• 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 is being taken offline on September 6, purchases refunded

EviLore

Expansive Ellipses
Staff Member
Arguing that people actively hating on a game online, constructing wild conspiracy theories about its creators and looking for every excuse to shit on it can materially harm its chances of success is pretty wild after what happened with Hogwarts Legacy. You had professional review sites refusing to review it and popular forums banning conversation about it, but it was still the biggest-selling game of the year. Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that a few people wisecracking about the Concord on comments sections turned an otherwise great game into an unprecedented flop?
The same thing just happened with Star Wars: The Acolyte. The lead actress blamed the alleged legions of alt-right ultra-conservative bigot Star Wars fans for not watching it and ensuring its failure somehow. Quite the strange claim. Can these online extremists really prevent you from loading up Disney+ and watching a show that you want to watch? Maybe the show was just unappealing and poorly made. Rogue One had a female lead and an almost entirely Diverse cast, but made a billion dollars and is well-liked by fans.

It's framed as some kind of moral requirement to buy into these unappealing entertainment products, and of course to not buy the morally impure products like Hogwarts and Stellar Blade and Wukong and Ion Fury ad infinitum. But it's just entertainment. People will buy what appeals to them, just like how TLOU2 became a big success despite the loud complaints in online discourse. Ultimately, even to the people complaining it was generally worth a buy.

It's also a major turnoff whenever someone performs self-righteous grandstanding, which is all any of these people do on Twitter and in interviews.

No one cares, make something good.
 
It's a game no one expected and blew up to one of the top sellers this year. It doesn't matter what happens to HD2 now it will be a win in Sony's book no matter what. Not only that but they can now work with Arrowhead to make HD3 eventually and improve upon the formula. They have a real hit here and I think there's even a possibility to make a movie\show of this IP if done right.
They sold a lot of copies. But this isn't the ps3 era anymore.
They're shooting for a recurring revenue stream because big budget single player titles are unsustainable.
It's almost out of the top 100 on steam. Below Warframe and Destiny.
All because they wanted a useless psn account instead of 40 dollars.
I just hope they learn from this year and stop making the same mistakes with the remaining mp games.

And no you are not a console warrior if you criticize Playstation's live service push.
They are now a third party publisher on Steam and deserve to be treated as such.
 

Nydius

Member
The same thing just happened with Star Wars: The Acolyte. The lead actress blamed the alleged legions of alt-right ultra-conservative bigot Star Wars fans for not watching it and ensuring its failure somehow. Quite the strange claim. Can these online extremists really prevent you from loading up Disney+ and watching a show that you want to watch? Maybe the show was just unappealing and poorly made. Rogue One had a female lead and an almost entirely Diverse cast, but made a billion dollars and is well-liked by fans.

It's framed as some kind of moral requirement to buy into these unappealing entertainment products, and of course to not buy the morally impure products like Hogwarts and Stellar Blade and Wukong and Ion Fury ad infinitum. But it's just entertainment. People will buy what appeals to them, just like how TLOU2 became a big success despite the loud complaints in online discourse. Ultimately, even to the people complaining it was generally worth a buy.

It's also a major turnoff whenever someone performs self-righteous grandstanding, which is all any of these people do on Twitter and in interviews.

No one cares, make something good.

As an aside related to this, every time I see some post show up on my Facebook feed like “Acolyte fans petition to save the show surpasses 60,000!, I roll my eyes. How many of those 60,000 actually watched the show I wonder. One tenth of them? One twentieth?

This is “modern audience” media in a nutshell. The people they pander to don’t watch, the people they offend don’t watch, and then they blame the imaginary bigot bogeyman, while trying to “save” the very thing their target audience never watched in the first place. 🙄
 
Last edited:

azertydu91

Hard to Kill
The same thing just happened with Star Wars: The Acolyte. The lead actress blamed the alleged legions of alt-right ultra-conservative bigot Star Wars fans for not watching it and ensuring its failure somehow.
Honestly the acolyte was great to me...Just hear me for 1 second, I am insomniac and this managed to put me to sleep faster that drugs ever did.
So that's a quality I guess.
I will have a surgery in a few weeks and at first I wanted them to put that shit on during the surgery , but thinking about it, I wanted the surgeon wide awake while operating so I abandonned that Idea, slower than sony abandonned concord but still quite fast.
 

