Overkill is dealing with a major fan outcry after the announcement at Crimefest, their ten day fan event, of the new “Black Market” update that has a Safe loot drop after missions, but requires $2.49 to open.
According to the official site, ”Vlad’s operation is smuggling brand-new, precision-engineered Safes from Washington state to Washington D.C. But these safes are tough to open. Only the best heisters, with the right tool, can crack them… Each safe drops a slick weapon skin, and each skin may have special mods and a stat boost associated with it. Sometimes, very rarely, a safe may even contain a precious Legendary skin.”
The developer did not respond to media inquiries. Instead, producer Almir Listo held a Reddit AMA to directly interact with fans, and blamed the media for creating a controversy, stating, ”I think the problem here really is people in positions of power in media and elsewhere making uninformed, clickbait articles about things that matter a lot to a lot of people, instead of doing some serious legwork to get their facts straight.”
He also stated, ”The reason why we didn’t want to discuss this was that it wasn’t fully launched until after Crimefest. Not in our wildest dreams could we anticipate the type of reaction that the update received during the first few days. Day by day people calmed down and started to discuss the changes - and here we are, discussing this now.”
Listo went on to say that they decided to stick with supporting Payday 2 instead of developing Payday 3, and occasionally having 75% discounts to boost sales. ” We do sales when we can where we reduce the price point up to 75% in order to pay people’s wages and create a buffer for a rainy day. Six months ago, we also made a bold move to permanently reduce the price point of 16 PAYDAY 2 products by 33-43% in the hopes of drawing additional sales.” However, this failed to raise money. ”Needless to say, we didn’t see the result we anticipated, and have had to think of other ways to make sure we can continue creating content in the pace we want in order to keep PAYDAY 2 fresh and exciting.”
Back in 2013, Listo posted in the Steam community forums, ” We’ve made it clear that PAYDAY 2 will have no micro-transactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!) and we’ve made it more clear that the PAYDAY loot bag is part of the Career Criminal Edition as well.”
