A co-op shooter that most people quietly filed under “only diehards still play this” just got an update that reads less like a birthday card and more like a full technical overhaul. Payday 2 launched back in 2013, and for thirteen years it’s been running on a Diesel Engine built for that era — 32-bit architecture, dated limitations and all. Update 247 finally changes that.
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What’s New in Payday 2’s Engine After Update 247
The Diesel Engine underneath Payday 2 has moved to 64-bit. That’s not just a spec-sheet number — the shift removes old memory limits that have long kept the game from running smoothly on modern systems, especially with heavier mods and content-packed maps. Rendering now runs through DirectX 11, and the developers report CPU usage improvements as well, meaning the game should behave noticeably better on hardware it was never originally built for.
There’s also a new resource compression system, which promises to shrink the installed size significantly and speed up load times — a welcome detail for anyone who’s kept Payday 2 installed “just in case” and dips back in occasionally for a heist night with friends.
On the smaller but genuinely annoying side, the update fixes a long-standing bug where the mouse cursor would get swallowed when Alt-Tabbing out of the game. It sounds minor, but that’s exactly the kind of issue that tends to linger for years in older titles nobody’s actively maintaining.
Why Linux Players Now Need to Switch to Proton
The update’s most debated piece of news is the end of native Linux support for Payday 2. The developers were blunt about the reasoning: the old Linux branch hasn’t been actively developed in a long time and, in their words, mostly just confuses new Linux users trying to get the game running. Starting with Update 247, Linux players will need to run the game through Proton in Steam instead — essentially through Windows emulation.
For most players, this is a reasonable trade-off. Proton has matured a lot over the past few years and, in most cases, actually runs more reliably than an abandoned native port. But for the smaller group of players who specifically chose Payday 2 because of its native Linux build, it’s a small but real loss.
What players should know:
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The update is free and installs automatically through Steam;
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Payday 2 is now officially maintained by modder-developers rather than Starbreeze, which is focused on Payday 3;
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Existing saves and progress aren’t affected by the update;
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Linux players will need to manually enable Proton in the game’s Steam properties if it isn’t already turned on;
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Several heist-related bugs have been fixed, though the full list is worth checking in the official patch notes.
It’s telling that a 13-year-old game’s fate is now in the hands of a modding community rather than a publisher — and that this community is the one pushing structural changes like this, not just throwing an anniversary skin drop. That’s a decent sign Payday 2 still has an active enough audience to justify rebuilding its engine in 2026. Worth keeping an eye on whether Proton compatibility issues pop up for Linux players in the first week or two — that’s usually when problems like that surface.
