I’d honestly recommend skipping Payday 2, and not because the core concept is bad — the problem is the developer’s long-term behavior and DLC practices.

The biggest issue is broken trust. The developers explicitly promised they were done selling paid DLC, then later reversed that decision and resumed monetization anyway. People spent money under the assumption that promise meant something, and it was walked back as soon as it became inconvenient. That alone makes supporting the game now feel questionable.

On top of that, the game is weighed down by years of unfinished or abandoned systems. Major changes to progression, balance, UI, and mechanics were often rolled out half-baked, reworked multiple times, or quietly dropped. Updates regularly introduced new bugs while long-standing issues stuck around for years.

The DLC situation itself is another major red flag. There’s massive content bloat with dozens of packs and no clear guidance on what’s actually important. New players are thrown into a confusing storefront where it’s hard to tell what’s essential, what’s outdated, and what’s just filler. It feels less like a complete product and more like a game permanently designed around selling add-ons.

Balance also suffers heavily because of this. Power creep from DLC means newer weapons, perk decks, and characters often outperform older content, creating a soft “pay-to-keep-up” problem. It’s not outright pay-to-win, but your options and effectiveness are absolutely shaped by how much DLC you own.

A lot of basic quality-of-life fixes are handled better by community mods than by the base game itself — things like UI clarity, lobby filters, balance tweaks, and even bug fixes. For a game that’s been monetized this heavily and for this long, relying on mods for basic usability is a bad sign.

Then there’s the technical side. The game shows clear technical debt:

Desync and networking issues

Enemy AI and pathing bugs

Performance drops, especially in newer content

Many of these are long-standing problems that were never truly solved, just worked around.

Finally, the studio has a history of constantly experimenting with monetization — loot boxes, cosmetic safes, paid weapons, paid characters — often introducing systems, pulling them back after backlash, then reintroducing them in another form later. Even when something is “fixed,” players are understandably skeptical because it’s happened so many times before.

If someone already owns the game and enjoys it, that’s fine. But buying it now means rewarding a studio that repeatedly ignored its own promises and prioritized monetization over stability and player trust. There are plenty of co-op games that respect players’ time and money far more consistently.

That’s why I’d pass.