Starbreeze says sorry, reverses price increase on Payday 2 DLC bundle_ 'We definitely didn't handle
By Dr. Eleanor Vance | Published on January 01, 0001
Starbreeze rolled out a new subscription service for DLC yesterday, which struck me as a pretty good deal: $5 per month for , and you can subscribe and cancel as you see fit. But the launch turned a less-than-flattering spotlight on another recent Payday 2 development: A significant increase in the price of the Infamous Collection, a bundle of all current Payday 2 DLC that players can buy outright.
A few weeks before the launch of the subscription service, the [[link]] Infamous Collection jumped from $118 to $170, a steep increase that many players assumed was meant to funnel them toward the subscription service. Gustav Nisser, Starbreeze's head of commercial, said there was no connection—that the timing was simply "unfortunate," and the studio had "dropped the ball" on keeping fans in the loop.
"The community has been pretty clear about how it looks next to the subscription launch—and they're not wrong, it's terrible timing," Nisser told PC Gamer. "We definitely didn't handle this right, and we'll be apologising to the community. Hopefully there will be at least some acceptance that this was an honest mistake."
Nisser said the discount on the Infamous Collection was reduced from 52% to 33% as part of a "general pricing review" that found it to be "a bit too steep," since it was cumulative with individual DLC discounts—that is, the 52% cut would apply on top of any other DLC discounts that might be in place at any given time. But for quite a few players it wasn't the new price that was the issue so much as the fact that it was made without notice, leading to a perception that Starbreeze was trying to quietly funnel players to the subscription offering.
Starbreeze has good reason to be careful about getting this right. Payday 2 is now a 12-year-old game but it's still pulling in tens of thousands of players every day on Steam; Payday 3, its presumptive successor, currently has a 24-hour peak concurrent player count of just 518. Starbreeze is still working on it, but for now it also very obviously needs to keep the wheels turning smoothly on Payday 2, too—and that means not antagonizing the [[link]] players who have stuck with it.
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