Payday 2
PAYDAY 2 is an action-packed, four-player co-op shooter that once again lets gamers don the masks of the original PAYDAY crew - Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf and Chains - as they descend on Washington DC for an epic crime spree.
First-Person ShooterSimulationStrategy
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- Released
- 2013
- Developer
- Overkill Software
- Platforms
- 3 systems
- Critics
- 79
- Steam Deck
- verified
- Download
- 32 GB
What is Payday 2?
PAYDAY 2 is an action-packed, four-player co-op shooter that once again lets gamers don the masks of the original PAYDAY crew - Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf and Chains - as they descend on Washington DC for an epic crime spree.
Description as published by the developer on its own store page, read 30 August 2026. It is marketing copy, not our assessment.
The record
| First released | 13 August 2013 |
|---|---|
| Developer | Overkill Software |
| Publisher | Starbreeze Studios, 505 Games |
| Platforms | PC, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck |
| Genres | First-Person Shooter, Simulation, Strategy |
| Languages | 12 supported |
Source. Catalogue facts from Wikidata Q7156711, seeded 30 August 2026. Store data from Steam, read 30 August 2026.
How was Payday 2 received?
Method. Player figures are Steam's own totals for the PC version, read 30 August 2026. The Metacritic score is the one Steam publishes on its store page and can lag the site itself. Metacritic page. Neither is our opinion. We have not published a review of this game.
Accessibility
Seeing
- Camera Comfort
Hearing
- Custom Volume Controls
- Stereo Sound
Input
- Full controller support
- Playable without Timed Input
Difficulty
- Adjustable Difficulty
Method. Features the publisher declared on its own store page. A declaration is a floor, not a review.
What does it support?
| Capability | Support |
|---|---|
| Controller | full support |
| Cloud saves | Yes |
| Cross-platform play | No |
| Mod support | No official workshop |
| Online play | Yes |
| In-game purchases | Yes |
| Steam Deck | verified |
| Download size | 32 GB |
| Add-on content | 81 DLC listed |
| Age gate | 18+ |
Content descriptors
- Frequent violence or gore
- General mature content
Method. Read from the publisher's Steam listing on 30 August 2026. Describes the PC version. Console versions differ.
What does it cost?
Steam price in US dollars, read 30 August 2026. Prices move hourly and vary by region. Check the current price.
Is Payday 2 worth it?
89% of 674,295 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. It costs $9.99 on Steam, and critics score it 79/100.
That is the data, not a verdict for sale: whether it is worth it depends on the price you pay and what you want. Players do report problems — see the reported-problems section below before buying. We have not published our own review of this game.
How long is Payday 2? How long to beat it
Total play time for Payday 2 is about 538 hours to do everything, and around 26.8 hours to reach the end of the main story. These are player-submitted times from HowLongToBeat, not our own, shown with the number of players behind each.
| How you play | Hours | Players logged |
|---|---|---|
| Just the main story: straight through the critical path | 26.8h | 108 |
| Main + the extras: story plus the side content most people do | 156h | 119 |
| Completionist: everything: 100% the game | 538h | 47 |
At its current price of $9.99, beating the main story works out to about $0.37 per hour. That is the price divided by the hours, a value read and not a verdict: a longer game costs less per hour, which is not the same as being the better game.
Source: HowLongToBeat community submissions, read 2026-10-19.
Payday 2 system requirements
The minimum requirements from Payday 2's Steam page. These are what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings.
| Memory | 4 GB RAM (other games at this level) |
|---|---|
| Graphics | NVIDIA & AMD (1GB · runs on a low-end GPU |
| Storage | 32 GB (more games this size) |
| System | 64-bit OS required |
Where Payday 2 sits on the grid
Compare the whole cataloguePayday 2 plotted on the axes the GamingPickz Score is built from, on the full 0 to 100 scale so its position is its real one. Change either axis to see where it lands.
1 games have both
Players. The share of Steam reviews marked positive, pulled toward the catalogue average in proportion to how few reviews stand behind it. A game with 200 reviews moves a long way toward the average; one with 200,000 barely moves at all. Without this a title sitting at 100 percent on nine reviews outranks Half-Life 2 at 98 percent on 278,000.
