Starbreeze Settles With Plaion Regarding Publishing Rights of Payday 3
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Key points
- Starbreeze settled with publisher Plaion regarding the rights to Payday 3.
- The studio mentioned in a press release that this settlement will accelerate its content development roadmap.
- Payday 3 was released on Sept. 21, 2023, and received mixed reviews from critics.
On May 6, Starbreeze announced that it had settled with Payday 3’s publisher, Plaion, indicating that it finally has the full rights to publish the game. According to the press release, Starbreeze has issued shares totaling 33 million Swedish kronas ($3.4 million) for the purchase.
“This agreement enables Starbreeze to fully acquire the publishing rights to PAYDAY 3 from Plaion, significantly accelerate our content development roadmap, and pursue broader strategic opportunities for the PAYDAY franchise as a whole,” said Starbreeze.
The press release goes further into the allocation of the proceeds, with 29 million kronas ($3 million) going to be used to repay the publisher under “previous agreement relating to PAYDAY 3.” Starbreeze will also pay 250,000 kronas ($26,000) just for the transaction costs.
Payday 3’s release was a disaster for Starbreeze. The game received mixed reviews from critics. While the game reached 1.3 million players at its launch, the game’s servers failed to sustain the numbers, resulting in days of outage.
The game was released on Sept. 21, 2023, for the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Payday 3 has a peak 24-hour player count of 679 on Steam. Its predecessor, Payday 2, currently has a 25,095 24-hour player count peak.
