Payday 3 released on Sept. 21, and between that date and Oct. 1, Payday 2 still had significantly more players than the new game. Terrible servers will do that, I suppose.
Redditor u/ArmyofKnights pointed out in a post that there was only one brief period on Sept. 25 that Payday 3 passed Payday 2 in player count—the entire rest of the time, Payday 3 fluctuated at around 20,000 players, while Payday 2 hung out around the 40,000 player mark. This data doesn’t come from speculation or personal observation, but from Steam’s official chart that tracks player count.
As much as we’d like to say we’re surprised by this, we’re not. Payday 3 was literally unplayable for the majority of it’s launch week, so it wasn’t exactly a top contender for player count. It also isn’t a shock that Payday 2 still outranked it during the times that Payday 3 did have working servers, because the server state fluctuated so often that it became very difficult to believe Starbreeze when they announced that Payday 3‘s servers were back up and running several times.
Comments on the post offer mixed opinions on why Payday 3 had less players than Payday 2—one fan believes that Payday 3 still needs to catch up with Payday 2 in terms of gameplay, while another stated that Payday 3 is superior in almost every way (aside from server issues, of course).
Regardless of personal opinions on Payday 3, it seems obvious that the server nightmare is what caused its player count to be lower than that of Payday 2—even a terrible sequel will have high player counts during launch week while players figure out that it’s terrible.
Personally, I think that Payday 3 really is a great game, but the server issues were such a plague that it might be a little while before anybody cares whether or not the game is fun. We’ve all been hurt before.
At the time of writing this article on Oct 2, Payday 3 has outranked Payday 2 for the past 48 hours, but it’s anyone’s guess if that will hold. At this point, I’d feel downright silly saying that Payday 3‘s servers are fixed—it would feel like saying that one sunny day in December means that winter isn’t cold anymore.
