Payday 3 servers are still a mess. So much so that the developer, Starbreeze, is looking into an offline mode. An update was posted that covered some of the stats for the game’s launch weekend and the issues the devs ran into and continue to deal with. Let’s touch on what the devs had to say about their servers and the potential for an offline mode.
A potential Payday 3 offline mode: The devs will look at “making Payday 3 less dependent on online services.” CEO Tobias Sjögren confirmed on X/Twitter that this could mean an offline mode.
Matchmaking infrastructure error with peak player counts.
The devs opened the statement by acknowledging that the servers did not perform as they thought they would. “Matchmaking software encountered an unforeseen error, which made it unable to handle the massive influx of players. The issue caused an unrecoverable situation for Starbreeze’s third-party matchmaking partner.”
This led to lots of downtime and an apology from Starbreeze’s CEO. The devs and their matchmaking partner seemed to be getting a handle on these issues by early Sunday, but another update late Sunday caused more problems.
Payday 3 hit a peak concurrent player count of 218,250 over the weekend. We can look at SteamDB to get an idea of how that splits between platforms. Now, peak player times could be different on other platforms. This is just a general idea.
On Steam, Payday 3 hit just over 70,000 on Saturday. The rest would be split between Xbox/Windows PC (the game also launched on Game Pass) and PlayStation 5.
The folks at Starbreeze know they have their work cut out to fix these issues. “We have a lot of diligent and consistent work ahead of us to regain community trust, but we will work hard to do it,” says Sjögren.
The team is also looking into working with a new matchmaking partner.
Server upgrades are coming on Tuesday and Friday. The devs will bring Payday 3 servers down entirely for upgrades on Tuesday and Friday. The first upgrade happened during three hours of downtime at 2 AM EST. Another three-hour server downtime starts at 2 AM EST on Friday. This pair of upgrades should make server and matchmaking smoother.