The 10 Best Heist Games to Play Right Now (October 2026)
Updated: Oct 25
CRIMENET Popularity Index: October 2026
PAYDAY 2 is still king. Teardown has the second-largest audience among the heist games we've checked, while Crime Simulator has pushed into third place, ahead of PAYDAY 3.
And apparently, hundreds of people are spending their evenings breaking into houses as garden gnomes. I find that strangely reassuring.
Welcome back to the CRIMENET Popularity Index, where we follow the games attracting players right now, rather than simply declaring which ones we personally adore.
This isn't our ranking of the greatest heist games ever made. Some genuinely excellent games have tiny audiences. Others can attract thousands of players despite having enough problems to warrant their own parliamentary inquiry.
For this edition, we've narrowed the chart to ten games. We checked which games actually revolve around robbery, burglary or planning a criminal score, and ranked eligible titles by their concurrent player counts.
The result is a snapshot of where virtual criminals were spending their time when we checked. It isn't a quarterly player average, and it doesn't represent console audiences.
Chart key:
▲ climbed
▼ dropped
▬ unchanged
NEW first appearance
RE re-entry
Popularity checked: October 2026
The October 2026 Chart
Rank | Move | Game |
1 | ▬ | PAYDAY 2 |
2 | ▲ | Teardown |
3 | ▲ | Crime Simulator |
4 | ▬ | PAYDAY 3 |
5 | ▲ | Burglin' Gnomes |
6 | ▼ | One-Armed Robber |
7 | ▬ | Thief Simulator |
8 | NEW | Dark Hours |
9 | ▼ | Crime Boss: Rockay City |
10 | ▼ | Thief Simulator 2 |
PAYDAY 2 may still wear the crown, but if you're planning your next payday instead of admiring someone else's, head to the GTA Online Weekly Grind. We cut through Rockstar's weekly chaos and point straight at the jobs actually worth stealing. Your bank account will thank you. The NPCs won't.
#10 ▼ Thief Simulator 2
Platforms: PC • PlayStation • Xbox
Thief Simulator 2 continues to pursue the same criminal fantasy as its predecessor: scout a property, find out when the occupants leave, get inside and redistribute their valuables.
Preferably into your own pockets.
The sequel expands on the original with more tools, locations and opportunities. Yet the underlying pleasure remains remarkably simple. Somewhere in a quiet residential neighbourhood, a perfectly ordinary person has gone to work, unaware that you're studying their household routine with the concentration of a military intelligence officer.
All because you fancy their television.
The original still has a larger Steam audience, but the sequel remains a worthwhile option for players who enjoy careful burglary rather than gunfights.
The Getaway: A more ambitious burglary simulator that hasn't overtaken its predecessor in Steam activity.
#9 ▼ Crime Boss: Rockay City
Platforms: PC • PlayStation • Xbox
Crime Boss: Rockay City remains one of the stranger propositions in criminal gaming.
You've got bank robberies, organised crime, a criminal empire and an extraordinary collection of Hollywood actors delivering dialogue that occasionally sounds as though everyone has been locked inside a particularly expensive cigar advertisement.
And somehow, there's a decent heist game underneath it all.
The combination of cooperative robberies and a solo crime-empire campaign gives it a different identity from PAYDAY. You're not merely robbing banks. You're trying to become the sort of person who employs other people to rob banks.
Which, admittedly, sounds far more sensible.
Crime Boss sits ninth in this snapshot. Its criminal fantasy remains strong, even if its audience is considerably smaller than the genre's leaders.
The Getaway: An alternative to PAYDAY for anyone who wants robbery mixed with criminal-empire management.
#8 NEW Dark Hours
Platforms: PC
Imagine successfully breaking into a building, filling your pockets and discovering that somebody else has arrived to make your evening considerably worse.
Unfortunately, that somebody isn't the police.
Dark Hours combines cooperative heists with supernatural horror. You're meant to steal valuables and escape, but your carefully planned robbery becomes rather less professional when an entity starts hunting everyone inside.
