Payday: The Heist may have received middling reviews in 2011, yet few could deny it offered anything less than a thrilling cooperative experience. The bank robber fantasy invited PC and PlayStation 3 users to assemble crews of four and take on daring, high-stakes heists. Within a year, over 700,000 players had joined the shooter’s criminal underworld, an impressive feat for developer Overkill Software’s first game. The studio delivered repeat success two years later upon deploying Payday 2, which reviewed marginally better and sold so well that it turned a profit days before launch. Throughout the sequel’s lengthy life-cycle, Overkill established a steady live-service support cadence as well as quality expectations that fans held in high esteem. Such standards would not be met when the third installment landed a decade later.