Payday 2 has three times the Payday 3 players right now

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Payday 3 has had a rough launch; patches have been delayed and the matchmaking has been anything but stable. So, while Starbreeze has promised to fix these issues and said more heists are on the way for the co-op shooter, it’s currently being eclipsed by its predecessor Payday 2 on Steam.

While Payday 3 started out really strong on Steam, the FPS game has had a very quick nosedive in concurrent players, with decade-long stalwart Payday 2 remaining incredibly strong by contrast. Developer Starbreeze has already apologized for delaying a major Payday 3 patch, and said matchmaking upgrades are on the way, but that doesn’t change the numbers.

Payday 3 did start strong though, with an impressive concurrent player peak of around 80,000 players on Steam after launch. Within a few days though the numbers fell off sharply, with the player count steadily dropping to around the 10,000 mark.

That’s where Payday 2 comes in, as the previous game in the series has been hovering at around 40,000 players for a couple of months now. In fact, the 24-hour peak for Payday 2 as of the publication of this article is 43,174 players, with Payday 3 sitting at 14,449.

We see peaks and troughs every day with every game on Steam, but even right now (as of me writing this), Payday 2 has 26,845 players, and Payday 3 has 8,625. This means Payday 2 has around three times as many players as its sequel on average. Payday 3 is supposed to have a long tail though, so this could very well change once the servers even out and Starbreeze introduces more content, like new Payday 3 heists. Right now though, it’s not looking good.

If you’re one of the people playing Payday 3 right now we’ve got you covered with everything you need to know about Payday 3 vault codes and a breakdown of the best Payday 3 weapons, too.