• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Concord bombs on Steam with less than 1k players on launch day

Arsic

Loves his juicy stink trail scent
There is some good designed characters in the game and skin variants. Kyps is my stand out.

I think Vale default skin is cool. Also dig 1-0ff. Fun looking robot. Haymar is solid and her alternate legendary is good. Really the ones that are bad are really bad to the point that the well designed models get ignored.
 

adamsapple

Or is it just one of Phil's balls in my throat?
I have a serious question.

Of the incredibly low number of 162 CCU on steam right, how many do you think are Sony employees?

Angry Gary Oldman GIF
 

Jaybe

Member
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.
 
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.
Its amongst them. It's definitely one of the if not THE biggest gaming flop ever.
 
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.
I mean with the numbers floating around it doesn’t look like it will recoup even 1% of be it’s production budget.

It’s beyond catastrophic.
 

Danny Dudekisser

I paid good money for this Dynex!
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.

It's got to be up there, though obviously, you can't ascertain that without knowing exactly how much money they sunk into this thing. If the ballpark figures being thrown around are anywhere near accurate, you might be correct.

Can't help but notice that sales rank has also tanked recently.
 

FoxMcChief

Gold Member
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.
I dunno, I think expectations on other projects means more than to fuck ton of money spent and lost on Cuckcord.
 

FunkMiller

Gold Member
It's $200M because they made it like a TLOU or GoW game. Full motion capture, paid actors, weekly produced cinematic storylines. They were trying to make a FPS version of the big budget "movie" games PlayStation is known for. All of this from a studio run by a guy with ZERO game development experience. The studio head was a MARKETING executive on Destiny at Activision (not Bungie like people are reporting).

I'd estimate it probably ballooned out from even 200 million. These companies don’t seem to know how the hell to economise or be efficient with money.
 
Last edited:
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.
It's not even close.

John Carter had $280 million global box office, even if you assume 50% goes to the theaters. That's still $140 million in revenue.

Based on CCU numbers I doubt this game even sold 100K copies. Which would be $4 million in revenue if it hit that number.
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
It's got to be up there, though obviously, you can't ascertain that without knowing exactly how much money they sunk into this thing. If the ballpark figures being thrown around are anywhere near accurate, you might be correct.

Can't help but notice that sales rank has also tanked recently.
in terms of total dollars lost it might not be as bad as Suicide Squad? But in terms of % return on investment it’s hard to imagine any other game doing worse.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
in terms of total dollars lost it might not be as bad as Suicide Squad? But in terms of % return on investment it’s hard to imagine any other game doing worse.
Even though it didnt have a lot of marketing in terms frequency (tons of preview videos or articles the past bunch of years), it did in terms of decent budget and Yt vignettes and official Concord gamepads. So internally, the game had enough eyeballs and marketing to do these things.
 
PC Gamer Review:
45%


Funny thing is their damning review(and the subsequent discourse surrounding this game for all reasons) is all around a net negative for the game.

It literally puts the kibosh on any future sales even more. I've never seen a game whose fate is more sealed than this one.
 
It's been interesting to watch these big publishers try to chase trends with "AAA" experiences, which take 5-8 years from greenlight to release while missing the window of opportunity. Meanwhile, people that are into hero shooters already have their main game of choice, whether Valorant, OW, or something else, and are not likely to spend money on trying a game that does a bad job of replicating what they already like.

If Sony released this as F2P I think it would have a pretty decent chance of at least sticking around for a bit. As is, why spend $40?
 

Rocinante618

Neo Member
The gameplay is decent, I liked it during the beta. The shooting feels alright.

imo dev/Sony should:
  • Make the game F2P or price it very cheap.
  • Take a few months and change it to majorly a PvE game (maybe keep one mode PvP)
  • Cut down the number of heroes looking at stats.
  • Maybe after a year or two, add a cosmetic shop or DLC with new planets to explore and enemies to kill or make a small story for each hero?
  • Add an offline mode before killing it, add in mod tools so that players can add their own characters/heroes
Sure this almost looks like a new game but I don't see any other way this game stays alive. I hope they make it at least offline, LAN/local before they kill it as I would really like to goof around with it with friends locally.
 
