Overkill: ‘For all the distress we’ve caused the past few weeks… we’re sorry’

Still not ditching microtransactions

Last week Payday 2 developer Overkill had a sit down to discuss various things with their Steam community moderators, who had gone on strike following even further tweaks to the game’s controversial new microtransactions.

Now Overkill has taken to their own steam forums to make an apology for uh… something. They never explicitly mention the microtransactions that caused this mess for them in the first place. They simply apologise for something, say they’ll fix it somehow, and then go on to talk about all the community figureheads they’ll be talking to shortly.

The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community. Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike. For all the distress we’ve caused the past few weeks, I’d just like to take the time and say that we’re sorry. We’ve done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up.

We need to get better at many things, and we will do our best to improve as soon as possible.

For some, this apology might well be enough. It’s nice to see a company at least acknowledge they’ve made a mistake, which God knows doesn’t happen enough in the games industry. It wouldn’t be fair not to give credit where it’s due, so at least Overkill know they’ve been shitty the past few weeks.

The problem I personally have with this statement is that isn’t saying anything we didn’t already know from their interview with the steam moderators. Overkill knows they’ve screwed up, but it seem to believe it was a problem of simply not explaining the changes well enough to players, as opposed to going against their previous word and implementing those changes in the first place.

They acknowledge the “distress” they have caused, but without putting concrete plans in place to actually fix the problem, the apology is pointless. They even discuss an apparently undocumented conversation they had with the Steam community moderators, in which they gave suggestions on how to ‘improve’ the microtransactions and the underwhelming Completely Overkill pack. Sounds good, right?

Except then Overkill state that although they’ve had these suggestions and are “discussing” them, there is no promise they or any other change will actually be made:

Today we had a meeting with Ashley and Jones, two of our volunteer moderators. Ashley and Jones has been collecting questions from the community that we discussed during the meeting. Two of the topics were stat boosts and the latest COP [Completely Overkill Pack] reward. We’re currently looking into what we can do to make up for the final COP-reward. Ashley and Jones gave several suggestions from the community that we are currently discussing internally. Our main goal is to try to find a way to reduce or remove the random elements of the final reward, whatever that reward will be.

Regarding stat boosts, Ashley and Jones suggested that we introduce something similar to StatTrak as part of future safes, a feature used in CS:GO in their cases. This is something we’ve been thinking about as well, and something that we will discuss going forward. I must stress however that we cannot currently make any promises but these are things we will be discussing as we move forward.

The big problem isn’t Overkill not listening to their game’s community (although that is certainly a problem); their big problem is the entire weapon skin drop system that pissed everyone off in the first place. If their apology was genuine, that system would no longer be there. Yet it is, and there are no promises to change them.

I also think it’s funny that after this non-apology they then describe at length the PR campaign they will be doing to try and sweep all of this controversy under the rug. But that’s a whole other complaint for another day.

Just come on, Overkill. Payday 2 is a great game, but you keep making these really basic mistakes that you don’t want to admit to. That is why people are angry.