Payday 3 Drops to "Mostly Negative" Score After Topping Sales Charts

Payday 3 has been hit with tons of negative reviews due to matchmaking issues.

By Tanner Dedmon

Payday 3 from Starbreeze Studios and Deep Silver has had quite the couple of days since its launch. Since it released on September 21st, the game's been hit with nearly endless matchmaking errors and problems with its online services which, seeing how the game is always online and requires an Internet connection in order to play, has meant that people haven't even been able to play the game by themselves let alone play it with others. While that's obviously not been the case for everyone across the PlayStation, Xbox, and PC platforms the game launched on, the problems have been frequent enough to cause the game's user scores to plummet. 

That's despite the fact that, for a brief while, the game was topping sales charts, too. It's moved down a few pegs on Steam's chart for the top sellers now that Cyberpunk 2077's big 2.0 update is out, but if for only a short amount of time, it was the No. 1 seller on Steam when it released. The Steam scores it's gotten since then, however, tell a different story. 

Payday 3's Issues

To figure out what's going on with Payday 3 right now, you needed only to try to boot up the game between its launch and now or check the game's socials. Updates like the one below have been shared multiple times throughout the past two days as the devs kept players apprised as to what was going on with the matchmaking situation. Service outages have been occurring frequently since the game's release, but things seem to have more or less stabilized within the past 12 hours or so to the point that people could play the game.

As evidenced by responses to the tweets from the devs, it's clear that not every player is finding success when it comes to getting into matches. Many are still encountering matchmaking errors, so players aren't in the clear just yet. Among other statements from the creators, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren issued an apology on Friday.

"We are so sorry that the infrastructure didn't hold up as expected, and although it's impossible to prepare for every scenario – we should be able to do better," he said. "We work tirelessly until we have restored all services and our players can get back to heisting again without issues!"

Payday 3's Reviews

Because of how Steam's review system is set up, it's one of the quicker ways to gauge community sentiment about a game, and community sentiment around Payday 3 is not great right now. It's currently got a "Mostly Negative" review score that's just one shy of the dreaded "Overwhelmingly Negative" with around 30% of the 19,000 user reviews regarding the game in a positive light.

"Online only was a huge mistake," reads the user review currently topping the list of critiques over on Steam.

"Imagine waiting for an hour and ten minutes and still not being able to get into a private game," reads another.

Other aggregate scores tell a similar story with Payday 3 down to a 1.8 user score over on Metacritic. If you're one of the many Payday 3 players trying to get into the game this weekend, it's best to keep an eye on the Payday 3 Twitter to see how things develop. 

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