Payday 2 devs says microstransactions are ‘working as we intended’

Overkill has at last responded to fans who continue to be outraged by the game’s recent addition of microtransactions.

The shooter’s recent Black Market update added weapon-boosting perks to the game which can be obtained via a cash-purchase. Fans were especially agitated as the developer explicitly stated in may 2013 that microtransactions would never be added to the game.

At the time, I meant what I said,” Overkill’s global brand director Almir Listo said in a Reddit AMA.

I never thought we would’ve had the pleasure of working on Payday 2 for at least another four years. We thought – and still think – that this is a great addition to the game.”

Liasto elaborated on the point in a separate answer: 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. 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.

There are several arguments as to why we think stat boosts are OK to have in Payday 2. The game is balanced around the vanilla experience, that is, the game without any DLC. Payday 2 is a player-versus-environment game. You and your three friends play together against the AI; you lose together and you win together. Any advantage your friends have will only benefit the success of the group. – Making sure that the boosts are balanced in such a way that it doesn’t impair on the player’s experience.

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.

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.

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.”

As always seems to be the way when people land themselves in it, the developer also chose to attack the press.

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,” he added. It’s a bit hard to take some of these people serious when you know they don’t even play the game. 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.”