• 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

FewRope

Member
QqBjSc3.jpeg
Sodium 4, this cannot be real
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
That screams like a lie to me.
It just sounds very weasel-y and noncommittal. “Explore options, including those that will better reach our players”.

Presumably then, that also includes options that won’t better reach their players i.e. can it.
 

zapiks44

Member
I guess I gotta give Sony credit for one thing: they took the most consumer-friendly decision they could have in response to the game's failure. They didn't try to blame the game's failure on "haters" or "bigots" or the "anti-woke crowd". They didn't insist the game was actually good and everyone else was just playing it wrong. They just accepted that it failed, made no excuses or defenses of it, and refunded everyone who bought it.

But will they do the same thing if Fairgame$ fails just as badly? I guess we'll find out soon.
 
When your open beta draws in so few people that could potentially give feedback on the game you need to pump the brakes and find someone outside that sphere for input. They had some warning signs, their hubris just blinded them.


They ignored the multiple signs cos they are narcissistic talentless mofos. These people are helpless.

I hope Sony is just in damage control mode with the vague PR and don't dare pull the plug while the topic is hot. They are losing money with every passing day.
 
But besides all the fun and laughter about this failed project. What do they need to change about the game (besides making it f2p) to make it attractive and successfull. I want detailed ideas
-Redesigned characters
-Redesigned skins
-Redesigned maps
-Redesigned modes
-Redesigned gameplay

Or redesigned ambitions knowing it's idiotic to pump more money in this game hoping to make a turn around when they could just convert the bones of it into something else.
 
All these "game journalists" mourning the death of one of the worst games ever made are showing why they have such a poor reputation among gamers nowadays. They could've presented this whole thing as an example of gamers "standing up to multi-billion dollar corporations" and showing that the common people still have power over them. We all love stories like that, don't we? So why didn't they do that? Because the game that we were standing up against aligned with their agenda. Because they don't give a fuck about "gamers"

Imagine if Stellar Blade or Hogwarts Legacy had failed as badly as Concord. The same journalists mourning Concord's demise would be celebrating with articles titled "Stellar Blade's failure proves that audiences firmly reject objectification of women" or similar cringeworthy headlines.

I hope Fairgames and Bungie's Marathon reboot also fail, just to see even more pathetic cope from them.

Watching them dance around why this game has failed has been entertaining, to say the least.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
My eyes kept fixating so I had to double check the original.This is the only part that ISN'T photoshopped. How is the boxart so poorly designed?

LEpLAi3.jpeg
I noticed that too. It all blends into that rectangular shape fine except that oddly cut off part at the top where the two characters' shoulders meet. All the boxart guy had to do is expand the big guy's shoulder to the back of hipster shrek's head.

And in the top right corner, that's one of their funky spaceships. It looks more like a giant mosquito. Even if you look at it in detail you still cant really tell it's a spaceship..... at least I think it's a spaceship? lol

The odd thing too is the box art shows characters with guns, so ok people can assume it's some kind of action or shooter game. But unless someone is vested into the universe already or read about it in detail, how would anyone know what Concord or that big N logo means?

It would be like Star Wars movie being renamed Known (I had to look it up), and the logo beside it is a giant M standing for Millennium Falcon.
 
Last edited:

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I guess the devs forgot to take some of the bots they used to try to boast their CCU offline after the game was shuttered :)
Cant blame em. They couldnt shut off the bots. They got fired already I bet. Last man standing IT guy in charge of rounding up all the tech gear hasnt got around to shutting off these PCs yet.
 
Last edited:
Yes, I recall her having a very self righteous demeanor about her ugly designs, like she was on a mission to have these character designs in the game for the 'modern audience' and it was the magnum opus of her art career.
And now she wants to play victim. Typical.

Ah yes, I found it, SmashJT covered her tweets:


Literal quotes:


Welp never mind what I was saying earlier then. Guess they are just trying to distance themselves after reception was bad, not because they inherently felt bad about the final designs.

I mean it could still be possible other artists did the early concept art and this woman is one of the artists who came in later redesigning some into the monstrosities seen in the released game. Like I doubt she was involved with designing every single character.

That's why I'm trying to have some nuance on the topic; it'd help to know who did what designs, and when, including if they did any concept art that was more appealing prior. Maybe someone else did come and tell them to change the designs later, or maybe they as an artist got tricked by far-left idpol ideologies a few years into working on the game and that made them change earlier designs. We probably will never know.

sony banked too much on this game and now only left with a children's game in astro bot which doesnt appeal to grown people.

Plenty of kids have PS5s c'mon. And lots of adults are just big kids so they're gonna love it, too.

I find her art style quite ugly and unpleasant, but we shouldn't call others art /work or whatever junk. You can see the effort put in some of those designs.

Just looking at it now; she's probably influenced by stuff like Steven Universe & Noelle Stevenson, but I don't think her style is ugly at all. They...actually have some good stuff in their portfolio, clearly. And there's effort present too, as you said.

amanda-kiefer-finalfire1-1.jpg

amanda-kiefer-ftpxru9aqaarrrz-copy.jpg


Like these here look good, and going by the 2nd they have a pretty solid skillset in traditional art (many digital artists don't). I'm guessing she had sensible viewpoints & politics at one point but then got hooked on "modern audience ideology" a few years ago and that influenced her character design work on Concord.

