Ho boy, if you thought the Payday 2 community was angry when Overkill first added random stat boosts to paid skins, you've seen nothing yet.

Now, in Update 90, when you open a chest and get a random skin you not only have a chance for it to have an in-game stat boost, you also have a chance for it to give you (and your team) an experience and cash boost.

What happened Overkill?

If you've never played Payday 2 you might just dismiss this as yet another company trying to milk their customer base but this time it hurts a lot more.

Overkill used to be really good about DLC. Even though there was a lot of it and some of it had in game benefits in the form of different weapons at the end of the day you could play any of the DLC maps completely free as long as you joined a group whose leader owned it.

It was a great model that worked for both sides and the game kept growing both in playerbase and in content.

I stopped playing Payday 2 some 5-6 months ago when I more or less finished everything but I didn't leave enraged, I left satisfied, and looking at how things are developing now it seems I got lucky.

Let me preface this by saying this is all guesswork but it would appear that with some of the key people (including the founder) leaving the company earlier this year Overkill underwent a very big shift in business. Even the "we will never do microtransactions" policy that they've held on to firmly for the entire life of the game just suddenly got ignored and the worst kind of random chest system introduced.

What really puzzles me is why they are willing to bear all this bad press, surely simply having a chest with cool skins inside is enough to make you obscene amounts of money, if Dota 2 or CS:GO are any comparison. So why take the shaky route of adding random benefits to random skins at random times?

This whole mess now leaves me not angry but rather weary for the future of their other, yet unreleased games, The Walking Dead FPS and the futuristic coop FPS Storm. Only time will tell if they will be able to avoid the bad practices that hit Payday 2 recently.