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Concord’s Death Offers a Bleak Look at Gaming’s Future

Kotaro

Member
C'mon man...Bleak future? The game didn't have appeal. The characters were all based on ResetERA and Reddit mods with a guest appearance by Lizzo cosplaying as Doom Guy.

It was also $40 when the competition offers a much bigger and better overall experience for FREE.

The industry is healthier than ever. We have Elden Ring and Wukong selling millions and Warhammer 40k isn't even officially out and has over 130,000 people playing on Steam alone.

And don’t forget Stellar Blade, the one game the wokes truly hate, sold over a million on PS5 alone
 

laynelane

Member
In spite of the histrionic title, there's some good insight into why it failed/was shut down within the article:

“It’s unprecedented for a game of this scale to be shut down so quickly,” says Liam Deane, a video game analyst at Omdia. “Usually publishers keep games that struggle at launch on life support for a while, but in Concord’s case the launch was so bad there was clearly no way back.”

“For big companies, it's difficult to work out what bets—and how large bets—you should make,” says Carless. “Some of the corporate overexuberance during Covid and low interest rates has meant that large companies overextended, and the pullback has been—and is going to be—painful.”

Naturally, this is all placed after the whining from a couple of people on Twitch.
 
'i see a dark future for overwatch wannabes. i see a bright future for mascot platformer wannabes. i also see a bright future for chinese monkey warrior wannabes...'

'ask again later'...
 

Raven117

Member
A lot of finance and slush was in the system around the time a lot of certain types of games and political happenings were occurring during covid….

This is all that flushing out the pipeline.

Hopefully the industry takes not that games like AstroBot… and games that just are freakin fun are what most gamers want most of the time.
 
I'm sure Concord had genuine fans. A very small, uber niche group of fans, but they existed. They just aren't nearly enough to sustain a AAAA live service game.

There are many little things that contributed to the failure of Concord. It wasn't very visually appealing. It was overly woke. It didn't bring anything new to the table. But the real problem is that the market is completely oversaturated with titles in the sector of the market that Concord released into. Gameplay wise, it didn't suck. But it certainly wasn't doing anything better than the myriad of other established titles people were already invested in. It's biggest sin was not providing anyone a reason to buy and play it. It's death was a mercy killing, and the industry is better off for it being forgotten. It would be great if the entire disaster would cause Sony to put the brakes on its live action push and realize this is not the path to success, but it seems that nearly every game publisher is like a gambling addict, continuously pumping in their money and yanking the lever on the slot machine, convinced that this time it's going to payoff and they'll get back a hundred times what they put in. No one responsible for the development of these titles is willing to take a step back and admit that the bubble has burst in the live service market and it's throwing good money after bad at this point.
 

Nickolaidas

Member
These people don't actually want things. They want to prevent you from having the things that you want. They get joy from denying people of things that would make them happy.
Two sides of the same coin. There are now many people who simply want woke products/games/shows/movies to fail to make the woke look like clowns for praising and supporting them in the first place.

The world would be bleaker if that thing was sucessful.

But 40 for a game with a 2 week life span is A-ok?
In their defense, they weren't signing up for a two-week lifespan.
 
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havoc00

Member
Two sides of the same coin. There are now many people who simply want woke products/games/shows/movies to fail to make the woke look like clowns for praising and supporting them in the first place.


In their defense, they weren't signing up for a two-week lifespan.
I don’t care what people do legally, but the constant forcing you must accept it or your bigot act is getting old.
 

Shubh_C63

Member
You can say those sentences about any game really. Especially when the game is cold now.

If 'The Finals' got shutdown. The game was so innovative, the community was so good. Stylistically bold and best shooter I have ever played. Plz bring back !
 
The problem with these people is

These people don't actually want things. They want to prevent you from having the things that you want. They get joy from denying people of things that would make them happy.
They are parasitic and disingenuous. And the people that have wasted massive amounts of time, money, effort to cater to these people still haven't realized two important things.
1. These people can't and won't pay for the things they claim they want.
2. These people are vastly over-represented on the internet when compared to people in the real world that are the actual consumers of the products that are produced.