Suddenly, the bloke carrying the loot isn't your biggest concern. It's the one making strange noises in a corridor nobody particularly wants to investigate.
I rather like the premise. Most heist games punish mistakes with alarms, guards or heavily armed police officers. Dark Hours introduces the possibility that your criminal enterprise might end with something eating the entire management team.
The Getaway: A robbery game where your biggest obstacle isn't necessarily security. Sometimes it's whatever lives in the building.
➡️ Dark Hours Review
#7 ▬ Thief Simulator
Platforms: PC • PlayStation • Xbox • Nintendo Switch
Few games understand the deeply unglamorous reality of burglary quite as thoroughly as Thief Simulator.
You study routines, scout properties, find ways through security and gradually become more efficient at removing somebody else's possessions.
It's wonderfully methodical.
You're not storming through the front door with an assault rifle and a speech about freedom. You're sitting outside a house, waiting for Brenda to leave for work because you've decided her microwave should belong to you.
There's something almost respectable about the amount of preparation involved.
Almost.
The Getaway: The stronger Steam audience of the two dedicated Thief Simulator games, and still a wonderfully focused burglary experience.
#6 ▼ One-Armed Robber
Platforms: PC
Most criminals have enough trouble organising a successful robbery with two functioning arms.
One-Armed Robber removes one of them.
An extraordinary decision.
Every mundane interaction becomes an obstacle. Picking things up, handling equipment, moving valuables and generally attempting to behave like a competent criminal now require far more coordination than anyone anticipated.
It's the sort of game where opening a door can become a team-building exercise, except nobody signed up for team building and the police are approaching.
Yet that ridiculous limitation is also its appeal. The awkwardness creates the comedy, particularly when multiple players attempt to complete a robbery while behaving like a group of malfunctioning industrial robots.
It's free, too.
The Getaway: Free cooperative robbery with a physical coordination problem that really ought to have been considered during recruitment.
#5 ▲ Burglin' Gnomes
Platforms: PC
There's something wonderfully wrong about Burglin' Gnomes.
Normal burglars want money, jewellery or valuable electronics. These creatures are tiny enough to regard ordinary household objects as major logistical challenges.
A kitchen becomes a potential crime scene. A piece of furniture becomes an obstacle. And somewhere in all this, a homeowner is about to discover they've been robbed by what appears to be an aggressive collection of garden ornaments.
The game turns miniature-scale burglary into cooperative chaos, combining theft with the physical absurdity of being considerably smaller than your targets.
What interests me is that it doesn't need to imitate PAYDAY. The criminal fantasy is the same, but the scale changes everything about how you approach it.
The Getaway: Proof that successful burglary doesn't require intimidating criminals. Sometimes it requires creatures who could comfortably live inside a flowerpot.
#4 ▬ PAYDAY 3
Platforms: PC • PlayStation • Xbox
PAYDAY 3 continues to lead a rather complicated existence.
The sequel arrived with enormous expectations and then spent a remarkable amount of time explaining why those expectations were unreasonable.
A bold strategy for something people had already paid for.
Years of updates have since attempted to repair the relationship. New content, changes to progression and continued development have given players reasons to return, although the game still lives in the shadow of PAYDAY 2.
And what a shadow.
Still, dismissing it outright would be lazy. PAYDAY 3 has its own approach to heist execution, particularly in how stealth, negotiation and escalation interact.
The question is whether its continued development can translate into sustained interest.
The Getaway: A sequel that continues rebuilding its reputation while its predecessor refuses to vacate the throne.
#3 ▲ Crime Simulator
Platforms: PC
Crime Simulator has one of the most straightforward premises imaginable.
You've got debts. You need money. Other people have things.
This is apparently the foundation of an entire career.
The game takes the burglary formula and gives it a cooperative twist. Players can break into properties, use equipment, avoid security and complete criminal jobs together.
Of course, involving friends introduces a problem that has plagued organised crime for centuries.
Friends are idiots.
One person is carefully planning the approach while another is trying to work out whether the expensive-looking object in the corner is worth carrying.
