Payday 3 has online only lobbies. On launch nobody could play for weeks because they were entirely overrun. Truly a baffling decision after the steam deck launch, probably made because they had some deal with their server provider. All while also competing with payday 2.

Just checked and payday 2 is sitting at 20k current players while 3 is still <300.

For comparison helldivers launched several months later, also had always online with launch server capacity issues, at a much higher scale, and fixed them within a week. That’s with Sony resources backing them, but still. Payday was out for weeks before it was playable for most.

Just checked for laughs and helldivers 1 has more players than payday 3 right now.