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[Nikodemos]

No Mans Sky got hideously panned on release but credit to them they stuck it out and turned it into something special.

Games with a strong single-player component (heck, NMS didn't even have multiplayer early on) are relatively simple to righten. Fix bugs, add content (said content might've even been partly developed for the initial launch, but was cut due to time constraints).
Note, I said simple, not easy. Actually squashing said bugs might be difficult, but identifying the weakspots is not complex.
Whereas a bomba like Concord is more complex to analyze, since there wasn't any one factor which can be directly pointed at. An in-depth analysis is required, in order to create a hierarchy of issues, so that, in the (I suspect rather unlikely) situation an exec issues a work order, people know what to concentrate on, so they don't waste time/work-hours on low-impact fixes.

 

[nush]

Did they ever explain why they called the cast "Freegunners" in a paid game?

You can buy it, play it and then get your money back. =free.

 

[Sw0pDiller]

Nice try, Professor!

Sorry, dont want to ruin your party.

 

[zokie]

Concord Was Cancelled So Craig Bought Every Copy

 

[protonion]

I'm still amazed about the level of failure of this game.
All it's bad traits can be said for many games but none failed so badly.
A random youtube trailer I saw had a million views. It was first thing you saw on the ps store for some time. Day one on pc. Gameplay looked fine.
You would expect just from this visibility it would get at least a few dozen thousands of gamers and die in six months.

But what happened is unreal. It wasn't just rejected. It's like it skipped every gamer's attention. It should be studied.

 

[Rentahamster]

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?

Someone accidentally disabled a few blending modes in Photoshop lol.

 

[cormack12]

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.

No Man's Sky is an interesting case. They got a massive injection up front which had immediate ROI and set the studio up for years. They could have just cut and run with the profits but they didn't, they reinvested in the game and now have a second game coming built on the same tech.

Concord isn't all bad, the core engine can be shelved and reskinned, which wouldn't take that long. But they need an idea for it. It's like when UT2K3 failed on consoles, or Counter Strike.

 

[SkylineRKR]

I'm still amazed about the level of failure of this game.
All it's bad traits can be said for many games but none failed so badly.
A random youtube trailer I saw had a million views. It was first thing you saw on the ps store for some time. Day one on pc. Gameplay looked fine.
You would expect just from this visibility it would get at least a few dozen thousands of gamers and die in six months.

But what happened is unreal. It wasn't just rejected. It's like it skipped every gamer's attention. It should be studied.

Yes this game is the culmination of a culture clash thats been brewing for a few years now. For a while now people start to openly dismiss and criticize woke, DEI etc. Some companies, like Harley Davidson and Jack Daniels openly stated they will stop supporting this shit. This trend is losing ground and as far as games go, this was a corporate checklist DEI game by a big publisher. In my opinion this was the ideal target to shit on, as Concord checked all the boxes that show whats wrong with society today and not to mention is another GaaS game.

This game shows that, if you continue to aggressively push this woke agenda and designs, you are going to pay for it. I expect Sony to eventually revise their stance, as another few bombs like this, for reasons like this, will eventually hurt the Playstation brand as whole and alienate their core user which clearly don't want to have to do anything with this shit.

 

[Nikodemos]

DEI is a convenient excuse for garden-variety fucktardery. Attempting to handwave incompetence as creative meddling.
BG3 is pretty blatantly queer-coded.
It's also a big commercial success. Why? Because it was well-made.
Arcane Season 1 is basically a DEI checklist. Le stronk blax womyn? Check. Butch lez and her femmy gf? Check. Physically-disabled characters? Check. Hood rat with a heart of gold? Check. Overworlders brutally oppress the underclasses under the veneer of order? Check.
It was widely acclaimed for its story and characterization, by pretty much everybody. Why? Same reason as BG3.

 

[Sony]

So I thought the ridiculing of this game was a bit of exaggerated, but the game designs of Concord have hit mainstream social media. Holy f*ck what were they thinking. The character designs are hideous.

 

[TheKratos]

Anyone here actually play Concord? Out of curiosity I was watching streams, apart from the horrible hero designs (some were good), the gameplay looked decent.

 

[Black_Stride]

DEI is a convenient excuse for garden-variety fucktardery. Attempting to handwave incompetence as creative meddling.

Concord just came out way way too late.
It was designed for 2016 or 2017.
If it came out then im sure it would have been received better.

It also needed to be free to play.

 

[The Cockatrice]

LMFAO that skin, holy fuck, first time seeing it.

 

[Goalus]

I wonder whether Microsoft will take notes and change the appearance of the Fable main character. There is still time to do so.

 

[SkylineRKR]

I wonder whether Microsoft will take notes and change the appearance of the Fable main character. There is still time to do so.

They should. Its easy enough to remodel her face. I mean come on, I see many young women going about in daily life, and the majority of them looks more feminine than whatever this character is supposed to be.