Because just at a glance, very few if any characters in that game have any appealing visual aspects like these two drawings here. Even for characters who look horrid in the final game, like that tank girl in green with the purple lipstick, their concept art despite being strongly similar is a much better realization of the exact same concept. So the final character designs in the game got stupidly watered down and simplified to the point of being boring & uninteresting.
 

zapiks44

Member
Now add in Mrs. Freeze, that chick from Flintlock, the nonbinary Qunari from Dragon Age 4, Leslye Hedland, the Fable heroine, and the whole cast of Dustborn.

2024: the game.

That seems dangerousl. Putting so much ugliness in one place could make it collapse into a black hole of ugliness that destroys us all.
 

GloveSlap

Member
There is almost no chance this is coming back IMO. Losing so much money is bad, but i think Sony is more concerned about the brand damage that comes with being the butt of so many jokes at this point. I seriously doubt they will willingly subject themselves to that again.
 

Gambit2483

Member
But besides all the fun and laughter about this failed project. What do they need to change about the game (besides making it f2p) to make it attractive and successfull. I want detailed ideas
What would they need to change? Everything.

The art sucks.
The game modes suck.
The characters suck.
The pricing sucks.

There's a reason this game did worse than even Lawbreakers.
 
Imagine failing a second time. I doubt they will gamble like that, with money and reputation on the line.

They will quietly bury it. If the studio doesn't shut down, they will recycle whatever they can for the next project.
 

laynelane

Member
There is almost no chance this is coming back IMO. Losing so much money is bad, but i think Sony is more concerned about the brand damage that comes with being the butt of so many jokes at this point. I seriously doubt they will willingly subject themselves to that again.

I've seen a lot of questioning here and elsewhere about how Sony could let this happen. There's definitely brand damage at this point. As well, there is notable damage to their GasS push too. People are already eyeballing Fairgame$ as the next Sony GaaS failure.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
I've seen a lot of questioning here and elsewhere about how Sony could let this happen. There's definitely brand damage at this point. As well, there is notable damage to their GasS push too. People are already eyeballing Fairgame$ as the next Sony GaaS failure.
People are going to think twice about "Fairlame Dollar Sign" and whatever other unknown GAAS game comes out. Games like GT and MLB are different. And so would a Helldivers 3.

Fairlames already doesnt have a great reception as it might be a generic heist game where the YT vid wasnt exactly eye catching.

Jade Raymond is probably shitting her panties, since Concord has already tainted her game whether she likes it or not. And if the game is truly as bad as Concord (hard to believe actually), Sony is playing hardball lately with bungie layoffs, cancelled GAAS games and pulling the plug on Concord in 2 weeks. So she better ensure her game is good or else Sony has no problem shutting it down early and gassing people.
 
Last edited:

Nikodemos

Member
Somebody made a DEI detector for gaming

Except it's wrong right out of the gate. Daw isn't a woman, he's just some fat dude with unkempt hair and bad fashion sense.
If he wanted to go for a blatant DEI low-hanging fruit, he could've pointed out Lennox. Who is a white dude, but green and spiky, because the game already has a token wyteboi in Teo, and a second one would be "overrepresentation".
 

edbrat

Member
I guess I gotta give Sony credit for one thing: they took the most consumer-friendly decision they could have in response to the game's failure. They didn't try to blame the game's failure on "haters" or "bigots" or the "anti-woke crowd". They didn't insist the game was actually good and everyone else was just playing it wrong. They just accepted that it failed, made no excuses or defenses of it, and refunded everyone who bought it.

But will they do the same thing if Fairgame$ fails just as badly? I guess we'll find out soon.
A bomb on this scale will have percolated through the organisation pretty quickly including corporate. I speculate that it will have quickly gotten to the point where some very heavy hitters at SIE and Sony Corp started thinking "this isn't just a commercial failure, this is so bad it risks tarnishing the brand move straight to defcon 1". Once that happened the managers in charge of the launch and the game will have no say in what happens, the corporate bosses will decide what to do on a conf call and the word will come down from on high telling the troops exactly what to do. Do not pass go, do not collect £200, refund everyone and we'll work out wtaf we'll do next over the coming days. Priority one is stop embarrassing us.

All of this could have been avoided if they listened to Iwata's "red ocean, blue ocean" spiel. They swam straight into the red ocean of GaaS just as the sector got stupidly overcrowded, they were late to the punch and what they delivered was nowhere near competitive. This is why you hire smart and expensive people to make these strategic calls which don't seem obvious at the time. There's a load of people in SIE who should have realised this and now they didn't the question will be asked "what is the point of you?". A loss on this scale needs some serious blood sacrifices to satiate the gods of finance and corporate.

The next thing they'll be wondering is "can we salvage this?" and it's far from obvious what they could do. No Mans Sky got hideously panned on release but credit to them they stuck it out and turned it into something special. But that was with a smaller team and presumably the cost of letting the dev sort shit out is way less than is needed for Concord. So much money is already in the bin, any request for more to fix it will rightly be side eyed with the most brutal level of scepticism. The opportunity cost of this is nauseating when you think what the investment in Concord could have been used on.
 
Top Bottom