Embearded

Member
It's funny how some are pushing this narrative that it's a specific group that caused this game to fail when NO ONE bought it.

Add on top that no major forum banned discussion about it, which is what happened to Hogwarts Legacy.

All i know is that a good game will sell, regardless of how right or left it leans politically.
The average consumer is a pretentious coward.
 

FoxMcChief

Gold Member
The Concord Platinum will be a badge of honor.

I think we honor different things.

If anything, it should be a badge of shame.
 

Bernardougf

Member
The same thing just happened with Star Wars: The Acolyte. The lead actress blamed the alleged legions of alt-right ultra-conservative bigot Star Wars fans for not watching it and ensuring its failure somehow. Quite the strange claim. Can these online extremists really prevent you from loading up Disney+ and watching a show that you want to watch? Maybe the show was just unappealing and poorly made. Rogue One had a female lead and an almost entirely Diverse cast, but made a billion dollars and is well-liked by fans.

It's framed as some kind of moral requirement to buy into these unappealing entertainment products, and of course to not buy the morally impure products like Hogwarts and Stellar Blade and Wukong and Ion Fury ad infinitum. But it's just entertainment. People will buy what appeals to them, just like how TLOU2 became a big success despite the loud complaints in online discourse. Ultimately, even to the people complaining it was generally worth a buy.

It's also a major turnoff whenever someone performs self-righteous grandstanding, which is all any of these people do on Twitter and in interviews.

No one cares, make something good.
Im forming the opinion that right now diversity is being used entirely as a guilty free shield...you are a unexperienced director so cast diverse actors (preferably woman of color) and include lgbtq+ tropes all around your story... if your creation fails pull the "bigotry/misogyny not my fault" card in social media + count with the help of the mainstream woke media and there and them... it was not your fault.. ready for the next project.
 

FoxMcChief

Gold Member
Im forming the opinion that right now diversity is being used entirely as a guilty free shield...you are a unexperienced director so cast diverse actors (preferably woman of color) and include lgbtq+ tropes all around your story... if your creation fails pull the "bigotry/misogyny not my fault" card in social media + count with the help of the mainstream woke media and there and them... it was not your fault.. ready for the next project.
I’m going to say it.

Star Wars was better when it was targeted to boys/men.
 

Bernardougf

Member
What's this "secret" Discord they had?
ksBvOKh.jpeg
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
Arguing that people actively hating on a game online, constructing wild conspiracy theories about its creators and looking for every excuse to shit on it can materially harm its chances of success is pretty wild after what happened with Hogwarts Legacy. You had professional review sites refusing to review it and popular forums banning conversation about it, but it was still the biggest-selling game of the year. Meanwhile, we're supposed to believe that a few people wisecracking about the Concord on comments sections turned an otherwise great game into an unprecedented flop?

Brandon Scott Jones Ghosts GIF by CBS
It seems like the answer has been staring them in the face for a while, but they refuse to acknowledge it because it’s not the answer they want: the “modern audience” they’ve been preaching about is a fictional creation. Actual audiences are either oblivious to the woke shit, or else they hate it. And the more people become consciously aware of it, the more they feel repulsed by it.

It’s kinda hilarious seeing all the mental gymnastics they put themselves through to avoid admitting it. And it’s only going to get more and more pathetic as woke bomb after woke bomb keep happening, along with people getting more and more comfortable calling it out.
 

Z O N E

Member
Add on top that no major forum banned discussion about it, which is what happened to Hogwarts Legacy.

All i know is that a good game will sell, regardless of how right or left it leans politically.
The average consumer is a pretentious coward.

Exactly. If the game has a good story, has good gameplay and good characters, then people won't give 2 shillings if the character wears a diaper and poops every 10 seconds. 😂

Yet, they somehow think that all of that has to go out of the window and the only thing that matters the colour of a characters skin.