Last edited:

//DEVIL//

Member
The gameplay is decent, I liked it during the beta. The shooting feels alright.

imo dev/Sony should:
  • Make the game F2P or price it very cheap.
  • Take a few months and change it to majorly a PvE game (maybe keep one mode PvP)
  • Cut down the number of heroes looking at stats.
  • Maybe after a year or two, add a cosmetic shop or DLC with new planets to explore and enemies to kill or make a small story for each hero?
  • Add an offline mode before killing it, add in mod tools so that players can add their own characters/heroes
Sure this almost looks like a new game but I don't see any other way this game stays alive. I hope they make it at least offline, LAN/local before they kill it as I would really like to goof around with it with friends locally.

The game is dead. was Dead on arrival. and it will not come back to life even if it's free to play.
 
Sure thing, Seattle is a top 10 most expensive city in the US, and Sony are paying to employ 170 ostensibly skilled professionals who are in high demand that they have to both poach and fend off poaches from. The average coastal US game dev salary exceeds $150k/year in salary alone, the actual costs to the business is way higher than that. They also have to pay mountains of premium benefits on every single head (i.e. platinum family insurance plans, cellphone plans, work from home internet plans, luxury car leases for the C-suites, etc...), mountains of state and federal employee taxes on every single head, and lease a luxury office studio with artisanal juice bars, meditation corners, and fine dining lunch caters. Then millions upon millions more in miscellaneous overhead like farms of high end computers/monitors, Herman Miller chairs/desks throughout, utilities, office supplies, toilet paper, etc... How much exactly do you think all that costs, a couple million a year? How else do you think Miles Morales, a 4 hour long DLC that reused every single assets within, cost $150,000,000 to produce?
Morgan Freeman Applause GIF by The Academy Awards

Dude knows his shit.
 
Is Concord the biggest bomb for any entertainment product in history? The development costs alone with the minuscule sales, makes me think this might just be. I can’t think of a worse performing high cost game. John Carter (2012), Heavens Gate (1980), and The Marvels (2023) are standouts in Film but I think Concord might take the prize. TV has had some large budget fails, but generally not at this scale and viewership return in $s is harder to quantify. Music and books are much lower costs.
the production budget of this game has to be around 100M, but when you add the cost of buying the studio, the number floating around is 200M, some people are even saying around 300M (there is no way that is true)

I would add that this failure is also reflects on Bungie and that cost 3.6 Billion lol.

so, I think the game itself (what it offers in a vacuum) doesn't feel like the biggest bomb in entertainment... i mean, yes, it's a complete rejection by the market AND reviews are in the 60s BUT it's marketing/bullet points/ambition are not high at all.

i would say in a vacuum, a bigger flopp was:
aq1PX5U.jpeg

in other words: The Spirit Within was doing something highly ambitious and groundbreaking.

concord is not doing shit.

NOW... but when we add the context around it... things look very different...Concord is not the biggest bomb in entertainment... Sony GaaS initiative is.
 

Hookshot

Gold Member
Can anyone think of a sensible way for Sony to get any money out of this? Getting some extra players by putting it on ps+ isn't going to generate a single cent.
 
Can anyone think of a sensible way for Sony to get any money out of this? Getting some extra players by putting it on ps+ isn't going to generate a single cent.
They could stop making games that suck and stop pandering to a loud, obnoxious minority and instead invest in what the other 99% of their fanbase actually wants, drop the stupid ideologies, and just make stuff people love again.

As for this game? No.
 
Last edited:
I don't personally understand what Sony was thinking here. I'm not anything special in the brains department and even I could have told them it was a fools errand to release a $40 game into a congested market of f2p titles, especially when you aren't doing anything special to differentiate your product from the others.
And now they've learned. Well we can hope they have.
 

Rayderism

Member
How many more woke-infested games have to flop before they finally realize that catering to those....people....is not going to work?

How many woke-infested games have actually been successful?
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
How many more woke-infested games have to flop before they finally realize that catering to those....people....is not going to work?
Who knows.

I lot of games and movies/tv have stunk it up lately. But it seems many of these companies have oodles of money to keep it going. All comes down to if they run out of money or shut down.

Given how stubborn they seem to be, it seems like many prefer draining the last penny and being laid off.
 

Raven117

Member
How many more woke-infested games have to flop before they finally realize that catering to those....people....is not going to work?

How many woke-infested games have actually been successful?
It’s not just “woke.” By lots of counts, BG3 could be considered “woke” but all of that was wrapped in a quality product first. Being “woke” was not the point or the focus. The focus was a great big awesome and inclusive video game that truly had something for everyone.

This, on the other hand, felt like “the message” was the point… and they created a cynical non-imaginative game to compete in an overcrowded market.
 
Top Bottom