PAYDAY 2 was easily one of the top games on Steam until last year when developer Overkill added microtransactions in the Black Market update. The move resulted in a massive fallout within the community, and it wasn't too hard to figure out why: not only is there a disdain of microtransactions in general among gamers, but the developer had promised in 2013 that it wouldn't implement them in the first place.
Now, it looks like Overkill and parent company Starbreeze are looking to get back in the good graces of its once thriving community, announcing that it has acquired the full rights to the PAYDAY franchise from publisher 505 Games, and one of the first things it will do with its complete ownership is remove microtransactions from PAYDAY 2.
In a video that accompanied the release, Producer Almir Listo begins by saying: "We are freeing up the black market."
"Starting with the next update in PAYDAY 2, any old-generation safes in the loot drop will stop to drop," he continued. "Any new-generation safe, going forward, will drop completely for free. You will still be able to trade all the old and new generation safes and items using the Steam Marketplace. Your prices [and] supply and demand will still continue to shape the PAYDAY 2 marketplace. Any new generation safes that drop will be dropping completely for free, and will continue to have different rarities and qualities, depending on what kind of items you get. The only difference is, now you open them for free."
In short, starting from the next update, microtransactions will be gone in its entirety.
Surprisingly, this isn't the only big news that Starbreeze announced. In addition to microtransactions being removed from PAYDAY 2, it also confirmed Payday 3 will be coming in the future. It didn't say this specifically, rather, the agreement with 505 Games for PAYDAY includes a note about money made from Payday 3.
Specifically, it says 505 will get a 33 percent revenue share of Starbreeze's net revenues from future sales of PAYDAY 3, capped at $40 million after Starbreeze, and after Starbeeze has fully recouped its development and marketing costs. In addition, 505 will retain full net revenue from PAYDAY 2 on the Steam platform starting retroactively from May 1st, 2016.
In the meantime, Starbreeze pledged to continue developing new content for PAYDAY 2 for at least 18 more months. This means that players can expect more content for the game through the end of 2017.
There's also an E3 teaser that starts around the 3:45 mark of the video featuring Dallas, Chains, and Dragan. You can watch it separately below:
