Payday 2 developer Starbreeze is ready to apologize after sending players into a frenzy. It increased the price to buy DLC without telling them… then announced a monthly DLC subscription service as what it describes in an post on Steam as a "cost effective alternative."
There are several things wrong with this picture, those players might argue. First, the heart of the issue: Starbreeze only announced its DLC subscription plan, which costs $5 a month or $20 for six months, after surreptitiously bumping up the price of its entire Infamous Collection DLC pack by around $50. Then, there's the principle.
"Adding a subscription to try milk a 12 year old game and upping the price of the dlc bundle because you refuse to put any money or effort into the sequel is downright shameful," says a "Not Recommended" Steam review with 546 "helpful" ratings as of writing.
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"They keep coming back to beat this dead horse into hamburger," says another Not Recommended review.
Starbreeze can at least recognize that it looks like it tried pushing people who have been, theoretically, playing its game for a decade into buying a subscription instead of making 2023's Payday 3 worth anything, and that this is a bad thing. Or, as Starbreeze head of commercial Gustav Nisser writes in a statement to Game Developer, the developer "dropped the ball."
"The negative reaction makes complete sense," Nisser says. "We agree with the community, we messed up on this one, and we have reverted the price on the bundle effective immediately." He thinks Starbreeze "should have realized how it would seem," and it currently costs $85 to buy all 75 pieces of DLC included in the Infamous Collection (which, to be fair, is a lot of DLC). But Starbreeze is still going ahead with its subscription model.
"I bet this one wasn't on your 2025 bingo card," says Starbreeze's original subscription announcement on Steam. Nope.
Anyway, here are the 25 best FPS games to play in 2025.
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