👁️
 
EGwlPbk.png


Saw this earlier and it made me laugh. The amount of people that think this game failed because of the "anti-woke" folks is crazy to me. A AAA game doesn't fail because of one single group. It would be different if the game sold 1M copies because then you can point to a loud minority but Concord has failed because NOBODY bought it which includes the same mentally ill people that constantly defend the game blindly.
I have seen comments like this so many times. How can they even say this. If everyone who wasn't a straight white male bought this game it would be the best smelling game ever made. I don't know if they have noticed but white males are in the minority on this planet. They are effectively blaming a minority for not buying their game. The issue is that people who aren't straight and white thought the game wasn't worth playing
 

cripterion

Member
I didn't get the game but I'd like a refund too Sony : you greenlit this and let it out on your platform, built some marketing around it even, I feel insulted.
 

tommib

Member
I have seen comments like this so many times. How can they even say this. If everyone who wasn't a straight white male bought this game it would be the best smelling game ever made. I don't know if they have noticed but white males are in the minority on this planet. They are effectively blaming a minority for not buying their game. The issue is that people who aren't straight and white thought the game wasn't worth playing
It’s trolling.
 

Raven117

Member
Star Wars was better when it was targeted to boys/men.
It really comes down to the fact that talentless people are simply shoehorning a political ideology into entertainment without bothering to actually make an entertaining product. Moreover, they are chasing a group that has not typically consumed certain pieces of entertainment (like video games), then surprised that that group isn't big enough to carry the product and blame the traditional market on not buying the entertainment.

Certain stories resonate with different groups of people. Its as simple as walking into any normal home in America and seeing a group of dudes watching Sports and old Star Wars movies, while a group of women are watching Bravo and the Bachelor...Of course there are exceptions to this, but we are talking large stereotypical groups...ya know...market segments.

What they are doing, isn't resonating with anyone.
 
Last edited:

BbMajor7th

Member
It seems like the answer has been staring them in the face for a while, but they refuse to acknowledge it because it’s not the answer they want: the “modern audience” they’ve been preaching about is a fictional creation. Actual audiences are either oblivious to the woke shit, or else they hate it. And the more people become consciously aware of it, the more they feel repulsed by it.

It’s kinda hilarious seeing all the mental gymnastics they put themselves through to avoid admitting it. And it’s only going to get more and more pathetic as woke bomb after woke bomb keep happening, along with people getting more and more comfortable calling it out.
One review I thought nailed it quite well. He argued that there's a misconception among big businesses that the performative personas people maintain on social media are representative of who they are in real life. If you look at social media engagement, the modern audience is huge, highly engaged, passionate, and vocal. In real life, they're all out buying and doing the same shit as people they claim to hate online.

I’m going to say it.

Star Wars was better when it was targeted to boys/men.
It was, but then I don't think it was necessarily that that made it good. I think it comes more down to authenticity. George Lucas was telling a story that comprised lots of things he, a young man, loved - Rashomon, Flash Gordon, John Carter of Mars - and naturally lots of other young men, of a similar background found it cool too. Modern Star Wars wants to use all this cool stuff created by a young man in the seventies as something designed to represent and appeal to a completely different audience in the 2020s. It doesn't work and appeals to no one, hence all these modern series and films fall flat: men don't care for them and neither do women.

Like the Bill Burr video earlier in the thread about the WNBA - putting women into traditionally masculine spaces doesn't mean that huge swathes of women will care about something they never really did before, whether it's science fiction or competitive sports. The same way that getting Chris Hemsworth or Vin Diesel or The Rock to parade around in lipstick wouldn't suddenly have men flocking to the nearest cosmetics counter.
 
Last edited:

Alebrije

Member
One review I thought nailed it quite well. He argued that there's a misconception among big businesses that the performative personas people maintain on social media are representative of who they are in real life. If you look at social media engagement, the modern audience is huge, highly engaged, passionate, and vocal. In real life, they're all out buying and doing the same shit as people they claim to hate online.
But what does companies mean when they talk about "modern audiences"? If Concord is a product for modern audiences it seems that market is so small that no companie Will invest on modern audiences on the future.

The true is that there is no such a group called " modern audiences" that is just a marketing label , basically there is just a market called "gamers" or "video Game players". And the major part of that group said /decided. Concord was not a good Game or Gaas.
 