What kind of gamer is going to be happy with this current direction? It can't be the majority of their userbase.

 

[ManaByte]

Somebody made a DEI detector for gaming

Concord | DEIDetected

Read about Concord and why is in our list classified as a dei-detected game.

deidetected.com

That site is insane. If you use that you won’t play anything.

 

[V1LÆM]

Deleted

 

[V1LÆM]

Deleted

 

[diffusionx]

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.

NMS also sold really, really, really well. Which means they could self fund the game presumably for a very long time while revamping the game.

Concord did not sell. I don’t mean, “did not sell well.” The scale of this games failure is unheard of these days. This article compares it to Suicicde Squad, a game that did so bad that the WB CEO blamed it for their decreased revenue, yet it did better than Clncord by orders of magnitude:

Concord's devastating 20% player count drop killed the PS5 shooter

Concord's PS5 player count dropped significantly in its second week — a fact that may have foreshadowed the shooter's premature death.

www.truetrophies.com

considering as you point out the damage to the brand and stuff like that, I really do think it is in the conversation for biggest bomb ever and I think Sony would be insane to roll it out again. Nobody wants this game.

 

[T-0800]

Anyone here actually play Concord? Out of curiosity I was watching streams, apart from the horrible hero designs (some were good), the gameplay looked decent.

I bought it and loved it. Was a ton of fun.

 

[nush]

I bought it and loved it. Was a ton of fun.

I'm sorry for your loss.

 

[ManaByte]

Anyone here actually play Concord? Out of curiosity I was watching streams, apart from the horrible hero designs (some were good), the gameplay looked decent.

Gameplay was fun. Hit the level cap in beta. Didn't get to play as much at launch though because it dropped at the same time as BLOPS6 beta and Outlaws. Finally got in some playtime after I finished Outlaws and between the BLOPS weekends but then they shut it down.

 

[T-0800]

I'm sorry for your loss.

Sadly it became harder and harder to find games as the days went by. I'd accepted I'd wasted money on it so I was pretty happy to find out I was getting a refund. Helped pay for Astrobot.

 

[SportsFan581]

I'm still amazed about the level of failure of this game.
All it's bad traits can be said for many games but none failed so badly.
A random youtube trailer I saw had a million views. It was first thing you saw on the ps store for some time. Day one on pc. Gameplay looked fine.
You would expect just from this visibility it would get at least a few dozen thousands of gamers and die in six months.

But what happened is unreal. It wasn't just rejected. It's like it skipped every gamer's attention. It should be studied.

In the GaaS world you have to be compelling enough for players to spend time on in place of whatever evergreen they are already playing. The more similar the game is in play style to evergreen titles the more difficult it will be to pull off. Standing out is super important. In this case the game was very Overwatchy (from reports, never played Overwatch or Concord myself), but was $40 when Overwatch was free.

With single player the old competition goes away (no matter how good it is) as players finish the core of the game allowing room to move on to something different. With GaaS the popular games stay in the zeitgeist seemingly forever, the devs have to come out swinging and give players a reason to even consider it.

 

[SkylineRKR]

In the GaaS world you have to be compelling enough for players to spend time on in place of whatever evergreen they are already playing. The more similar the game is in play style to evergreen titles the more difficult it will be to pull off. Standing out is super important. In this case the game was very Overwatchy (from reports, never played Overwatch or Concord myself), but was $40 when Overwatch was free.

With single player the old competition goes away (no matter how good it is) as players finish the core of the game allowing room to move on to something different. With GaaS the popular games stay in the zeitgeist seemingly forever, the devs have to come out swinging and give players a reason to even consider it.

Overwatch 2 gets shit on a lot, and rightfully so, but its Free to Play and it has designs that are like 1000x more compelling than Concord. Reinhardt, D.Va, Genji, Hanzo, Pharah etc all look better than anything on there. I understand wanting to buy skins and outfits for Overwatch 2.

Concord did cost $40 to even boot it up. This is quite an easy choice.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

i had no idea what the main character looked like and searched it.

Reminds me of a refugee guy named Sohail (or Soheil) who came to my high school from India.

 

[tanners]

Whoa shit, this is the first time i've seen a game being cancelled and recalled

Cyberpunk 2077 8th gen edition shivers nervously

 

[Last Hearth]

DEI is a convenient excuse for garden-variety fucktardery. Attempting to handwave incompetence as creative meddling.
BG3 is pretty blatantly queer-coded.
It's also a big commercial success. Why? Because it was well-made.
Arcane Season 1 is basically a DEI checklist. Le stronk blax womyn? Check. Butch lez and her femmy gf? Check. Physically-disabled characters? Check. Hood rat with a heart of gold? Check. Overworlders brutally oppress the underclasses under the veneer of order? Check.
It was widely acclaimed for its story and characterization, by pretty much everybody. Why? Same reason as BG3.

