While you were sleeping last night, Starbreeze Studios announced Payday 3, along with oodles of other Payday-related news.

Starbreeze, who is the parent company of Payday developer Overkill, had quite the announcement party last night.

They began with announcing that they regained the franchise rights to the Payday series for about 30 million dollars. Following the transaction, Starbreeze owns full rights to the Payday-franchise “for any future developments or commercialization.”  This includes Payday 2 as well as Payday for mobile platforms.

Further, starting retroactively from May 1, 2016, Starbreeze will retain full net revenue from Payday 2 on Steam. Revenue generated from Payday 2: Crimewave Edition (the console version) will continue to be split between 505 Games and Starbreeze, with the aforementioned retaining the publishing rights.

505 games will also retain a 33% revenue share of Starbreeze’s net revenues from future sales of Payday 3 (which is already in development according to Starbreeze), capped at $40 million dollars, and after Starbreeze has fully recouped its development and marketing costs.

“Given the strategic value for Starbreeze to control its hit franchise it is both in the short and long term a sound investment,” said Starbreeze in the official press release. 

Starbreeze CEO, Bo Andersson Klint added, “PAYDAY is very close to my heart, and has laid the foundation for Starbreeze success in recent years. We’re very excited to bring our heisters home to the safe house.”

No further details were shared about Payday 3, other than that it’s coming “in the future.”

Meanwhile, Andersson also confirmed that Payday 2 will continue to receive content for the next 18 month and that the game’s microtransactions will be removed.

My Opinion:

The Payday franchise has an install base of over 14 million users — so while I don’t see the hooplah about it — clearly it has its fans. After scrolling through this story’s various comment sections I can conclude that the fans are happy about this, which is a huge improvement from a few months ago when pitchforks were selling like hotcakes over this franchise.

---

Tyler Fischer is an Associate Writer for MONG who plays video games when he’s not busy researching alien conspiracy theories at 2AM. You can find him on Twitter.