At least the criminal objective is clear: get in, steal what you can and get out.
Crime Simulator takes third place, narrowly ahead of PAYDAY 3.
The Getaway: Cooperative burglary with a surprisingly strong Steam audience, and one of the more interesting alternatives to traditional bank-heist shooters.
#2 ▲ Teardown
Platforms: PC • PlayStation • Xbox
Teardown understands something most heist games refuse to acknowledge.
Walls are optional.
In a traditional robbery, you'd study the building, identify a route and carefully navigate the security measures. Teardown looks at the same building and asks whether the entire east wall is strictly necessary.
The answer is frequently no.
Its destructible environments allow players to create elaborate escape routes, demolish obstacles and transform carefully planned theft into something approaching a controlled demolition contract.
The trick is that destruction alone isn't enough. You still need to plan the job, coordinate objectives and escape before time runs out.
That combination of preparation and spectacular property damage makes Teardown one of the genre's most distinctive games.
The insurance company has declined to comment.
The Getaway: A heist sandbox where preparation matters, demolition is encouraged and structural integrity is somebody else's problem.
#1 ▬ PAYDAY 2
Platforms: PC • PlayStation • Xbox
Thirteen years.
PAYDAY 2 has been robbing banks for thirteen bloody years.
Entire gaming franchises have appeared, released three sequels, collapsed, been sold to another publisher and returned as remasters during that time.
PAYDAY 2 is still here.
And it isn't merely surviving on life support.
With 13,920 concurrent Steam players during our October check, its audience is larger than the other nine games on this list combined.
Think about that.
You could assemble everyone playing Teardown, PAYDAY 3, Crime Simulator and the rest of our Top 10 into one enormous criminal organisation, and PAYDAY 2 would still have more employees.
Its strength comes from the sheer quantity of heists, character builds, weapons and approaches available. Whether you're attempting a carefully coordinated stealth operation or transforming a bank lobby into an international diplomatic incident, there's an absurd amount to do.
And after all this time, its own sequel still hasn't dethroned it.
At some point, the developers of PAYDAY 3 must feel as though they've inherited the family business only to discover their father has absolutely no intention of retiring.
The Getaway: The undisputed leader of our October heist snapshot, and a remarkable example of a game refusing to become history.
Biggest Story This Quarter
The most striking result is the enormous distance between PAYDAY 2 and everybody else.
But there's another interesting contest underneath.
Crime Simulator recorded 963 players, putting it ahead of PAYDAY 3's 900. That's hardly an insurmountable lead, but it's a reminder that the biggest names don't automatically own every corner of the genre.
Burglin' Gnomes also deserves attention. A cooperative burglary game starring tiny criminals has entered the Top 5 in our snapshot.
We have reached a point in gaming history where PAYDAY 3 is competing for attention with a game about gnomes stealing household objects.
I would pay good money to watch somebody explain that at a shareholder meeting.
Outside the Vault
Several games remain worth watching even though they missed this edition's Top 10.
Perfect Heist 2 deserves attention for its unusual robber-versus-police design, where deception matters as much as shooting.
PAYDAY: The Heist remains historically important. Its successor simply swallowed most of the audience.
The Break-In offers another enjoyable take on cooperative burglary, while Monaco: What's Yours Is Mine remains one of the great older examples of teamwork turning into criminal panic.
And GTA Online hasn't stopped being relevant. It's excluded from this chart because we feel it's place belongs in crime. Its heists remain an essential part of the broader genre. They simply need their own appropriate comparison.
The Verdict
PAYDAY 2 has retained the crown. Teardown continues to prove that stealing things becomes considerably more interesting when you can destroy the architecture, and Crime Simulator is now attracting enough players to stand alongside much bigger names.
But popularity is only one measurement.
If the game you love appears near the bottom, it doesn't suddenly become rubbish. And if thousands of people are playing something terrible, those thousands may simply be having a collective lapse in judgement.
Next time we'll see whether the rankings change when we take another comparable reading.
For now, PAYDAY 2 remains the king.
Thirteen years, and the bastard still won't retire.
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