Payday 2 recently received microtransactions, and naturally the game’s community is in uproar about there being a payment model in a premium, pay-for game. But for those hoping the dissatisfaction from players will be enough to see developer Overkill pull the idea from the game, recent comments from the Payday 2’s producer won’t please. The Black Market isn’t going anywhere.
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Overkill’s Almir Listo held a AMA on Reddit this weekend, which naturally saw hundreds of posts from people angry and demanding answers. Listo remains positive about the change in the face of the anger: “We thought – and still think – that this is a great addition to the game,” he said.
“We have a system that everyone can participate in, where players can earn actual money while playing PayDay 2. If you don’t want to purchase anything, that’s completely fine, as you can just sell what you get and continue focusing on the core experience of PayDay 2.
Meanwhile, the added funds allow us to continue making the game better and better all the time.”
The addition of microtransactions and the anger it caused was addressed with a quick patch that occasionally will drop keys in the game for free, which players can use to unlock safes without paying. Despite the concession, players still remain unhappy.
One of the key issues with Payday 2’s microtransactions is that it backtracks on what the developer said when the game launched in 2011, where Listo said in a Steam forum post “We’ve made it clear that PAYDAY 2 will have no micro-transactions whatsoever.” In response, Listo explained on Reddit that while he believed that to be true then, things have changed. Overkill wants to produce more content than their partner 505 Games will help fund, and so they need to generate cash flow some other way.
“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,” Listo revealed.
The Black Market is already performing well, and Listo confirmed that it won’t be going away. Overkill are willing to continue discussing it with the community, but the system is working well for the developer and here to stay.
“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,” said Listo.
Knowing that the Black Market is now a permanent addition to Payday 2, how do you feel about the game? Is there anything you’d change about the system to make it feel fair?
Thanks, VG247.