‘Payday’ Dev Starbreeze Kills Co-Op ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ Game

After the success of Baldur’s Gate 3, there’s been talk of Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast releasing more games based on Dungeons & Dragons. Bad news for fans looking forward to that: one of them, a title codenamed “Project Baxter,” has been fully canceled.

The title was in development over at Swedish developer Starbreeze, best known for the Payday franchise and 2012’s Syndicate. In a recent announcement, CEO Adolf Kristjansson said the “difficult but necessary decision” came as the studio is prioritizing a full revamp of its co-op heist franchise Payday. As such, “Baxter” development has been ended, and some of its assigned developers will be “redeployed across Starbreeze’s projects.” Others will be let go and given help by Starbreeze to find employment elsewhere.

“Baxter” was first announced in 2023, with Starbreeze at the time stating it’d feature “signature cornerstones” of its prior works like a live-service model and cooperative play. While the studio’s been quiet on it since then, the game would’ve released sometime in 2026 for “all major platforms.” Around this time in 2024, Starbreeze showed off concept art with a tease that it would show more in the near future.

Dungeons & Dragons is no stranger to live-service games: before Baldur’s Gate 3, there was a co-op-focused reboot of Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance in 2021, and its online servers shut down this past February. Wizards of the Coast, which owns D&D, also cancelled five unannounced games prior to Baldur’s release, some of which were likely D&D games. At the time of writing, a single-player action game from Giant Skull set in the D&D universe—and led by Star Wars: Jedi director Stig Asmussen—remains in development.

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