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[mitch1971]

 

[{insert code here}]

This in a nutshell, they are all convinced gamers will flock to their game when their imagined audience doesn't even exist (except in their head).



Really, we should be asking who Greenlit the game. I mean eight years for an arena based FPS with 12 maps beggars belief. Retailing an arena shooter at $40 in the current climate, online only (no bots).

Firewalk was an independent studio when the game was greenlit so, it was the devs I guess .

Now, Sony acquired FireWalk in April '23 during Jim Ryan's tenure. At that point in time the game had been in development for 7 years which begs the question, why would you acquire a studio that's been stuck on a single game for 7 years?

I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that FireWalk shopped that game to every major publisher in the business and nobody found it worth investing in.

 

[Timberwolf25]

I keep hearing the overly saturated market excuse as one of the reasons this game has failed. If that is true, then why did the Marvel Rivals beta do so well?
And I guess time will tell if when it has the full release if it will ever hit that high mark of 697 CCU on Steam.

Brace yourselves for some high drama!

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

I keep hearing the overly saturated market excuse as one of the reasons this game has failed. If that is true, then why did the Marvel Rivals beta do so well?
And I guess time will tell if when it has the full release if it will ever hit that high mark of 697 CCU on Steam.

Brace yourselves for some high drama!

They have to cling on to some narrative. That's the one they chose, lol.

 

[FIREKNIGHT2029]

Nothing bleak about a shitty game that no one wanted flopping. I’m happy they pulled the plug. Better to do that than waste time with the “dozens” of people that it appealed to.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Concord was something else, it was a purely by the book shooter.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Firewalk was an independent studio when the game was greenlit so, it was the devs I guess .

Now, Sony acquired FireWalk in April '23 during Jim Ryan's tenure. At that point in time the game had been in development for 7 years which begs the question, why would you acquire a studio that's been stuck on a single game for 7 years?

I mean, there's no doubt in my mind that FireWalk shopped that game to every major publisher in the business and nobody found it worth investing in.

Sony was in a bind.

Internally, they committed to GAAS gaming, and some of their internal projects were delayed/cancelled, and a year ago Bungie's real light came through and it was a mess.

So Sony decided to go beyond a partnership deal with Concord and bought out FW so lock them in as a GAAS studio. I believe Sony buying them out is similar to the Bungie buyout and they did some deals to lock in some GAAS games. Turns out they havent panned out.

Sony has a history of working with studios on exclusive games and then buy them out later on if things go well. So for them to suddenly buy Bungie, FW and Jade Raymond's Haven is odd. But they have a common factor - GAAS. One is a multiplat studio that goes from company to company and the other two are brand new studios with zero track record of games made except some high level employees with an impressive Linkedin resume from other companies.

 

[havoc00]

 

[{insert code here}]

Sony was in a bind.

Internally, they committed to GAAS gaming, and some of their internal projects were delayed/cancelled, and a year ago Bungie's real light came through and it was a mess.

So Sony decided to go beyond a partnership deal with Concord and bought out FW so lock them in as a GAAS studio. I believe Sony buying them out is similar to the Bungie buyout and they did some deals to lock in some GAAS games. Turns out they havent panned out.

Sony has a history of working with studios on exclusive games and then buy them out later on if things go well. So for them to suddenly buy Bungie, FW and Jade Raymond's Haven is odd. But they have a common factor - GAAS. One is a multiplat studio that goes from company to company and the other two are brand new studios with zero track record of games made except some high level employees with an impressive Linkedin resume from other companies.

When you say it like that it sounds like they were desperate.

I mean, 3.6B for Bungie is insane when you consider MS bought all of Zenimax/Bethesda for 7B and here we are 2+ years later and they've got nothing to show for it. I want some of whatever the Sony execs were smoking when they made that deal.

How many studios could you build/finance from the ground up with 3.6B?

