Starbreeze rolled out a new subscription service for Payday 2 DLC yesterday, which struck me as a pretty good deal: $5 per month for every piece of DLC currently available, 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 Infamous Collection jumped from $118 to $170, a steep increase that many players assumed was meant to funnel them toward the subscription service. Gustav Nisser, Starbreeze’s head of commercial, said there was no connection—that the timing was simply “unfortunate,” and the studio had “dropped the ball” on keeping fans in the loop.
They are only sorry the fans saw right through their plan. There’s no reason to increase the price on old digital content.
Starbreeze rolling back bad decisions and pretending they didn’t know? What is this? A Tuesday?
They’re experimenting with new income practices
Payday 3 didn’t make enough money, so they’re following the players back to Payday 2 to try to shake them down there.
What a sad decline for such a great dev :c
payday still exists? I haven’t heard of the game in years. I’m surprised they even attempted this as a whole because it sounds like it’s only going to piss off their remaining userbase.
BEING SAID, I think their main issue here isn’t the fact that the price went up in the first place, it’s that they decided to make it almost 25% more as the increase after having it be ~52% off for ages. This rollup should have defo been more gradual if they wanted people to not be pissed about that. An instant 50$ increase in price is a tough amount to swallow for a 12 year old game, regardless of if DLC is involved, even moreso when it boosts the price to $170
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I actually like these “DLC Subscription” type things, particularly for older games with tons of DLC. There’s a huge barrier to entry for someone trying to pick up an older game, and being able to pay $5 or $10 and ‘demo’ all of the DLC for a month is a nice way to see what’s worth buying or if the game is even going to have enough longevity to make buying the DLC worth it.
Obviously when it’s accompanied by a huge increase in the price of the DLC, it sours it considerably, but at its core, the subscription itself is not a bad thing.
Yeah, i agree on that; when i heard that i thought about jumping in for a month and playing it again; it actually is pretty fun, but it’s simply too expensive to buy in. I would be happy if other games with lots of DLC or expensive DLC considered something similar; Paradox games are the first thing that come to mind, but there’s other stuff like Rimworld where you can drop 100 Bucks on expansions that i simply do not have.
Someone I know wanted a recommendation for a multiplayer game recently. One of the games I remembered existing was Payday 2. DLC and subscriptions involved? Never-fuckin-mind.
You boycott a game because it has DLC? That’s silly. Especially for PD2 which developed over years and added many times the content of the base game. And if you want to play a DLC mission you don’t even need the DLC; only the host needs it.
IMO paydays DLC policy was and is generally good. Recent price changes non-included.
