Overkill: "The Black Market Update Is Working As We Intended"

It seems that Payday 2's controversial Black Market Update that has dropped the game's Steam rating from 93% to 78% approval is here to stay. In an AMA held today, Producer Almir Listo stated that "We understand that there is a lot of fury, anger and disappointment with us adding this. From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended. Going forward, we hope we can convince the parts of the community that resist this change that this was the right decision to do to ensure the stability of OVERKILL as an independent developer and the future growth of PAYDAY 2." In other words, revenue has increased as expected and they are not planning to remove microtransactions from the game.

The reason for the update is supposedly as follows: "We have a partnership with our partner 505 Games, where we have a deal to produce a specific amount of content until 2017. However, we at OVERKILL want to create more than what we and 505 Games agreed on. We want to do everything we can to make PAYDAY 2 as awesome as possible. In order to do that, we made the decision to triple the size of the crew. To ensure that we can keep the size of the team, we decided that the best approach was to introduce the Black Market update to the game." It begs the question of whether it was worth it, however. They are currently receiving quite a lot of bad press solely based on their decision to implement microtransactions to bring in enough revenue to sustain their substantially larger crew.

In another comment, Almir states that "Regarding the weapon balance, we felt that we need to change the meta of the game, and make more weapons viable. People have been using the new system for ten days and we've gathered a lot of feedback. Before we go live with any changes, we'll adress them to the community to see if you agree, and go from there." It remains to be seen what this entails.

You can find the full AMA here. To go through Almir's answers, you might find it easier to just search his post history. There's quite a bit of noise in there.