Back in 2025, Starbreeze turned its venerable heist-shooter Payday 2 over to a new studio, Sidetrack Games, so it could focus exclusively on trying to salvage the still-struggling Payday 3. Today we got our first look at the fruits of those efforts, and it’s big news—not for Payday 3, to be clear, but for Payday 2, which is getting a major overhaul to its game engine.
The engine update will see Payday 2 ported to a 64-bit architecture, which should eliminate out-of-memory crashes that have persisted over the years, and upgraded to DirectX 11 rendering—that won’t make the game look any better but it will use significantly less VRAM and thus run better on lower-end hardware. The install size has also been reduced by more than half, from 86GB to 32GB.
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The downside to all of this will sound familiar: As Leon from Sidetrack Games says in the video, “Sadly, it’s inevitable that some mods will break.” He encouraged mod makers to “repair what can be repaired” during the beta test for the engine upgrade, and promised that “we will be there to help out with new file formats where we can.”
And yes, there will be a beta test for those who want to check out the engine overhaul before it’s fully cooked: It’s set to start on June 30 and run until the end of July, and will be open to everyone who wants in. Details on that—including how to get in, I would assume—will be posted on the 30th.
For now, the pressing question is the same as it ever was: What does this mean for Payday 3? Payday 2 continues to fly high on Steam while its supposed successor lags far behind with a small fraction of players.
And while shunting Payday 2 off to Sidekick was ostensibly meant to enable Starbreeze to “focus on Payday as a whole and Payday 3 in particular,” all we’ve really seen since then from the newer game are crossovers with PUBG and Roblox, and the launch of peer-to-peer support—which is always good, yes, but also makes me wonder if Starbreeze is weighing whether those dedicated servers it’s maintaining are really worth it. As we said when the Payday game in Roblox went live, Starbreeze hasn’t declared Payday 3 dead yet, but it sure does seem to be paying a lot of attention to other things.
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