Yup., Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a communist, yes his novels are still great works of art.
It's not that woke left wing stuff automatically make bad art, it's that many of the proponents of the ideology are not true believers, they just use it because it's the easy way for them to get ahead. So they get advancements and access to better opportunities without actual putting in the time and the hard work to earn them.

When you had a few of those types on a large team, it was still possible to hide them by giving them the less critical tasks, and have the other non-slackers who are competent cover for them.
But when they become the majority on your team, or god forbid even becomes team leaders or project managers. Then you have a disaster on your hands, because they are all only going to put in the minimum effort, and that's how you get a game like Concord, where every thing is bland, every character design feels like someone who turned in a piece of homework assignment, all the game play modes are basically what's standard in the genre, because that takes the least amount of thought. That's why the woke messages are not woven into interest settings with interesting characters, they are just in your face scolding and lectures, because that takes the least amount of work.

The result is that the a large portion of public has clearly caught on and now automatically associate woke with boring and poor quality, that why most people never even gave Concord a chance, they've learned their lesson.

 

[Negotiator]

Pretty soon you will have no job at all, sweetheart...

Ever heard of "Hubris/Nemesis"?

 

[ReBurn]

Pretty soon you will have no job at all, sweetheart...

Ever heard of "Hubris/Nemesis"?

Well of course we won't have games to play if Sony keeps refunding them and locking them out of our libraries.

 

[Coolade]

 

[Negotiator]

Well of course we won't have games to play if Sony keeps refunding them and locking them out of our libraries.

Astro Bot is still available to buy & play.

If you want your MP fix, why don't you ask for an Uncharted/Killzone MP remaster from the glorious PS3 era?

 

[havoc00]

Anyone here actually play Concord? Out of curiosity I was watching streams, apart from the horrible hero designs (some were good), the gameplay looked decent.

I bought it, it was solid shooter at its core. Did nothing groundbreaking

 

[ManaByte]

Still shit. They need to start from scratch.

 

[havoc00]

Well of course we won't have games to play if Sony keeps refunding them and locking them out of our libraries.

Lmao

 

[Davevil]

it's not the first video I've seen these days where supposed artists try to change or improve the aesthetic aspect of that shit... but it's still shit

 

[Timberwolf25]

Pretty soon you will have no job at all, sweetheart...

Ever heard of "Hubris/Nemesis"?

Explains a lot

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Considering how odd and pissy so many wokey game makers are, it's truly puzzling if you think about it.

Imagine if you were a weird person and was hired for years at good money, got free lunches, had weekly ping pong tournaments and churned out the shittiest products ever that could literally shut down the studio.

The common sense person would be happy as a clam as it'd be highway robbery.

 

[BigBeauford]

To be fair, Baz is a biological male.

 

[Bernardougf]

.

Pretty soon you will have no job at all, sweetheart...

Ever heard of "Hubris/Nemesis"?

Anyone still want to try and push the "poor devs had to do shit work for woke suits" narrative ? Its all rotten... burn to the ground..

And I agree with the green hair woketard.. pretty soon I wont buy any western games... but thanks to ASIA I had and will have plenty to play ... time to go back to astro bot.. so fuck you and enjoy the unemployment list pretty soon

 

[Shubh_C63]

LMFAO that skin, holy fuck, first time seeing it.

You have to be talentless AF to design something like that. Not even joking wtf is that

 

[DonkeyPunchJr]

Pretty soon you will have no job at all, sweetheart...

Ever heard of "Hubris/Nemesis"?

lol meanwhile Black Myth Wukong, Space Marine 2, and Astro Bot are all selling like crazy.

Bitch, you made the game that you think your audience (which you hate) ought to want, instead of the game they actually wanted. What did you think was going to happen? Blame yourself.

 

[Negotiator]

Considering how odd and pissy so many wokey game makers are, it's truly puzzling if you think about it.

Imagine if you were a weird person and was hired for years at good money, got free lunches, had weekly ping pong tournaments and churned out the shittiest products ever that could literally shut down the studio.

The common sense person would be happy as a clam as it'd be highway robbery.

Let's just call it modern day Socialism.

 

[saintjules]

 

[ManaByte]

 

[Hero of Spielberg]

 

[Sgt.Asher]

This has been fun. Now I just have to wait for Fairgame dollar sign.

 

[Coolade]

 

[MayauMiao]

Pretty soon you will have no job at all, sweetheart...

Ever heard of "Hubris/Nemesis"?

Well, the weirdos won and now she have no games to create at all.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

Well, the weirdos won and now she have no games to create at all.

They did win. Game was under development for 8 years at est. $100M budget. It makes no difference whether someone was a FT employee the whole time or got a 1 yr contract gig.

At the end of the day, one of the biggest bombs in history (esp. in modern years) still lead to employees being blessed making good money during their employment. You got people getting paid $100,000+/yr making absolute junk. Give them credit for milking a good wage for years despite terrible quality.