Developer Starbreeze has fired CEO Tobias Sjögren after Payday 3 continues to disappoint. Sjögren will be immediately replaced by interim CEO Juergen Goeldner, as the company president says they need “a different leadership“.
Launched last September, Payday 3 has been a disaster for Starbreeze, with Steam reviews currently sitting at “Extremely negative“. Its number of players is also very small, less than 200 players on Steam at the time of writing. In fact, the highest number of players in 24 hours of Payday 3 is only 378, far behind. its predecessor was Payday 2 with 31,866 people.
According to a report by CGMagazine, this dismissal comes after former CEO Sjögren announced he would step down at the end of last year. It seems like Starbreeze wants to start making changes as soon as possible, as Sjögren’s departure was effective immediately and the company is currently looking for a new CEO.
“The company has a clear strategy focused on creating engaging games across our IPs,” said Starbreeze president Torgny Hellström. “The board’s collective assessment is that strategy execution requires different leadership.”
“On behalf of the board of directors, I would like to thank Tobias Sjögren for his achievements over the past three years.”
Payday 3 was mentioned in a statement from the interim CEO, but very briefly. It looks like Starbreeze is looking ahead to its next projects.
Juergen Goeldner said: “SAfter launching Payday 3, the company was well positioned to leverage the organization’s strengths to monetize and grow its IP portfolio. I look forward to taking on an executive position and working with the board to ensure implementation of this strategy.”
It’s unclear how maintaining support for Payday 3 will be affected by this CEO change. It’s still getting updates, as you’d expect from a game that requires players to be online all the time, but that might not last much longer if Starbreeze decides to cut losses to invest in other projects. .
The DLC released last December did not improve the game’s situation
With that said, Starbreeze admitted that fans were disappointed with the state of the game back in January and has outlined a plan to turn things around. This comes after they announced their search for a new CEO, so it’s very possible that future support is still in the plans. However, if that support doesn’t get the PC player base above triple digits, it’s unclear how long it will last.
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