In a recent Reddit AMA, PAYDAY 2’s producer, Almir Listo, defended the game’s microtransactions and shed some light why the company decided to do such a thing. Two years ago, OVERKILL stated that PAYDAY 2 would not be plagued by micro-transactions. Well, today things are a bit different as the game does offer what OVERKILL claimed would never be implemented.

Of course, this caused a lot of fan backlash, to which Almir decided respond. As Almir said, at the time of PAYDAY 2’s release, the team meant what it said (about micro-transactions).

“Two and a half years ago, during development of PAYDAY 2 and in the build-up for its release, myself and then Game Director David Goldfarb said that there would be no microtransactions in PAYDAY 2. At the time, there were games that were released with in-game microtransaction systems at launch; players were asked to pay for the full game, and then continue to spend money directly after the initial purchase. At the time, PAYDAY 2 featured a relatively advanced weapon modifications system where players for in-game money could buy, sell and modify weapons, masks and modifications. When we discussed this with people, we’d receive a ton of questions regarding whether or not it was microtransactions or not in our game too. To make sure there was no confusion, we said what we did to make things absolutely clear. If you asked me then, there would be no way we would’ve added a system like we just did.

Fast forward to today, two and a half years later, and the addition of the Black Market update. There’s been a lot of articles written by a lot of people claiming a lot of things about us, our intentions and the effect this has on the community as a whole and the future of PAYDAY 2. It’s a bit hard to take some of these people serious when you know they don’t even play the game. One contributor on an esteemed website even said: “An earlier version of this post called the game “competitive multiplayer” as I wrongly believed there was a competitive component. There isn’t and I apologize for the error. However, paying real-world money to perform better in a multiplayer game even without PvP is still a problem.” I think the problem here really is people in positions of power in media and elsewhere making uninformed, clickbait articles about things that matter a lot to a lot of people, instead of doing some serious legwork to get their facts straight.

Since we released PAYDAY 2 back in 2013, the OVERKILL crew working on the project has more than tripled in size. From 25 developers to today with 75 developers. This allows us to create better content more often across several platforms. Like we’ve said in the past, we do free updates when we can, and paid DLC when we have to. As our ambition for PAYDAY 2 post-launch has grown, we’ve hired more people to help us make it happen. New stuff include everything to the drive feature to the comeback of the First World Bank and Slaughterhouse from PAYDAY: The Heist.”

Almir then said that OVERKILL tried to find ways to keep revenue flowing prior to implementing micro-transactions to the game, however is attempts were not successful.

“Two years ago people would have us instantly start work on PAYDAY 3, right after we released PAYDAY 2, like developers usually do. Instead, we decided to continue work on PAYDAY 2, because we wanted to make it an incredible co-op experience. 88 updates later, we have to ensure the future survival of the game. We do sales when we can where we reduce the price point up to 75% in order to pay people’s wages and create a buffer for a rainy day. Six months ago, we also made a bold move to permanently reduce the price point of 16 PAYDAY 2 products by 33-43% in the hopes of drawing additional sales. Needless to say, we didn’t see the result we anticipated, and have had to think of other ways to make sure we can continue creating content in the pace we want in order to keep PAYDAY 2 fresh and exciting.”

In his lengthy reply, Almir also explained what’s the current relationship between OVERKILL and 505 Games (the game’s publisher), the current state of PAYDAY 2, as well as the current state of OVERKILL.

“We have a partnership with our partner 505 Games, where we have a deal to produce a specific amount of content until 2017. However, we at OVERKILL want to create more than what we and 505 Games agreed on. We want to do everything we can to make PAYDAY 2 as awesome as possible. In order to do that, we made the decision to triple the size of the crew. To ensure that we can keep the size of the team, we decided that the best approach was to introduce the Black Market update to the game.

This is how it works: – In the in-game loot drop, players now can receive a safe or a drill – A safe can be opened by a drill which then generates an item that can be traded in the Steam Marketplace – Items are weapon skins, where some provide a small stat boost to the weapon its applied on – Drills, safes and weapon skins can be traded using the Steam Marketplace – From time to time, live events will allow players to get free drills and safes, and the item inside can then be traded on the market – Drills can also be purchased for 2,50$

The reason why we didn’t want to discuss this was that it wasn’t fully launched until after Crimefest. Not in our wildest dreams could we anticipate the type of reaction that the update received during the first few days. Day by day people calmed down and started to discuss the changes – and here we are, discussing this now.”

Almir concluded that while OVERKILL understands there is a lot of fury and anger about this whole thing, the Black Market update does work (from an economical point of view).

“We understand that there is a lot of fury, anger and disappointment with us adding this. From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended. Going forward, we hope we can convince the parts of the community that resist this change that this was the right decision to do to ensure the stability of OVERKILL as an independent developer and the future growth of PAYDAY 2.”

John Papadopoulos

John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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