Whenever products that these mutants championed failed, they never express any amount of introspection as to why that failure occurred. The blame is always shifted elsewhere. Because as you can probably gather, the majority of these specimens are liberal women and trans/women. And women and trans (despite lies to the opposite effect) are NOT the primary consumers of video games.

So true and perfectly said.
 

Orangee

Neo Member

It’s already here, please make your voice heard. I have already signed it multiple times.
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I think Sony should go for It. Those all are absolutely convincing arguments.
 
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Braag

Member
Not gonna read someone's long ass cope article, but to me Concord failing means people voted with their wallets and showed what they don't want in their games, which is an insane amounts of virtue signalling.
 

StueyDuck

Member
Earlier this week, after warping across the galaxy for 90 hours in a sentient spacecraft, Twitch streamer John Wissmiller realized that Concord was the best first-person shooter he’d played in a decade.

“The gunplay was crunchy, the movement was smooth, and the progression felt rewarding,” he says. “I was even more enthralled by the world the developers had created when I looked into the lore.”

He wasn’t alone. “One of the biggest perks about the game was the absence of toxicity within the player community,” says Kelle Dees, a content creator at KDeesGamez. “Everything about the game was positive and inclusive.”

On Wednesday, less than two weeks after the game’s August 23 launch, Sony announced it was taking Concord offline and offering full refunds to anyone who had purchased it on PlayStation 5 or PC. “While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” wrote Ryan Ellis, Concord’s director at Firewalk Studios, a division of Sony Interactive Entertainment.


“I was completely devastated,” Wissmiller says. “We’ve never seen a first-party title from Sony get this kind of treatment.”

In fact, we’ve never seen any AAA video game get this kind of treatment—and that’s what could make Concord a horrifying canary in the coal mine for gamers and game workers alike.

“It’s unprecedented for a game of this scale to be shut down so quickly,” says Liam Deane, a video game analyst at Omdia. “Usually publishers keep games that struggle at launch on life support for a while, but in Concord’s case the launch was so bad there was clearly no way back.”


Like Fortnite, Destiny 2, and Valorant, Concord was meant to be a live-service game that constantly released new updates over the course of several years. But while those other games are free to play—and rely on microtransactions to make money—Concord cost $40 up front. “It's just very difficult to break into competitive multiplayer games [and] displace the existing top titles,” says Simon Carless, an industry analyst who publishes the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. “These are the kind of titles that players socialize with their friends in, and they're often not motivated to switch games.”

Sony hasn’t revealed how many copies of Concordsold between August 23 and September 3, but the number of active PC players on the Steam platform peaked at just 697 on launch day. That’s abysmally low for a major release that spent eight years in development; Sony’s previous live-service game, Helldivers 2, had over 155,000 players on its first day, back in February, and later peaked at 458,709.

Helldivers 2, though, was a breakout hit that already had an established fanbase. Concord, on the other hand, was a brand-new franchise that didn’t get much of a marketing push and drew the ire of “anti-woke” snivelers who complained about the game’s use of pronouns on its character selection screen.


“For big companies, it's difficult to work out what bets—and how large bets—you should make,” says Carless. “Some of the corporate overexuberanceduring Covid and low interest rates has meant that large companies overextended, and the pullback has been—and is going to be—painful.”

This article reaks of ai
 
I keep coming back to this "it failed because of the chuds" thing. In what way? Is it because:

A. The chuds didn't buy it, and they needed them to buy it for it to succeed
B. The chuds convinced the masses not to buy it

Logically, it has to be one of these two, right?

In Case A, the solution is obvious: if you need the chuds to buy the game for it to be a success, you have to target the chuds. Not sure what else to say about that one.

Case B is a little more complicated. In this scenario, the target audience -- clearly, hardcore leftists -- were originally going to buy the game, but internet chuds somehow convinced them to abandon their values and ignore the game instead. In which case, clearly the former group didn't hold those values very deeply in the first place, and clearly the latter group isn't making any arguments that are very objectionable.

Any way you slice this, if people want to attribute any modicum of power to the chuds, the only logical response, if you want to make money, is to start catering to them. Thus, anyone who holds the chuds are responsible for Concord's failure is indirectly advocating that future games target the chuds as their audience.

