Payday 3 turned out to be tied to online, and the servers crashed at the start. As a result, for a long time, users simply could not play the purchased game.
Then there were calls to make an offline mode for Payday 3, and Starbreeze announced it, but the promised launch "by the end of 2024" never happened.
They don't directly talk about canceling the offline mode, but during a recent stream, they made it clear that it definitely won't be available in the near future:
"I know the team had good intentions when it came to [offline mode] and they were trying to bring it to life, but I think we'll have to admit that it's not feasible for what we're aiming for with this game."
There are several reasons for "canceling" the Payday 3 offline mode:
"First of all, we have a limited number of people. We want them to work on the most valuable things for the game [...] progression, core gameplay loops, and so on. But more importantly, today we have an update model where it takes weeks to release a client update. It's a bit technically challenging; it means that if we find today that "this value is incorrect", it will take us a very long time to fix it. It's not because we're slow, but simply because updating the core part, etc., takes weeks."
The authors of Payday 3 want to move to a model that will guarantee a quick update, and for this, "...we need the ability to make changes on the backend [server side] to release new versions faster. If we can implement changes earlier and be confident in their capabilities, it will significantly speed up our work."
Judging by reviews, for some who still believed in Payday 3, this became the "last straw."