There's a new Payday game coming later this year, and it's VR

PAYDAY: Aces High - Reveal Trailer (Meta Quest, SteamVR) - YouTube

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Starbreeze has something new cooking on the Payday front and, well, it's a VR game—Payday: Aces High, a co-op heist game like the others in the series, but "built specifically for virtual reality, bringing the planning, teamwork and signature chaos of a Payday heist to a fully immersive format."

Payday: Aces High does look very much like a Payday game: Four supposedly elite bank robbers put on suits and clown masks, and then Gong Show their way through jobs that invariably end in extreme violence and huge body counts. Not exactly the height of professionalism there, fellas!

This one, however, is being developed by Fast Travel Games, a VR studio whose previous releases include Cities: VR, Vampire: The Masquerade: Justice, the confusion-causing Apex Construct, and the Stellaris VR spinoff Ghost Signal. Up to four people can partake in co-op multiplayer action and, possibly because finding four people with VR headsets can be a challenge unto itself, singleplayer is also supported.

"Bringing the iconic Payday universe to VR has been more than a milestone for our studio—it's been a genuine privilege," Fast Travel CEO Oskar Burman said. "Working with an IP cherished by millions has been fantastic, and watching our team capture that magic in a fully fledged VR experience has been truly inspiring."

This won't be Starbreeze's first foray into the world of VR. A VR version of Payday 2 dropped in 2018 and it's apparently pretty alright, but even before that the studio had high hopes for the field. In 2015 it announced its own VR headset called StarVR, and even launched a VR arcade to support it, although development of the headset was put on hold in 2018. Starbreeze said this latest move is part of its strategy to "expand Payday through selected licensing partnerships and new entertainment formats."

"Fast Travel Games is a globally respected VR studio with over a decade of VR experience," Starbreeze CEO Adolf Kristjansson said. "Under their leadership, Aces High is not just an adaptation. It is a true Payday game built from the ground up for this medium."

Maybe so—it looks the part, as I said—but all of this is happening under a very dark cloud hanging over Starbreeze. Payday 3 remains a mess and at this point, well over two years after release, it's hard to imagine any sort of meaningful turnaround happening, especially while the much older Payday 2 is still reliably chugging along. Starbreeze itself, meanwhile, has imposed two rounds of layoffs over the past six months and cancelled an anticipated co-op D&D game it had announced in 2023.

And even if Payday: Aces High is "good" by whatever slippery metric you use to define the term, how much impact it will have on the fates of the franchise and the studio is a big question. The Assassin's Creed VR game Nexus, for instance, is well regarded by players but didn't sell as well as publisher Ubisoft had hoped—in fact, it convinced Ubisoft to back off on VR development. Meta also recently closed three VR studios as part of its big metaversal walkback, an amusing but also in some ways alarming move from a company that literally renamed itself after the thing it's now slowly backing away from. (Maybe things will work out better with AI.)

Anyway, we'll see how it all shakes out not too long from now. Payday: Aces High is currently slated to arrive in Q3 of 2026—so, sometime between July 1 and September 30—and will be available exclusively for Meta Quest and SteamVR headsets. It's up for wishlisting now on Steam and the Meta Store.

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