Starbreeze expect to release Payday 3 in either 2022 or 2023

(Image credit: Starbreeze)

Swedish developer Starbreeze had to restructure following poor sales of Overkill's The Walking Dead, laying off staff and selling the publishing rights to games like System Shock 2 and Psychonauts 2. They're apparently not dead yet, however, with a blog post saying cash flow is predicted to tick up, in part due to the release of the next game in the popular multiplayer bank-heist series.

"The company estimates that these cash flows will be positive, based on expected new publishing agreements in 2020 and an expected release of PAYDAY 3 in 2022–2023", as the blog post puts it. Mobile spin-off Payday: Crime War is also mentioned as a source of expected income in 2020.

It was hoped Overkill's The Walking Dead would sell millions, but it only managed to move a few hundred thousand copies. Eurogamer's article on The Fall of Starbreeze explains how this one flop brought the company low after a string of disasters like investing heavily in The Raid: World War Two (essentially a reskinned Payday), and setting up a VR company with plans to launch their own headset.

PRODUCTS

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.