“We will be able to share a date with you relatively soon when the first update for consoles will hit,” said Payday 2 producer Amir Listo in February. We’ve been making some real progress.” It’s now the end of July, and there’s no indication when console owners are getting new content.


Payday 2: Crimewave Edition is an updated version of Payday 2, released for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in June 2015. The Xbox One version famously had matchmaking issues for months after the game was released.

On PC, developer Overkill has been regularly issuing content updates, such as new heists, to keep players interested. None of that has shown up on the console version, though Overkill has been promising it since launch.


Understandably, Overkill was focused on matchmaking when the console versions came out. Since then, Overkill has occasionally published videos to YouTube vaguely promising that progress was being made. Though it promised an update in February, a video on April 8 brought little news.

“We can’t give you guys an exact release schedule yet, but as soon as we can, we will do that,” said Listo. “For all of those out there who are in disbelief that we maybe aren’t working on this or whatever. Don’t worry, we are working on this. [...] We are continuing development, that we do care about this, and we’re sorry that it’s taking so much time.”

A few weeks later, another declaration things were moving forward.

“We are making great progress, and we are getting a lot closer to having it fully working,” said producer Andreas Penniger. “Today, we’re going to show you gameplay on the console for the first time.”


They did, at least, show off gameplay.

Though console owners have been patient for more than a year, things came to a head this week when a Steam post titled “400 days with no console update” went viral and blew up on reddit. The Steam user seemed to figure a message board for the PC version was a good place to get heard.


He was right. Producer Amir Listo soon responded to folks’ concerns.

“We are currently in a loop of bug testing -> bug fixing -> bug testing until we have a solid update,” said Listo. “As soon as we can give you a date that we can stand by, we will do so.”


You can imagine why some folks might take that with a grain of salt.

“We haven’t abandoned development,” he said. “We’ve never been closer to to releasing more content on consoles than we are now. What I’ve said to others is that whatever I or anyone else in the crew says right now doesn’t matter until you guys actually get some solid dates and actual content. That’s why we did the last status update and are focusing on finishing it up.”


Listo said there was a “unique set of challenges” that has made the console updates take so long, and explained how they’re actively working on a system to make future updates easier to pull off.

“If we could add more developers and thus finish it faster we would do that,” he said. “However, that is not how it works; every project is different and sadly in the scenario we are in, throwing more people on the project won’t solve anything. We need to let the team work and finish the update, one day at a time.”


Though there’s still no release date, Overkill understands the anger.

“I can only offer my apologies that it’s taking this long to release additional content and that we can’t be more specific on when it’s ready,” he said. “We are taking every necessary step to ensure that we never let you console heisters down again in this kind of fashion. It goes without saying that we are frustrated as well not being able to solve it better than we have.”


The company’s answers are getting downvoted on reddit, meaning it’s harder for people to find them. On Twitter, the company is making its case.


For now, console players continue to wait.

This is hardly the first controversy surrounding Payday 2, either. After pledging to not include microtransactions in the game, the developers experimented with microtransactions. It did not go very well.