Overkill Software was built from the remains of another Swedish studio. Brothers Bo and Ulf Andersson had founded Grin in 1997, a developer whose credits included Bionic Commando, and when Grin went bankrupt and closed in 2009 after a planned Final Fantasy-based project with Square Enix fell through, the brothers started again in Stockholm that September alongside composer Simon Viklund. The new studio's first game set the course for everything that followed. PAYDAY: The Heist, released on October 20, 2011 for Windows and PlayStation 3, was a four-player co-op shooter about pulling off armed robberies as a masked crew, with drills that jam at the worst moment, hostages to trade for captured crewmates, escalating police assaults and a pounding Viklund soundtrack that made every vault breach feel like a set piece. Starbreeze Studios acquired Overkill in April 2012 and moved the team into its Stockholm offices, and PAYDAY 2 arrived on August 13, 2013, with 505 Games supporting the retail release. It turned the formula into a full criminal career, with contracts to choose from, skill trees, a stealth route through many heists, masks to unlock and a weapon modification system deep enough to shape how each player approaches a job, and it became the game the studio is known for.
The years after PAYDAY 2 brought both the studio's biggest swing and its hardest stretch. Bo Andersson became CEO of Starbreeze in 2013 while still overseeing Overkill, Ulf Andersson announced his departure in May 2015, and in May 2016 505 Games sold its share of the PAYDAY IP back to Starbreeze, giving the company and Overkill full ownership of the franchise. Overkill's The Walking Dead, a co-op shooter set in Skybound's comic universe, launched on PC in November 2018 to mixed reviews; its console versions were put on hold, Starbreeze filed for reconstruction that December, Bo Andersson stepped down as CEO, and Skybound withdrew the license in February 2019. The studio came through as part of Starbreeze and returned to the series that made its name with PAYDAY 3, released in 2023 for Windows, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Overkill remains a Starbreeze studio headquartered in Stockholm, and PAYDAY 2 is still very much alive more than a decade after launch: in 2026 it moved to version 3 of the Diesel engine in August and added a new heist, Under the Hammer, in September, with PC maintenance handled since October 2025 by partner studio Sidetrack Games. For anyone who wants to understand why the co-op heist game became a genre of its own, this is where it starts.