Holammer

Member
abd


Saw this on Knowyourmeme.
Checked a site of ill repute and they have zero Concord fanarts and 120 for Deadlock where this gargoyle character is featured in most of them.
Firewalk failed so thoroughly in creating titillating characters, Valve destroys them without even trying.
 

BbMajor7th

Member
But what does companies mean when they talk about "modern audiences"? If Concord is a product for modern audiences it seems that market is so small that no companie Will invest on modern audiences on the future.

The true is that there is no such a group called " modern audiences" that is just a marketing label , basically there is just a market called "gamers" or "video Game players". And the major part of that group said /decided. Concord was not a good Game or Gaas.
Honestly, 'Modern Audiences' is just another term for 'Cleared by PR' and all PR wants to do is avoid bad publicity, which in the modern age, means avoiding a blow-up on social media. Hence, the 'Modern Audience' is just an extraction of the exaggerated personas we maintain on social media and doesn't actually appeal to anyone in real life.
 

TintoConCasera

I bought a sex doll, but I keep it inflated 100% of the time and use it like a regular wife
abd


Saw this on Knowyourmeme.
Checked a site of ill repute and they have zero Concord fanarts and 120 for Deadlock where this gargoyle character is featured in most of them.
Firewalk failed so thoroughly in creating titillating characters, Valve destroys them without even trying.
Funny thing is that Deadlock also has quite the diverse character roster but guess what, their designs are miles ahead of those of Concord.
 

sloppyjoe_gamer

Gold Member
As an aside related to this, every time I see some post show up on my Facebook feed like “Acolyte fans petition to save the show surpasses 60,000!, I roll my eyes. How many of those 60,000 actually watched the show I wonder. One tenth of them? One twentieth?

This is “modern audience” media in a nutshell. The people they pander to don’t watch, the people they offend don’t watch, and then they blame the imaginary bigot bogeyman, while trying to “save” the very thing their target audience never watched in the first place. 🙄

The problem is, no one stood up to these clowns and called them out a long time ago about this imaginary modern audience. Now this is all they hang their hat on when something fails.....that it's somehow bigoted white people who caused their trash to fail. Somewhere along the line this all became acceptable for this false narrative to proliferate and now we are where we are. There's a lesson in there someplace about calling out ignorance and stupidity right away instead of allowing it to fester.
 

Danknugz

Member
how much money was wasted on this garbage that could have gone to poor needy families and children, just so a bunch of sad gamers could get their rocks off on a shitty game?
 

Kamina

Golden Boy
It really comes down to the fact that talentless people are simply shoehorning a political ideology into entertainment without bothering to actually make an entertaining product. Moreover, they are chasing a group that has not typically consumed certain pieces of entertainment (like video games), then surprised that that group isn't big enough to carry the product and blame the traditional market on not buying the entertainment.

Certain stories resonate with different groups of people. Its as simple as walking into any normal home in America and seeing a group of dudes watching Sports and old Star Wars movies, while a group of women are watching Bravo and the Bachelor...Of course there are exceptions to this, but we are talking large stereotypical groups...ya know...market segments.

What they are doing, isn't resonating with anyone.
Talentless is the right term here, but also delusional.
They really seem to believe that this so called modern audience exists and that implementing their own mindsets makes sense, but end up with surprised pikachu faces when their products fail. Instead of then contemplating what could have led to failure, they double down that it must have been men/racist/bigots/toxic people/…
The problem at hand: “I am a victim, everyone who doesn’t agree with me is against me, other opinions are wrong”
 
Last edited:

Robot Carnival

Gold Member
I had only kinda heard of Concord before that big SOP presentation not long ago. my reaction when I first heard the name during the SOP was "oh, I think I heard about it before." and went on to watch the whole thing. the CG trailer was... ok I guess. it didn't really grab my attention or interest all that much. and after the gameplay trailer, I can already tell I won't play it for sure. it just doesn't look interesting enough for me. I used to play Warframe and I played the original Overwatch until it's shutdown, and am still playing Destiny 2. I am in theory the target audience they should be aiming for. but the character designs and the game play simply didn't grab me. I shown that picture of all the characters to a friend of mine and his response was "I would probably only play the yellow trashcan if I had to pick." the characters are just so uninspiring looking, and that's part of the biggest deciding point when I consider a game. maybe the designs are cool for some circles, but for me they're not. I do respect them trying to get away from F2P and predatory micro-transactions, but you're making a hero shooter when all the main leaders are doing F2P in various degrees of success. the paid model in this case is almost destined to fail.

