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

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Starbreeze gets another leadership shakeup following its CEO departure back in March.

Payday 3 screenshot where a masked character holds a person hostage
(Image credit: Tyler C. / Starbreeze Studios)

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 . 

"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 updates."

Payday 3's shift in creative leadership comes at the end of a rocky first year for the co-op crime shooter. 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 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.

Lincoln Carpenter
News Writer

Lincoln has been writing about games for 11 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before ing on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.