Payday 2 Dev Explains and Defends Introduction of Microtransactions

Payday 2 developer Overkill Software has defended its recent Black Market update, which introduces optional microtransactions the team team-based shooter.

Posting in a Reddit AMA, producer Almir Listo responded to questions pertaining to the update, the media coverage of it, and the response from the Payday 2 community.

According to Listo, Overkill decided to introduce microtransactions--despite previously saying it wouldn't do so--as a result of extended post-launch support, and the growth of its team to support this.

"Since we released Payday 2 back in 2013, the Overkill crew working on the project has more than tripled in size," he explained. "As our ambition for post-launch has grown, we’ve hired more people to help us make it happen.

"Two years ago people would have us instantly start work on Payday 3, right after we released Payday 2, like developers usually do. Instead, we decided to continue work on Payday 2, because we wanted to make it an incredible co-op experience."

He continued: "We have a partnership with our partner 505 Games, where we have a deal to produce a specific amount of content until 2017. However, we at Overkill want to create more than what we and 505 Games agreed on. We want to do everything we can to make Payday 2 as awesome as possible.

"In order to do that, we made the decision to triple the size of the crew. To ensure that we can keep the size of the team, we decided that the best approach was to introduce the Black Market update to the game."

The Black Market update, according to its developer, was designed to "open up a brand new way of allowing you to personalise your weapons with skins, mods and more."

Items are acquired by unlocking safes, which--initially--could only be done by purchasing a special drill for $2.50. Since then the drill has been added as a random drop. Once the safe is cracked open, the player is given a random weapon skin or item, some of which can impact gameplay.

Elsewhere in the AMA, Listo indicated the the microtransaction aspect of the game was proving to be successful for the studio, seemingly suggesting it has no plans to remove it.

"We have a system that everyone can participate in, where players can earn actual money while playing Payday 2. If you don't want to purchase anything, that's completely fine, as you can just sell what you get and continue focusing on the core experience of Payday 2. Meanwhile, the added funds allow us to continue making the game better and better all the time.

"We understand that there is a lot of fury, anger, and disappointment with us adding this. From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended. Going forward, we hope we can convince the parts of the community that resist this change that this was the right decision to do to ensure the stability of Overkill as an independent developer and the future growth of Payday 2."