Re: follow-up to my previous post.
As a Black, Muslim man, it's really difficult for me to weigh into this discourse surrounding 'DEI' topics because it delves into a theme of identity politics that were a large part of my formative years. This isn't even to mention the fact it seems to be used as a dog whistle by certain corners of the poltical Right. Full disclosure; I am not unbiased when it comes to this.
Having said that, I'm not entirely ignorant of the arguments surrounding it, either. But this is not a
Coor's Light moment.
Even though many gamers may have strong political views, the medium is still largely isolated from political division. Concord failed because of it's awful, ambiguous reveal; poor reception; lukewarm character designs, and being released in a saturated market at $40, while its competitors are free. It did not fail because the characters had pronouns, or because Firewalk wanted to appeal to 'modern audiences'.
What surprised me were the extent to which some people here were so persuaded that, in fact, it failed specifically because it was 'woke'. With all due respect, that's completely delusional - you are in too deep at that point.
You can be 'anti-woke', anti DEI and still think Concord failed because of a myriad of reasons games tend to fail, particularly Sony GaaS titles. If this were a chapter discussing this game's failure, the pronoun controversy wouldn't be more than a sentence. Instead, some of you have made it to be the Title; Sub-title; Captions and even the Barcode. It is extraordinarily inflated sense that really stood out to me.
Nice to see the other side represented and speaking up here
Whilst I agree somewhat that gaming as a whole is somewhat isolated, and this probably doesn’t rise to the level of a coors light moment. Due to demographics (and timing), I wouldn’t underestimate its impact in this particular instance.
1. 93% of FPS players are male
2. 75% of gamers are white (12% black)
3. Sci fi heavily tilts male
4. 95% of US males identify as cis
So concords core demographic due to its gaming genre and thematic genre will be overwhelmingly cis white males. That’s just how it is for their choice of genre and theme. (Other themes and genres would have been somewhat more suitable)
Now that in and of itself is not an issue, however, US white males tilt quite heavily republican. These are not “normal times” politically in the U.S. it’s times of very extreme polarisation, exasperated by it being an election year, where the very things concord has chosen to place front and center being a major cultural inflection point, that republican males have been conditioned to reflexively reject.
The devs have also gone about it in such a hamfisted unashamedly (and unapologetically) aggressive way, and their devs/community mangers have directly been telling people NOT to play the game, and insulting ‘gamers’ more broadly), that even centrist or soft left are turned off by it.
They’ve clearly presented it as “if you’re a cis white male; this isn’t for you”…worth noting, that helped along by a generation growing up watching Andrew Tate etc, black and Latino males have also been (whilst not a majority) moving to the right. I’m also not sure what the intersection is of black/latino males and LGBT interests are. But I expect that intersection of diversity may further reduce their addressable market.
Again, not in and of itself an issue, but they have immediately made the game relatively niche, ruling out a majority of the addressable audience for specifically this type of game…yet have spent the levels of money developing it that you would for something with broad demographic appeal. Like, sure, make games for niche audiences, we all deserve games that speak to us, just don’t spend hundreds of millions.
Their DEI focus will also feed into influencer marketing and organic social traffic. It’s a highly divisive title in a politically charged period. Left wing accounts will talk about it because it aligns with their audience already, right wing will just slam it, however the critical middle ground will avoid it, because it will alienate a large section of their audience, regardless of what angle they take. Safer just to ignore it and talk about something else.
In addition to all of that, they are fighting the same issues that all big GAAS titles have been suffering from, which is the major pushback now against the predatory practices of GAAS as a model, which has resulted in a graveyard of failures this year.
Arguably one could say the DEI focus also impacts this too, as the already reduced audience concord are targeting are liable to be the most sensitive towards exploitative corporations money grabbing shenanigans. Notably, minorities (which demographically due to the systemic issues and under representation concord wants to champion) are over represented among the lower socioeconomic groups (and have less disposable income), and the ‘left’ more broadly being in the “eat the rich” camp. So are even more ideologically primed to reject GAAS than the broader, already dissatisfied public. The limited spending power of the 18-25yr old core demographic has also been eaten by Wukong this week.
This is in addition to all the non DEI issues you mention, So yeah A LOT going against it, and it would have almost certainly been a flop regardless of DEI. But it would, imo be incorrect to assume these choices didn’t play an important role in the sheer scale of the flop. Not that there’s THAT much difference between 500 players and 12,000 players. Either are catastrophic for a 200mil hole (or however much it cost)