Games journalists: chuds don't have to be your audience.
It's the same as the arguments about women's sports. Supposedly they struggle because evil, sexist men refuse to watch them. However, if women actually cared about their sports this wouldn't be a problem as the viewing figures would be roughly the same as for men's sports.
 
ok, so do you guys think we will lets political agendas in game?

in my opinion the japanese side of the playstation will step in and restructure every studio and hopefully less DEI shit, concord failing like that is really bad looks for playstation, but surely some big head at sony saw the project and said " get it out " usually if its this bad they cancel the project
 
It's the same as the arguments about women's sports. Supposedly they struggle because evil, sexist men refuse to watch them. However, if women actually cared about their sports this wouldn't be a problem as the viewing figures would be roughly the same as for men's sports.
It's telling that so much effort is made to try and make men care about and watch women's sports but none is ever made to try and make women care about watching sports in general

The NFL's master plan right now to make women care about the NFL is Taylor Swift being Travis Kelce's boyfriend. I'm being completely serious. I've never seen the NFL try to make women care about football because of the sport itself
 
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It's the same as the arguments about women's sports. Supposedly they struggle because evil, sexist men refuse to watch them. However, if women actually cared about their sports this wouldn't be a problem as the viewing figures would be roughly the same as for men's sports.
Bingo. See Bill Burr's skit about how women failed the WNBA. It's not men's responsibility to prop up women's sports. It's women's responsibility and clearly women don't, in any appreciable numbers, care about women's sports either.

That totally applies here as well. Developers keep trying to appeal to the "modern audience", who don't ever show up. So it should be more and more obvious by now that the "modern audience" (a) doesn't exist, (b) it's size is extremely exaggerated due to how loud they are on the Internet, (c) have no real interest in purchasing the products they supposedly want, or (d) some combination of all of the above.
 

Nickolaidas

Member
ok, so do you guys think we will lets political agendas in game?

in my opinion the japanese side of the playstation will step in and restructure every studio and hopefully less DEI shit, concord failing like that is really bad looks for playstation, but surely some big head at sony saw the project and said " get it out " usually if its this bad they cancel the project
Honestly, I don't know. It could go in a lot of ways. Governments could start funding more and more woke games so that we will be paying for them, one way or another.

Also, the majority of normies don't care about that stuff because they always consumed video games at a surface level. The guy who just wants to do cool combos in Street Fighter doesn't care if the announcer is gay/trans whatever.

That said, at SOME point, companies need to realize that alienating a good percentage of customers in order to not piss off twitter trolls is NOT profitable.

Making your characters bland and uninteresting in order to not be attacked by twitter woketards isn't worth the hundreds of thousands of players who won't buy your game and WOULD have if you hadn't made your game politically correct. At SOME point, game devs need to realize that.

What we need is more Korean/Chinese games to succeed in order to show western game devs that having Kotaku or Twitter attack your game MEANS. JACK. SHIT. They NEED to understand this. They NEED to realize this. So that they can make games the way they wanted to, before their hands were tied by some committee. Companies who got too big for their own good need to have severe financial losses in order to understand that their politically correct approach doesn't work anymore. It never did, it's just that people hadn't woken up to their tactics from the get go.

The first western dev who will make an AAA quality game, make females unapologetically sexy again and will laugh at the journalists who will try to call them out and cancel them will be the dev who will rule the western gaming sphere for the next ten years.

We need a western AAA dev/publisher with this attitude:



Replace 'muslim immigrant' with 'woke content' and 'Ukranian refugees' with 'devs hired based on merit' and 'government' with 'dev team' and you get the chud head dev that Western gaming so desperately needs right now.
 

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
So much gaslighting from journalists these days. It has to be coming from the universities.

Yep. For the past decade we've been getting our gaming news filtered through a group of woke, university educated (or rather politically indoctrinated) writers who have not been representative of the global gaming population at all. Thank god for Youtube where we can find different perspectives from people who are gamers first instead of failed journalists..
 

Ozzie666

Member
In all seriousness, when are the Aliens coming to wipe us out. These comments, none of them can be real. What the fuck has happened to humanity.

Also, they could have pre-ordered the game if they cared that much.
 

Neo Blaster

Member
Nah, a bleak future for GaaS games at most.

