Starbreeze's newly announced status of the long-awaited first patch for "Payday 3" is not good news: the patch is not ready yet, nor do they know when it will be released. Instead, the studio offered a brief explanation as to why things have gotten so dire and what they are doing to fix it.

Amidst all the doom and gloom, there is a bright spot: the process that requires Sony and Microsoft to ensure, as much as possible, that updates to their games do not cause unintended grief. At the time, Starbreeze expected to be able to release the patch by mid-October, but obviously that didn't work out.

Postponements are never fun, but this time it was probably for the best; Starbreeze has stated that the situation could have been even worse had they not postponed the patch.

"The reasons why it took so long to prepare this first patch are very long and complicated, but the short answer is that we found a serious error in the update pipeline shortly after the game was released." Without addressing this and ensuring a solid testing environment, there was a serious risk that player progressions would be erased."

said Starbreeze.

As for why the console certification process is withholding patches on PC, Starbreeze said, "We promised players that we would be fair across all platforms." In other words, if they wait, we wait.

Every game and situation is different, and "Payday 3" is clearly running into far more serious problems than anyone expected. Still, it's hard not to compare it to "Lords of the Fallen": less than two weeks after the game launched with serious performance and stability issues, developer Hexworks has released eight updates, and players' goodwill (among them some worry that the developer is working too hard to keep up the pace of patches) and has done much to restore faith that the game will perform to its potential. Starbreeze, on the other hand, has done nothing but apologize, explain, and ask for patience.

Starbreeze's developers are frustrated, to be sure, but so are the players. This is reflected in the number of concurrent users for "Payday 3," which has dropped precipitously since the game's launch on September 21. Currently, 2,609 people are playing the game, not a complete collapse, but far from the peak of more than 69,000; Payday 2 has been around for a decade, so the player base is probably much larger, but this is a clear indication that people are not moving on to the new game as they should A clear sign that people are not moving on to newer games as they should.

Besides fixing the patch, Starbreeze is also looking at ways to change Payday 3's progression system in response to player feedback and said it will share more information soon." Once the patches can be consistently delivered, the team will also realize further content plans for the game." Expect to see free content updates for the game by the end of the year and we will share more information about these contents when we get there."