How many games of old IP (Wipeout, Motorstorm, Resistance, R&C, Socom, Warhawk, Killzone, J&D, etc) that we've all been hoping and praying for could they have greenlit and made with that 3.6B?

This Sony is not the same Sony that I grew up with and I'm fairly certain this post will not sit well with the Playstation Elite Task Squad.

 

[Men_in_Boxes]

When you say it like that it sounds like they were desperate.

I mean, 3.6B for Bungie is insane when you consider MS bought all of Zenimax/Bethesda for 7B and here we are 2+ years later and they've got nothing to show for it. I want some of whatever the Sony execs were smoking when they made that deal.

How many studios could you build/finance from the ground up with 3.6B?

How many games of old IP (Wipeout, Motorstorm, Resistance, R&C, Socom, Warhawk, Killzone, J&D, etc) that we've all been hoping and praying for could they have greenlit and made with that 3.6B?

This Sony is not the same Sony that I grew up with and I'm fairly certain this post will not sit well with the Playstation Elite Task Squad.

They do have 4 rods in the fire. Destiny 2, Marathon, Gummy Bears, and Destiny Mobile.

In 3 years, we could be looking at Bungie as a steal if any of those titles pop off.

 

[bundylove]

Lwt me understand this.
200 million down the shitter.

No days gone
No drive club 2
No gravity rush 3
No bloodborne 2
No new wipeout
List is long.

You could have made half of these with that money.

No i wont turn progressive no i wont turn woke no i wont turn trans no matyer what shit you try to shove down my throught.

 

[adamsapple]

Lwt me understand this.
200 million down the shitter.

No days gone
No drive club 2
No gravity rush 3
No bloodborne 2
No new wipeout
List is long.

You could have made half of these with that money.

No i wont turn progressive no i wont turn woke no i wont turn trans no matyer what shit you try to shove down my throught.

In love and (console) war, it's all Fairgame$

 

[{insert code here}]

In love and (console) war, it's all Fairgame$

 

[MrMephistoX]

Still going to die on this hill the gameplay was great and tried different stuff like platforming and grabbing onto ledges for more verticality, rolling and sliding, the gunplay was fun, weapons were unique, and the characters themselves (ugly designs aside) were also very unique. I’ll admit the character aesthetics were bland or weird in some cases but I think in addition to the negative influencer hype train killing people from trying it out $40 mandatory out the gate for multiplayer only seems to be suicidal in this market. If it comes back as F2P they should try the Killer Instinct model of rotating free chars and a price tag to unlock all the content for season 1. Single player story mode probably would have saved it as well.

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

This is going to be the hottest cosplay and Halloween costume of 2024

 

[Ozzy Onya A2Z]

Personally I hope platforms, publishers and developers start using their alpha/beta phases more intrinsically with the actual game development and not just as some network launch test for basic Q&A. Where we see success stories like Valheim or Grounded and others that curate a game based on long term feedback loops it paints a clear picture of how a locked-behind-the-curtain games such as Concord fail so spectacularly; deservedly so.

343 are a prime example of PR reacting to this and even postulating such roadmaps but failing to deliver such a content pipeline and feedback loop with their audience. Again we see a spectacle of failure from devs who think they know the game better than their audience with decades and generations of love for those genres/franchises.

If I was spearheading a 8 year development with 100s of millions of investment on the line I'd sure as shit want everything under the microscope from art and characters to mechanics and ranking etc. There's a reason games like Apex or Fortnite or COD hit their stride of output and adjust post updates so often. They understand the loop, not just the content drop. I'm all for the artists and devs leading and deciding what and how their game is designed and developed but to sit in a closed studio for 8 years and think you're the next billion dollar franchise is a fools game. You need your audience at the forefront of your processes to guide your teams.

 

[BlueLyria]

If it was so good, why did it die?

 

[SegaSnatcher]

The game sucked and it was rightly given the Of Mice and Men treatment. Its okay to let some games die gracefully.