Guy was surprised there was no toxicity? I wouldn't, considering how low the players numbers were.
 

peish

Member
I need to know what other stupid commentary this Adam Morgan has wrote over the years.
 
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SkylineRKR

Member
With games like this bombing as hard as they do, the future is bright bro. Watch Astro Bot being a bigger success, which kind of forces Sony to rethink.
 

Bernardougf

Member
The problem with these people is

These people don't actually want things. They want to prevent you from having the things that you want. They get joy from denying people of things that would make them happy.
They are parasitic and disingenuous. And the people that have wasted massive amounts of time, money, effort to cater to these people still haven't realized two important things.
1. These people can't and won't pay for the things they claim they want.
2. These people are vastly over-represented on the internet when compared to people in the real world that are the actual consumers of the products that are produced.

Whenever products that these mutants championed failed, they never express any amount of introspection as to why that failure occurred. The blame is always shifted elsewhere. Because as you can probably gather, the majority of these specimens are liberal women and trans/women. And women and trans (despite lies to the opposite effect) are NOT the primary consumers of video games.
Another thing is, they failed to realize as some (few) posters in neogaf are also failing, that the mainstream buyer is not all some mindless buyer who throws money into things, wokeness/dei practices are now a well known and commented subject, and its beeing progressively rejected in all kinds of media, its discussed in multiple youtube channels and its mocked by massively successful comedians with enormous audience and reach, this notion that heavy wokeness wont influence in broad sales is nowdays imho ludicrous and if those company's continue to shrug it off this fails and not acknowledge the reality, you can expect more bombas incoming.

The westerm game landscape feels like Hollywood from 4 years ago ... they are just too late to the cultural woke push they think that can be made, I guess seeing failure is not equal to experiencing it... I think we can all thank Disney for this.. their agenda pushing in kids movie wised up pretty fast the mainstream, specially when you have producers saying outloud in recorded meetings they want to actively push gay/queerness in childs entertainment
 
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Bernardougf

Member
It's telling that so much effort is made to try and make men care about and watch women's sports but none is ever made to try and make women care about watching sports in general

The NFL's master plan right now to make women care about the NFL is Taylor Swift being Travis Kelce's boyfriend. I'm being completely serious. I've never seen the NFL try to make women care about football because of the sport itself
And yet you never see them trying to make man care about Housewifes shows or female Auditorium programs.... is like everything that man likes must be for everyone but everything that woman likes is just for her and thats fine.

The usual whats yours is also mine but what is mine is mine.
 
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Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
An alternative, more accurate position would be...

"Concords death offers an exciting look at gamings future..."

Concord shows us that mediocrity will not be tolerated in the Live Service space. You either have to be better than your peers or you have to innovate and find your own niche to capture.

We got dozens of cheap Mario 64 and Resident Evil knockoffs in the 90's. That doesn't fly today.

The standards have been raised. It's time to celebrate.
 
The only bleak outlook for gaming is hopefully dei and social agenda woke garbage games.

Astro bot and wukong have proven games made by people who just want to make the game they want to make without worrying about appeasing all the diversity idiots can make money. They shown you can sell your game like gangbusters if you're talented and do what you want instead of doing what others want.

Following the rules of politically and socially correct guidelines guarantees you'll make a mediocre product no one can relate to.
 

Ogbert

Gold Member
That streamer is a complete penis.

I was laughing at his coverage. A woke, insufferable bellend, with obligatory septum piercing.

No one wants your non-binary gaas purple haired fatso waddling dogshit.

Fuck off.
 

Neon Xenon

Member
This Wired "article" is shit. This isn't to say that I (nor anyone) expect any better from them after the embarrassing Hogwarts Legacy shitpiece that was skinwalking as an actual review.

"Concord’s Death Offers a Bleak Look at Gaming’s Future". Easily dismissed, not worth engaging with, right from the word Go. And really, you don't even have to read the rest of it. The writer is trying to do damage control for a game that people have already made up their minds about from its very first showing, but even then, you can safely say that it is generally agreed upon that the game is a high profile failure.

Move on.
 
Those people really should play oldies in order to discover what videogames were really about. I mean they were born in a world playing Fortnite and such, no wonder some of them actually liked Concord. So sad.
 
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