite series and I was one of the people who preordered the first game. But I can’t support how Overkill is playing every one of the people who have already spent hundreds each towards the series only to be told that we don’t know what’s best for us.

To Listo’s credit, he stuck around and answered a ton of questions, despite just about everyone pushing back on his explanations.

It’s not looking good over on Steam, either.

Elsewhere, fans have launched a parody website called The Road to Greedfest, an attempt to both send a message to and rally fans behind certain objectives.

First up? Stop playing Payday 2 and get it under 10,000 concurrent players. Next, tank the Metacritic userscore. After that, apply the same tactics to the game’s review score on Steam. The “challenges” after that haven’t been revealed.

We’ll have to wait and see how this ultimately impacts Payday 2 going forward. Even if some of the most hardcore leave, will the microtransactions make up for it? Right now, that’s what Overkill is gambling. According to them, it’s working.

 

[pippin]

This is all cute, but people should be this active against any game that features microtransactions, not just Payday.

 

[Blaine]

This is all cute, but people should be this active against any game that features microtransactions, not just Payday.

While that sounds good, it's far too late for that. That war was lost. The computer gaming community of the early 1990s and early 2000s who detest DRM, cash shops, pre-order bonuses, and all the rest of that cancer are now a tiny minority.

I blame consoles.

 

[pippin]

While that sounds good, it's far too late for that. That war was lost. The computer gaming community of the early 1990s and early 2000s who detest DRM, cash shops, pre-order bonuses, and all the rest of that cancer are now a tiny minority.

I blame consoles.

For once I don't think consoles are to blame here. DRM policies have been a problem for PC gaming, consider codewheels and paragraphs and special words, for instance. If consoles had any sort of problem at all with this, it has been integrated when they did the change to digital distribution, and it's mostly related to region locking. Before this, you could say you liked console gaming more because you didn't had to deal with DRM and you'd be kinda right. The nature of PC software development made it so DRM was an obligation for devs who wanted to make some money out of their products. In fact, in the mid late 80s, a main point to consider when buying new software was if it was copy protected or not.

 

[Astral Rag]

Payday 2's latest update has players in uproar all over again
Now the game's Steam mods have quit too.

By Tom Phillips Published 13/11/2015

Payday 2 players recently reacted in anger at the addition of paid-for weapon skins with stat-changing bonuses.

Now, Payday 2 developer Overkill has added new weapon skins with XP and cash boosting upgrades to the game's PC version.

The update has incensed the heist shooter's already disgruntled playerbase, just weeks after Overkill's last widely-criticised addition.

Payday 2's new boosts will generate more money and XP for your whole team.

These effects will also stack, so the more players in a squad that have a boost active, the more the whole team benefits as a result.

"This is kinda hilarious to me in a strange way. It's like they're just trolling their fans at this point," one Reddit user wrote.

The Payday 2 Reddit is awash with negative feedback. Top thread titles include: "F*** you Overkill 2.0", "F*** You Overkill 2: Team-Boost Boogaloo" and "RIP this sub".

Payday 2's Steam moderation team has also quit in protest. Swamped with bad feedback and disappointed in the state of the game they also play, the trio of mods announced their decision to hang up their banhammers last night.

"We've recently being [sic] under a great deal of stress after the Crimefest update," moderator Ashley wrote, referencing October's poorly-received changes. "A number of death threats thrown at us as well as much more heavy moderation needed due to a huge increase in users breaking the rules. We are not paid and have been in a very stressful situation.

"If Overkill decides to let us go as moderators it's something we are prepared for, I personally cannot sit by when they continue to promote immoral business practices. I felt the skins system needed work but could function. The recent safe update showed against that.

"I'm very sorry that it has come to this situation but the stress we have had to manage with, coupled with our unhappiness with the situation has pushed us to make this choice."

Payday 2's October update added the ability to crack open safes for random drops of loot, but you needed to buy a £1.60 drill to open them.

