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PAYDAY 3’s Free Weekend Drew 320,000 Players

More than 250,000 players tried the game for the first time, and concurrent players topped 22,000 on Sunday.

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More than 320,000 players joined PAYDAY 3 for its free weekend, including 250,000 first-timers, Starbreeze CEO Adolf Kristjansson said in a message to players. At 20:39 CET on Sunday, more than 22,000 players were in the game at once, well above its usual peak. PAYDAY 3's rebuild included an Unreal Engine 5 upgrade and the move to include every heist in the base game, changes detailed in PAYDAY 3 Update 3.8.

The weekend gave Starbreeze a large-scale look at PAYDAY 3 after a year of changes. The rebuild included an upgrade to Unreal Engine 5 and putting every heist in the base game, completing the plan Starbreeze outlined in August. Kristjansson said the studio still has work to do.

Players completed 725,671 heists, while 139,495 ended badly. Crews secured 8.9 million loot bags and $601.6 billion in game cash, spending 542,000 hours on the job over four days. No Rest For The Wicked was the most-started heist, with more than 700,000 runs, while First World Bank produced the biggest combined haul at $88.9 billion.

Kristjansson described 2026 as a year for rebuilding player trust and said 2027 would focus on rewarding it. Starbreeze says regular updates will continue, and that something new will arrive later in November, though it did not identify what.

Which free-weekend stat would your crew put at the top of the scoreboard? Follow Starbreeze’s plan to move from rebuilding trust to rewarding it on X, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, Steam, and Telegram.

PAYDAY 3 is a 1-to-4 player co-op FPS and the ultimate heist fantasy, set in the most iconic city in the world. Gone without a trace or through a hail of bullets. Either way, you're getting out with the prize.