“You know the drill! Each safe can only be opened with a specially-designed drill, which can only be acquired from the Steam Market. Buy a drill and then use it or trade it – the choice is yours. Gang, the Black Market is open!” In layman’s terms, “give us more money”. This is the message you receive from Payday 2 encouraging you to engage in microtransactions. It was also something introduced 2 years into the game and after the developer, Overkill, had previously promised to never participate in the practice.
That change of pace lead to some unsurprising ire from the community of players and has tossed the game into several weeks of in-fighting and anger that hasn’t really diminished all that much.
While those provocative inclusions remain, Overkill did finally issue an apology via Steam stating, "The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community…Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike. For all the distress we've caused the past few weeks, I'd just like to take the time and say that we’re sorry. We've done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up.”
Though it’s nice to see a company admit their mistakes, it will be nicer to see what Overkill plans to do to recover their credibility with their fanbase, though they have committed to reaching out to dominate members of the Payday 2 community, including top modders and volunteer moderators, but one has to wonder if the damage has been done.
