Payday 3's game director is stepping down after a hard first year for the heist game sequel

Miodrag “Mio” Kovačević will be stepping down as game director of Payday 3, according to an announcement from Starbreeze released earlier today on the official Payday X account. 

"Mio will be stepping away from his former role as Game Director and focusing his efforts as a designer elsewhere in the project," Starbreeze said, while Payday lead producer Andreas Penninger and global brand director Almir Listo will be acting as "the creative force behind the upcoming updates."

Payday 3's shift in creative leadership comes at the end of a rocky first year for the co-op crime shooter. Catastrophic server woes rendered the game nearly unplayable at release, while misguided progression schemes left players feeling like the sequel was more of a step backwards, as Tyler Colp wrote in our Payday 3 review. Attempts to improve the state of affairs just seemed to add more dysfunction, as patch deployment issues produced a weeks-long delay for Payday 3's first update.

Kovačević's stepping down as game director isn't the first leadership change to come out of the Payday 3 turmoil. In March 2024, six months after Payday 3's release, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren left the company. Sjögren was seemingly ousted by a frustrated board of directors, judging from a statement made by Starbreeze chairman Torgny Hellström in an accompanying press release. "The board’s consolidated assessment is that the execution of strategy needs a different leadership," Hellström said. Before his departure, Sjögren had said Payday 3 sales and player counts were "at significantly lower levels than we would like."

While Payday 3's received regular updates and new heists in the months since its disastrous launch period, it's struggled to gain any momentum with its player base. By October 2023, its concurrent player counts had sunk below Payday 2's, and according to Steamdb have remained lower at every point since. At time of writing, there are less than 700 players in Payday 3—less than 10% of Payday 2's 8,700.