on a side note, I see a lot of people on the purple side saying they feel sorry for the devs. maybe I'm just a terrible person, but I don't feel that way at all. it's a very competitive industry, and when you have a chance to prove yourself you'll want to do what's going to guarantee the best chance for success. you can feel free to "express yourself" when you're an actual proven name. but if after all the betas and play tests with negative feedbacks you still insist on the terrible design in terms of gameplay, characters and price point, then you have nobody else to blame but yourself and you have to own up to it. don't tell me not a single person in the studio didn't feel there are issues there. if they did feel there's problem and they didn't speak up, then they're part of the problems. and if they simply didn't feel it's an problem, then they shouldn't be in this industry and they learned a valuable lesson. life isn't always sunshine and rainbows. you made a mistake or bad decision in life, you'll have to face the consequences of it one way or the other. just because you pour your heart and soul into a mistake doesn't make it not a mistake.

and don't get me started on the whole "it's the far right asshole's fault". I support people for what they want to do with their sexuality. I support right to abortion and women's right. I support racial equality. but as an Asian man, who was told we're white-adjacent and still barely see many of us represented in main stream media, I am not going to just accept BS like that "far right" narrative. fact of the matter is, we're just not interested in that you're selling. as soon as you got something we like, we'll support you with our wallet. we play games to escape our daily life. to have fun. to entertain. when you're making it into some social lesson experience, then you have a lesson you'll have to learn yourself.
 

Fbh

Member
The same thing just happened with Star Wars: The Acolyte. The lead actress blamed the alleged legions of alt-right ultra-conservative bigot Star Wars fans for not watching it and ensuring its failure somehow. Quite the strange claim. Can these online extremists really prevent you from loading up Disney+ and watching a show that you want to watch? Maybe the show was just unappealing and poorly made. Rogue One had a female lead and an almost entirely Diverse cast, but made a billion dollars and is well-liked by fans.

It's framed as some kind of moral requirement to buy into these unappealing entertainment products, and of course to not buy the morally impure products like Hogwarts and Stellar Blade and Wukong and Ion Fury ad infinitum. But it's just entertainment. People will buy what appeals to them, just like how TLOU2 became a big success despite the loud complaints in online discourse. Ultimately, even to the people complaining it was generally worth a buy.

It's also a major turnoff whenever someone performs self-righteous grandstanding, which is all any of these people do on Twitter and in interviews.

No one cares, make something good.

Yeah I really don't get this logical fallacy of a discourse that some people have when projects like these fail.
At first they hit you with "it's not made for you" and "if you don't like it don't buy/play/watch it".
But then when the product fails it's somehow still my fault for not buying/playing/watching it .

Apparently the expectation is that I should stay quiet about stuff I don't like but for some reason still spend my time and money on it.
 

ZoukGalaxy

Member
Talentless is the right term here, but also delusional.
They really seem to believe that this so called modern audience exists and that implementing their own mindsets makes sense, but end up with surprised pikachu faces when their products fail. Instead of then contemplating what could have led to failure, they double down that it must have been men/racist/bigots/toxic people/…
The problem at hand: “I am a victim, everyone who doesn’t agree with me is against me, other opinions are wrong”
Thanks Thank You GIF by BLKBOK
 
True but let’s get more Latin women and Indian women then instead of always just Black women. I guess Star Wars Outlaws and GTA 6 are a step in that direction at least.

It follows alongside the uglification of women in gaming in general. That isn't to say that black women are the ugliest (not even remotely true), but rather when you look at subjective attractiveness metrics like the data produced by dating sites, Black women are the least attracted demographic by almost every male ethnic demo other than black men.

So, with most gamers being white males, those fat liberal white women slobs who work in gaming and want to create female characters that are either self-inserts or not a threat to themselves, will not consider black women characters to be a threat to them, whereas latin, Indian and Asian female characters would offend their narcissism.
 
Top Bottom