Popularity. A blend of two things that are not the same. Audience is how many people wrote a Steam review, which is a floor on how many played it. Reach is how many language editions of Wikipedia document the game, which is cultural footprint rather than sales. A game can score high on one and low on the other: a huge free-to-play title has audience without reach, and a landmark console exclusive has reach without a Steam audience at all. Where both exist they are averaged; where only one does, that one carries it.
- Nintendo
Every point links to that game's entry. The value map and the reception map are fixed views of the same data.
How positions are decided
No paid placement, no favouritism, live third-party data
- Placed by the published method, not by us. Every coordinate is computed from the axis definitions and weights printed on this site. Nobody moves a point. See the axes.
- Nothing here is paid for. No sponsored placements, no promoted slots, no arrangement of any kind affects a position. If that ever changes it will be labelled and sit outside the ranking.
- No favouritism, including our own. The 16 games we have written full reviews of are scored by exactly the same formula as the other 1,510, from the same third-party inputs, and they land where it puts them. Our own opinion of a game does not enter its coordinates.
- A position is not an endorsement. It says how a game was received and what it costs, not that we recommend it. Where we do recommend something, it carries a written review with a name on it.
- Fetched from live third-party data. Player sentiment from Steam, critic aggregates as published on store pages, prices checked hourly, attention from Wikipedia. Each figure carries its source and the date it was read, and we do not adjust any of them.
Estimated sales for Payday 2
These are estimates, not reported figures. Overkill Software has not published unit sales for Payday 2, and nobody outside the company can measure them. What follows is arithmetic on the review count, with the method printed below so you can check it or reject it.
How this was calculated
Steam sales track review counts closely enough that dividing one by the other across games with published figures gives a usable multiplier. This is the standard method for estimating sales from outside a publisher.
| Reviews on Steam | 674,295 |
|---|---|
| Sales per review | 30 to 60 |
| List price | $9.99 |
| Assumed average selling price | 33% to 66% of list |
What this cannot tell you
Steam only. Console, Epic, GOG and retail sales are not in here. For a game that sold heavily on PlayStation this is a fraction of the real number.
The band is wide because the method is imprecise. Review rates vary with price, genre, launch era and how insistently a game asks. Published analyses put the ratio between 30 and 60 for paid games, and we show the whole range rather than picking a point in it.
The owner estimate above measures something else. SteamSpy counts accounts that have the game, which includes free weekends, bundles, giveaways and gifts. It sits higher than a sales figure for that reason, and the two are not alternative answers to the same question.
Revenue is the shakiest line. It assumes an average selling price well below list because most copies move in sales, and it ignores regional pricing, refunds, key resellers and whatever deal the publisher actually has with Valve. Treat it as an order of magnitude, not a figure.
If Overkill Software publishes a real number we will use that instead and say where it came from. Our editorial policy covers how we handle figures we cannot verify.
Payday 2 price & deals: is it on sale?
We have one reading so far: $9.99 on 30 August 2026. Prices are checked daily from here, and this becomes a chart once there is more than one point to join. A single observation is a price, not a history.
Latest Payday 2 updates & patch notes
Pulled from Payday 2's own Steam feed on 5 September 2026. Posts marked as from the studio were written by the developer; the rest are articles Steam syndicated from elsewhere. Every one links to its source.
What readers say about Payday 2
Reviews written by people who have played it. These are separate from the GamingPickz Score and are never averaged into it: that score comes from thousands of Steam reviews with a sample-size correction, and a handful of unverified ratings would distort it rather than improve it.
Loading reviews…
Problems players report
We read the 300 most recent negative Steam reviews of Payday 2 on 30 August 2026 and counted what they mention. These are complaints, not confirmed defects: we have not reproduced any of them, and a review describes one person's machine. What the counts tell you is which problems more than one person ran into.
- Crashes and freezes16 of 300 (5%)
game got updated , game loads and then crashes and yes i don't use mod's since i started playing payday 2 for 560 hours and in my time playing i've never had an update like this where my game would crash please fix this Starbreeze aka OVERKILL.
