When Payday 2 was still in development, Almir Listo, global brand director and Game Director David Goldfarb promised fans that the game would never include micro-transactions. The duo kept their promise for more than 2 years until last week when purchasable items started appearing in game in a Crimefest Community Event.
After getting chastised by players, Listo and the design team made the purchasable items available as free loot drops while keeping the option to purchase them. Later on, they clarified that micro transactions are here to stay. Needless to say, the community was not pleased, so Listo started a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) to clear things up.
In the AMA, Listo acknowledged his pre-release promises and insisted that micro-transactions are necessary to keep the servers running and that the majority of players are happy to have that option.
"Since we released PAYDAY 2 back in 2013, the OVERKILL crew working on the project has more than tripled in size. From 25 developers to today with 75 developers. This allows us to create better content more often across several platforms. Like we've said in the past, we do free updates when we can, and paid DLC when we have to. As our ambition for PAYDAY 2 post-launch has grown, we’ve hired more people to help us make it happen.
...Two years ago people would have us instantly start work on PAYDAY 3, right after we released PAYDAY 2, like developers usually do. Instead, we decided to continue work on PAYDAY 2, because we wanted to make it an incredible co-op experience. 88 updates later, we have to ensure the future survival of the game. 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. (https://www.overkillsoftware.com/games/meltdown/). 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.
We have a partnership with our partner 505 Games, where we have a deal to produce a specific amount of content until 2017. However, we at OVERKILL want to create more than what we and 505 Games agreed on. We want to do everything we can to make PAYDAY 2 as awesome as possible. In order to do that, we made the decision to triple the size of the crew. To ensure that we can keep the size of the team, we decided that the best approach was to introduce the Black Market update to the game.
…We understand that there is a lot of fury, anger and disappointment with us adding this. From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended. Going forward, we hope we can convince the parts of the community that resist this change that this was the right decision to do to ensure the stability of OVERKILL as an independent developer and the future growth of PAYDAY 2."
VIA: Reddit.