Payday 3 expected to launch in 2022 or 2023

It's been a hard time for Starbreeze, with the gang behind Payday 2 and Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons facing a very real possibility they wouldn't survive another year. As they continue to try to recover from serious financial problems, they now foresee a bright and lucrative future led by one game: Payday 3. We should expect the latest in the really-quite-good cooperative heist FPS in 2022 or 2023, they've said in a new financial filing. Which seemed forever away until I realised it's almost 2020? As in, 2020 starts within three months? And then it's basically 2525? And we'll be living on the Moon? Time, eh.

Starbreeze have been talking about Payday 3 since 2016 but this is the most they've said to say about it since their cloud of financial doom rolled in. They've now estimated a big boost in cash flow based chiefly on signing a publishing agreement for Payday 3 in the first half of 2020 then launching the game "in 2020-2023."

Ah y'know what, now I say it again, that does feel ages away. But I'm okay with a break. Starbreeze and their Overkill studio added new maps and characters and things in free updates and paid DLC for a solid five years. They took cooperative heisting just about everywhere they could, including hitting a secret Illuminati base for spooky artifacts and busting into the chuffing White House to swipe presidential pardons. They can't escalate from there, only reset. Time out to reset expectations is fine. And time to recover from moneyhell.

Starbreeze filed for administration in December 2018, seeking time to rebuild the company so they'd be better-equipped to pay off creditors and survive. They'd been in trouble for a while, and this was not helped by Overkill's The Walking Dead later flopping hard and getting pulled from sale a few months after launch.

Five months after saying they might not survive another year, Starbreeze are still here and looking ahead to Payday 3. Fingers crossed.