Payday has come to Fortnite, because today’s cool gamers are ‘discovering legendary IPs in entirely new ways’

The ongoing effort to come up with a new Payday game that people actually want to play continued today with the announcement of Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience, a UEFN game that’s available exclusively in (you guessed it) Fortnite.

Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience “reimagines elements of Payday as a progressive roguelike shooter,” with three separate heists—the Jewelry Store, the Bank, and the Harbor—each of them made up of multiple unique rooms “ensuring endless replayability.”

“We recognize that today’s audiences are discovering legendary IPs in entirely new ways,” Starbreeze chief growth officer Matt Dixon said. “Integrating Payday into the Fortnite ecosystem through UEFN is a cornerstone of our strategy to engage new players and welcome them into the broader Payday platform.”

That’s the sort of utterance that you’re only going to hear from an entertainment industry executive, but it does nonetheless get to the heart of Starbreeze’s big problem. Payday 2, which launched in 2013, is still chugging along on Steam, with concurrent player counts that keep it consistently within the platform’s 100 most-played games.

But Payday 3 continues to flounder, and while updates are still rolling out it’s hard to shake the feeling that Starbreeze is looking elsewhere for the future of the franchise. The studio announced a Roblox spinoff game in April—actually the second, following Notoriety: A Payday Experience, which came out in 2024—as prior to that, a VR game called Payday: Aces High.

Heist Escape Roguelike: Payday Experience is live now in Fortnite. If you want to check it out for yourself, use Island Code 8105-9005-4478.