Overkill later responded by giving players chances to get a free drill instead, and defended its changes to the game by reasoning that it needed more funds to keep supporting Payday 2 two years after launch.

"We have a partnership with our partner 505 Games, where we have a deal to produce a specific amount of content until 2017. However, we at Overkill want to create more than what we and 505 Games agreed on," producer Almir Listo explained.

"We want to do everything we can to make Payday 2 as awesome as possible. In order to do that, we made the decision to triple the size of the crew. To ensure that we can keep the size of the team, we decided that the best approach was to introduce the Black Market update to the game."

"From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended," Listo concluded. "Right now, things are looking pretty great."

Overkill is yet to respond to the latest developments. We've asked for comment.

 

[udm]

of vidya gaems drama

 

[Papa Môlé]

I get more enjoyment now out of following the drama and sales hunting than actually playing the games.

 

[Explorerbc]

Now that I think about it, there wasn't really any other direction this could have went.

The problem is that the game's content was and will always be limited. After you've done all the heists a few times, there was nothing to go back to unless you were trying for achievements, stealth runs on extreme difficulty etc. And after you did that you were done (unless of course you were a casual who can't stealth and joins overkill games at rank 20 )

So the only way they could keep people playing was the shitty leveling system which forced them to grind over and over the same heists to mostly get e-peen infamy and cosmetics. Of course that made everyone cheat and turned games to shit.

Then they made grinding harder with a stupid update and introduced even more levels and cosmetics and shit for you to buy. Every now and then they also released a paid DLC map and a few guns.

So yeah, in the end everything revolved less around the heists and more around getting fast XP and money, so that you can spend them on a reset(!) and start all over again but with a shinny number next to your name.

When I quit I was infamy 2 and had done all challenges and achievements of the first and a half year's worth of content I think. And that took me 160 hours. Right now you can get up to infamy 25.

Makes sense that sooner or later they would introduce a store with microtransactions, since items and levels are the only thing left to keep the game going for those who haven't gotten bored of it years ago.

 

[Infinitron]

Read and weep:

 

[moraes]

This is what happens when ruthless, greedy and amoral entites have free reign to fabricate skinner boxes.

 

[Utgard-Loki]

https://www.reddit.com/r/paydaytheh...pite_what_some_people_are_saying_gamers_arent

it's done.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...loper-apologises-after-paid-for-boosts-blowup

Payday 2 developer apologises after paid-for boosts blowup
"We screwed up."

Payday 2 developer Overkill Studios has apologised to its community after a month of changes that infuriated fans.

Overkill tweaked the game in response to fan anger but then defended the introduction of microtransactions in general by saying they were needed to fund the amount of investment already planned for the game.

Finally, just over a week ago, Overkill upset its community all over again with another controversial new addition: weapon skins with XP and cash boosting buffs. Even the game's community moderators decided they'd had enough, and hung up their banhammers in protest.

Now, after the dust has settled, producer Almir Listo has issued an apology. In an open letter to the Payday community, Listo admitted Overkill's mistakes and set out a multi-point plan of fan-pleasing initiatives.

"The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community," Listo wrote. "Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike.

"For all the distress we've caused the past few weeks, I'd just like to take the time and say that we're sorry. We've done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up. We need to get better at many things, and we will do our best to improve as soon as possible."

Overkill has met with its striking moderators and listened to community suggestions for how to change the stat-boosts. Eight Overkill developers will begin taking an active part in the game's forums "starting next week".

The developer will fly out a group of modders to Overkill, meet with others and set up a meeting with one of the game's most high-profile players.

Heist tournaments will be tested, and shown off at the upcoming DreamHack Winter event next week. Finally, new voice-over will be added to the game via a forthcoming update.

All of which amounts to a lot of promises for meetings and more discussion, but no confirmation yet of any big changes or the reversal of controversial decisions. The message is clear: we will do better at listening. But the Payday community undoubtedly will be looking for actions after those words.

