Starbreeze has announced that Payday 3 game director Miodrag Kovačević, otherwise known as Mio, will be stepping down from his role in order to work "as a designer elsewhere in the project".
In a message on X (formerly Twitter), Starbreeze says that while it researches and plans Payday 3's second year of content, lead producer Andreas Häll Penninger and community head Almir Listo will be taking over the game's update schedule.
No timeframe is given as to when Payday 3 will get its next full-time creative director, so it looks like we'll just have to wait and see what Andreas and Almir bring to the project in the interim.
In general, reactions to Mio's departure appear to be mostly positive. One user says that this decision "was likely with how things went down during Year 1", while another says that Mio's departure is "unfortunate" but "a massive W" nonetheless.
Mio's exit from his role as director comes as Payday 3 continues to flag in terms of player count and user reviews. A quick look at SteamDB shows that Payday 3 currently has just under 600 players online with a 771-player 24-hour peak, while Payday 2's 24-hour peak is much higher at just under 15,000.
All told, it's been a rough ride for Payday 3. The game launched in September last year to middling reviews, and although it enjoyed tens of thousands of concurrent players at launch, those numbers quickly dwindled as players fled, seemingly in order to return to Payday 2.
In February this year, Starbreeze admitted that Payday 3 had performed at "significantly lower levels" than it wanted, and former CEO Tobias Sjögren stepped down in March, partly due, it seems, to the game's poor performance.
In response to Payday 3's woes, Starbreeze announced an ambitious initiative called Medic Bag, which involves overhauling many of the game's key systems. Last month, a roadmap was released showing off some of what's coming in the next few months as part of that initiative.
If you feel like checking it out, you can grab Payday 3 right now on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. It's also available as part of an Xbox Game Pass subscription on both PC and Xbox.
