The main thing for the weekend (September 23-24)

The head of Starbreeze apologized for the problematic release of Payday 3, the creators of cheats for Valorant were arrested in China, online Cyberpunk 2077 reached the highest level since 2021, – we tell you what happened in the gaming industry over the weekend.

Gamers are dissatisfied with the state of the Payday 3 criminal shooter. The project is massively criticized for poorly functioning servers, a controversial matchmaking system and other problems. A few days after the release of the game, Starbreeze CEO Tobias Sjögren published a statement on X (Twitter) in which he apologized to the audience and promised to put the game in order. “We are very sorry that the infrastructure is not working as we expected. Although it is impossible to prepare for all scenarios, we had to show ourselves better. We will continue to work hard to restore all services so that gamers can return to the robberies,” Siegren wrote. Note that at the time of writing the news, Payday 3 has only 34% positive reviews on Steam.

The Chinese police arrested ten people involved in the development and distribution of cheats for Valorant. The police had been preparing for the capture of criminals for a month, cooperating with Tencent, the parent company of the Riot Games studio that created the game. During the operation, she seized 17 computers and eight smartphones that were used for illegal purposes, and estimated the income of the authors of the cheats at $ 4 million.

According to SteamDB, on Sunday, 169,711 people played the Steam version of Cyberpunk 2077 at the peak at the same time. The last time such an online game was in early January 2021, a month after the release. As a result, Cyberpunk 2077 came in ninth place in the top of the most popular games on Steam in terms of daily online, beating GTA V. Recall that Cyberpunk 2077 managed to achieve online growth thanks to patch 2.0, which significantly changed many aspects of the game.