 

[Astral Rag]

We're truly very, very sorry about the whole debacle but we're certainly not just going to stop nickel-and-diming our fans.

 

[Papa Môlé]

hashtag sorry not sorry

 

[Jick Magger]

 

[Astral Rag]

Spoiler

Payday 2 is getting a Goat Simulator game mode

Payday 2 fans react in surprise at paid-for Goat Simulator tie-in
You herd that right.

Payday 2 will kick off its 2016 DLC schedule with a $6.99 Goat Simulator add-on.


The paid-for PC addition, available via Steam tomorrow, has taken the game's community by surprise.

Last autumn saw a catalogue of controversies envelop the online shooter and its community of committed fans, as developer Overkill added microtransaction boosts, apologised, then added paid-for stat-changing skins too.

The year ended with Overkill attempting reparations with its severely cheesed off playerbase, and sit-down meetings with striking community moderators.

News of the game's Goat Simulator DLC - which at $6.99 is priced just $3 less than the full Goat Simulator game - was greeted with a mixed reaction from fans, many of whom were expecting one of Overkill's free updates to launch next.

"I think most people are annoyed by the fact they added microtransactions saying 'we need them to make free stuff', then they don't make free stuff, bah," one fan wrote on Reddit.

"I paid $3 for Goat Simulator and Overkill wants $7 for a sh***y goat DLC?" another fan complained, referencing Goat Simulator's recent Steam sale price.

The new Payday add-on is designed to be a light-hearted addition. In it, you must extract goats which have swallowed packages of cocaine and then... liberate said packages after they are passed out.

Overkill has created a mixture of paid and free Payday 2 DLC since the game's launch. £86.52 worth of add-ons for the game are currently available on Steam, although you can also spend more in-game on virtual drills which unlock safes of random loot.

 

[Turtle-Zone 3000]

Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel.

 

[jcd]

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[pippin]

 

[Astral Rag]

http://steamcommunity.com/games/218620/announcements/detail/807635219739438195

 

[Infinitron]

Oh shiiiiiiiiii http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-05-31-payday-3-confirmed-payday-2-ditches-microtransactions

Payday 3 confirmed, Payday 2 ditches microtransactions

In a press release announcing Swedish studio Starbreeze has bought the full rights to the Payday franchise, Payday 3 was confirmed.

Starbreeze's agreement with publisher 505 Games for Payday includes a note about money made from Payday 3.

The note says 505 gets a 33 per cent revenue share of Starbreeze's net revenues from future sales of Payday 3, capped at $40m (around £27m), and after Starbreeze has fully recouped its development and marketing costs.

That's all we have on Payday 3, unfortunately. There's no word yet on a release window, platforms or features.

Starbreeze gets full net revenue from Payday 2 on Steam, however. Money made by the console version (Payday 2: Crimewave Edition) will continue to be split between the companies as before.

Starbreeze bought the rights to the game for $30m (£20m), adding an installed base of 14 million users.

Starbreeze boss Bo Andersson Klint said developer Overkill, which it owns, will continue to support Payday 2 for at least another 18 months. That takes players through until the end of 2017.

Meanwhile, in an update on Payday 2's Steam page, Overkill said it was making the game's black market free for everyone going forward. That means it's ditched the controversial microtransactions that angered the community earlier this year. Overkill explains how it works in the video below.

 

[Angthoron]

So now they'll piss off the players that paid money for those things

 

[Explorerbc]

I guess they milked what they could and now decided to save face until Payday 3 releases with a bazillion of new and improved DLC.

 

[sexbad?]

It makes me wonder how much of the microtransaction nonsense was forced by the publisher...

On the one hand, it was these fuckers who implemented it, but on the other, what the fuck is 505 Games successful with other than Payday? It would make sense that they would attempt to milk it to the very last drop.