Steam review, 17 August 2026 · 561 hours played · 5 readers marked it helpfulI have an issue where my game freezes for a couple seconds every few seconds that makes playing impossible since it can interrupt interactions, stop my movement, and make it hard for a consistent and enjoyable experience.
Steam review, 16 August 2026 · 145 hours played · 5 readers marked it helpful
A further 7 reviews call the game buggy or broken without saying how, which is why they are counted separately rather than assigned to a theme. Counted by keyword across review text, so a review discussing two problems is counted under both. Read the reviews yourself.
Did it run on your PC?
Tell other players how it ran on your machine. One tap, from your saved PC if you have one.
Where Payday 2 appears
The ranked lists and finder pages Payday 2 qualifies for, from its own genre and platform to what it takes to run.
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Games like Payday 2
24 games overlap with Payday 2 on the tags Steam players applied to it, on genre, and on theme. The closest are PAYDAY The Heist, One-armed robber and PAYDAY 3.
Part of the Payday series
Payday 2 is one of 2 Payday games we track. See the whole series ranked by the GamingPickz Score, plotted on the grid, and listed in release order:
Payday 2 head to head
See Payday 2 compared side by side, on score, price, specs and more:
More Payday 2 comparisons: vs Perfect Heist 2, vs Total War: WARHAMMER II, vs Football Manager 2021, vs Age of Empires II (Retired), vs Company of Heroes, vs Sid Meier's Civilization V, vs Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, vs Counter-Strike, vs Orcs Must Die!, vs Anno 1800, vs Sniper Elite 5, vs Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2, vs Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands, vs Tropico 4, vs Age of History II, vs America's Army: Proving Grounds, vs Beholder, vs Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30, vs Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront, vs Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, vs Day of Defeat: Source, vs Door Kickers, vs Dungeons 3, vs ENDLESS Space 2, vs Enlisted: Reinforced, vs Europa Universalis IV, vs Frostpunk, vs Hearts of Iron IV, vs Insurgency, vs Kingdom: Classic, vs Men of War: Assault Squad 2, vs Overcooked! 2, vs Poker Night at the Inventory, vs Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad with Rising Storm, vs Sanctum 2, vs Slime Rancher, vs Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, vs Soda Dungeon, vs Stronghold: Crusader, vs Stronghold Crusader HD (2012), vs Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, vs Victoria II, vs World of Tanks
Common questions about Payday 2
What platforms is Payday 2 on?
Payday 2 is available on PC, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck. It first released in 2013.
How much does Payday 2 cost?
$9.99 on Steam in the United States, read on 30 August 2026. Prices move often and vary by region, so check the store before buying.
Do players recommend Payday 2?
89% of 674,295 Steam reviews are positive, which Steam rates Very Positive. That is players rating it, not our review. We have not published a review of this game.
What is the Metacritic score for Payday 2?
79 out of 100 for the PC version, as published on the game's own Steam store page. Steam can lag Metacritic by a few points.
Does Payday 2 work on Steam Deck?
Valve rates Payday 2 as verified on the Steam Deck, from its own testing. That means it works out of the box with no configuration.
How big is the Payday 2 download?
32 GB on PC, from the storage requirement on its Steam listing. Console versions differ.
Who made Payday 2?
Payday 2 was developed by Overkill Software and published by Starbreeze Studios, 505 Games.
Is Payday 2 worth it in 2026?
89% of 674,295 Steam reviews are positive (Very Positive), and it is $9.99 on steam. That is the strongest signal we hold; "worth it" depends on the price you pay and what you want, so weigh the sentiment against the current price above.
Is Payday 2 on sale?
Not at the moment. Payday 2 is at its $9.99 list price on Steam, read on 30 August 2026. It has been cheaper before; the price history above shows when.
What are the system requirements for Payday 2?
At minimum, Payday 2 needs 4 GB RAM, a NVIDIA & AMD (1GB, 32 GB of storage, from its Steam listing. That is what it takes to launch and be playable, not to run at high settings. Check it against your own PC on the can-I-run page.