A popular co-op shooter on Steam faces heavy criticism from loyal fans after a poorly timed price change.
Which game is it? Payday 2 is a popular co-op shooter on Steam where you take on the role of criminals in various scenarios. You rob banks, engage in illegal activities, and aim to seize the big money.
The approach you take in each mission is to some extent up to you. You determine the equipment used and whether you want to proceed quietly or loudly and violently.
The game has an 88% positive rating on Steam (all reviews), but it has recently lost a lot of support, dropping to 60% in recent reviews.
If you want a closer look at the gameplay of Payday 2, we are including the gameplay trailer for the Black Cat Heist here:
Price change angers loyal fans
What was that price change? In recent years, numerous paid add-ons and DLCs have been released for Payday 2. If you were to buy every available package for the co-op shooter, you would be spending over 200 euros.
Instead, the developers offer the so-called Infamous Collection
, which gives you 75 contents at a 52% discount. The collection thus costs around 118 euros – this changed recently.
On September 5th, the price of the bundle rose to over 170 euros (cf. SteamDB). About three weeks later, on September 24th, the developers released a subscription that allows players to play all DLCs of the co-op shooter for 4.59 euros per month.
The price increase just a few weeks before the introduction of a subscription for the same contents left a bad taste for many players and led to heavy criticism from the community. A player with over 330 hours played complained on Steam:
Introducing a subscription to milk a 12-year-old game and making the DLC bundle more expensive because you refuse to invest money or work into the successor is truly shameless.
Many other players expressed a similar sentiment. The game received over 30 negative reviews on Valve’s gaming platform within 2 days.
Developers hear criticism, adjust price again
This is how the developers respond: The developers have responded to the criticism from fans and reverted the price increase of the Infamous Collection. The bundle now costs around 118 euros again.
In an email to the English-language magazine Game Developer, the developers explain that the price change and the introduction of the subscription occurred independently, but they messed up the timing of the price change and now understand how it appears from the outside.
In 2023, the direct successor to the popular co-op shooter, Payday 3, was released. However, this was not well received by many fans and only brought an important feature that players had long demanded many months after release: Payday 3 finally gives fans what they want – triples player counts on Steam
