Over the years, there’s been several cautionary tales, of sorts, of developers or publishers who grew too fast and ended up crashing because of it. One such unfortunate example was Starbreeze, whose Payday series saw huge success which saw them expand at a rate that eventually came back to haunt them. They seem to be trying to get back on track with reviving active development for Payday 2, but it’s come with some drawbacks on the console side.
As announced via a blog post from the developer, the console versions of the games are soon to be behind update wise. They acknowledge that keeping up with consoles has been a huge issue for them and say that after the current console update 1.5, it may be a good while before we see any significant updates on PS4 and Xbox One.
“Consoles has always been something of an Achilles heel in our production pipeline and while we’ve made several efforts through the years to strengthen the team and effectivising the PC production to better align to consoles, it hasn’t been enough. As of April 2019, the PAYDAY 2: Crime Wave Edition with its DLC’s is almost caught up to PC, but not quite.
“We’ve had to look at the future console updates from our situation as it looks today, with the limitations that we have, rather than looking back at what has been said and done before and make choices accordingly, even though they might not be what we wish them to. We simply have too many constraints in available manpower to be able to fix the situation in the short term. We see this as an opportunity to, at least, be as forthcoming as we can be regarding the road map ahead.
“To be clear as can be, we will out of necessity, at this time, have to accept disparity between the PC and Consoles versions for PAYDAY 2 going forward.”
The Nintendo Switch version of the game is looking to fare even worse as they say due to the outsourced nature of the port, updating it would take too much work. It seems there will be no updates at all for that version going forward.
“We’re very sad to announce that PAYDAY 2 for Nintendo Switch will be very unlikely to see further updates, despite what our initial ambitions were on the contrary. As per above, we’ve been forced to make many hard decisions along the road, and this is yet another. To put the Switch version separately into context, the transfer of the game over to the Switch-platform was not made in-house and would require significant further investments to happen.”
Well, it seems as if the revived development of the game will mostly center around the PC version, as Starbreeze does what it can to get everything back on track. It’s obviously a very disappointing thing for those on consoles, but maybe Payday 3, should it actually happen, will be different.