 

[Hero of Spielberg]

Personally I hope platforms, publishers and developers start using their alpha/beta phases more intrinsically with the actual game development and not just as some network launch test for basic Q&A. Where we see success stories like Valheim or Grounded and others that curate a game based on long term feedback loops it paints a clear picture of how a locked-behind-the-curtain games such as Concord fail so spectacularly; deservedly so.

343 are a prime example of PR reacting to this and even postulating such roadmaps but failing to deliver such a content pipeline and feedback loop with their audience. Again we see a spectacle of failure from devs who think they know the game better than their audience with decades and generations of love for those genres/franchises.

If I was spearheading a 8 year development with 100s of millions of investment on the line I'd sure as shit want everything under the microscope from art and characters to mechanics and ranking etc. There's a reason games like Apex or Fortnite or COD hit their stride of output and adjust post updates so often. They understand the loop, not just the content drop. I'm all for the artists and devs leading and deciding what and how their game is designed and developed but to sit in a closed studio for 8 years and think you're the next billion dollar franchise is a fools game. You need your audience at the forefront of your processes to guide your teams.

Problem is in the case of Concord, they don't like their audience and didn't want to hear what they thought.

 

[SidViscous]

Problem is in the case of Concord, they don't like their audience and didn't want to hear what they thought.

The little feedback they did receive, i.e. the latino guy being by far the most played character, fell on completely deaf ears. Every promo and key art they released after that was for the two least selected characters! You will consume our DEI slop!

Bleak future my arse.

 

[dottme]

If this is coming toward me on Halloween, you’ll see a guy screaming and running.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

If you look at Sony's first party SP games they are big budget realistic-ish look games. Lots of production values, lots of story and cut scenes etc....

So it's not surprising that Sony would enjoy adding Concord to their line up. Although the colour palette and characters are ugly, it still fits their library of a realistic shaded game with story and vignettes.

That's their trend. GT and baseball are also not cartoony kinds of games either.

Sony is an entertainment company with hollywood movies and tv shows too. So their games will relate as they try to go for giant productions.

As for Fairgames and Marathon who knows how they will be. But when it comes to shooter fan, there seems to be a trend of either modern warfare/WWII fan, or you go crazy with colours, style, and sci-fi. Concord tries this weird hybrid of GotG, pastel colours and detailed shading and realism and probably the best mocap I've seen in a shooter like they are trying to get both sets of gamers. If you dont go WWII/modern soldier stuff, gamers like crazy fun hero shooters with style.

 

[Davey Cakes]

Is there any better example of “voting with your wallet” than this game? People rejected it the moment Sony put out a trailer and nothing changed upon release.

 

[MayauMiao]

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.

- Wired writer acknowledged how much of a bigger voice the anti woke crowd have, meanwhile trying to blame marketing push when there is already a huge one during its first reveal
- Using "snivelers" clearly shows the writer is still butthurt that they have lost the power to influence sales

 

[MayauMiao]

I'm sure that will be in someone's nightmare dream.

 

[CherryFalls]

 

[Heisenberg007]

What's bleak about people rejecting a poorly-made game?

 

[RetroGamingUK]

In love and (console) war, it's all Fairgame$

The “war” was over a long time ago

 

[Paasei]

A few people in the concord Reddit said they would never pay 60 for a 9 hour platformer

Yeah well, some people eat bugs too.

 

[CompleteGlobalSaturation]

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.”

https://archive.is/2024.09.06-115535/https://www.wired.com/story/concord-death-future-of-video-games-bleak/

I know you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover but both John and 'KDeesGamez' look exactly how I imagined.

 

[Hoho for breakfast]

Literally the worst cast of characters I've ever seen in anything ever, and then trying to charge to play it. There's really nothing more that needs to be said about it. It was absolutely doomed before it even launched.

And so far it looks like they have more failures to come. They can either learn from this or not. Regardless, gaming as a whole is going to be just fine so I don't know what this person is even on about (nor do I care).