The creators of PAYDAY 3 will buy back the publishing rights to the game
A year and a half ago, developers from Starbreeze released the cooperative shooter PAYDAY 3. During this time, the publishing rights to the game belonged to PLAION, a subsidiary of Embracer Group. However, these rights are now returning to the creators of the title.
PAYDAY 3
Starbreeze announced that it has reached an agreement with PLAION on the deal. To finance the purchase, Starbreeze will issue 147,676,204 Class B shares with a total value of 33 million Swedish kronor (3.44 million dollars). All the issued shares will be acquired by Embracer Group.
Notably, of this amount, 29 million Swedish kronor (3 million dollars) will be used to repay an old debt to PLAION related to PAYDAY 3. The details of this debt are not disclosed.
As explained by Starbreeze, the deal will accelerate the creation of new content for the game and improve the development of the franchise overall.
The company also emphasized that acquiring the publishing rights does not mean ending the collaboration with PLAION. On the contrary, both parties wish to establish a long-term partnership and work together on PAYDAY again in the future.
It's worth noting that PAYDAY 3 performed worse than Starbreeze expected. Upon release, the game was so heavily criticized that the company had to form a separate team to refine the shooter, and later, they changed its game director. In recent months, the daily active users of PAYDAY 3 on Steam rarely exceed a thousand people, while the second installment in the series consistently holds above 20 thousand users. Nonetheless, in 2024 PAYDAY 3 brought in twice the revenue for Starbreeze compared to PAYDAY 2, totaling 82.9 million Swedish kronor (8.65 million dollars).