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Concord’s Death Offers a Bleak Look at Gaming’s Future

cormack12

Gold Member
This in a nutshell, they are all convinced gamers will flock to their game when their imagined audience doesn't even exist (except in their head).



Really, we should be asking who Greenlit the game. I mean eight years for an arena based FPS with 12 maps beggars belief. Retailing an arena shooter at $40 in the current climate, online only (no bots).
 

Bloobs

Al Pachinko, Konami President
“Everything about the game was positive and inclusive.”

Wallace Shawn Reaction GIF by CBS
 

Dynasty8

Member
C'mon man...Bleak future? The game didn't have appeal. The characters were all based on ResetERA and Reddit mods with a guest appearance by Lizzo cosplaying as Doom Guy.

It was also $40 when the competition offers a much bigger and better overall experience for FREE.

The industry is healthier than ever. We have Elden Ring and Wukong selling millions and Warhammer 40k isn't even officially out and has over 130,000 people playing on Steam alone.
 
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Humdinger

Member
“One of the biggest perks about the game was the absence of toxicity within the player community,” says Kelle Dees, a content creator

haha, good one.

I think Concord's failure is going to be a boon for the gaming industry. Or at least I hope it will. They could always be stupid like Disney and double-down until the losses pile up into the billions. I don't think Sony has the financial wiggle room of Disney, though, so hopefully they will get the "message" sooner.
 
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Earlier this week, after warping across the galaxy for 90 hours in a sentient spacecraft, Twitch streamer John Wissmiller realized that Concord was the best first-person shooter he’d played in a decade.
According to Twitch Metrics, this dude was the #1 Concord streamer yet averaged less than 100 viewers per stream. And before Concord he had basically no viewers... so yeah, not surprised he's saying bullshit like that lol
He wasn’t alone. “One of the biggest perks about the game was the absence of toxicity within the player community,” says Kelle Dees, a content creator at KDeesGamez. “Everything about the game was positive and inclusive.”
Again, another streamer with virtually no viewers.

No one wanted to play or watch the game.
 

TheAssist

Member
It happens. Doesnt really spell anything. I wrote in another thread a while back that products sometimes fail. Always. That's why you cant rely on one product. That goes for cars, medicine, services, whatever.

Just look at how many products and services Google, Microsoft, Amazon, or any big company have taken to their graves. When Sony said they have x GAAS titles in the works, they probably calculated that some will make it and some wont. Now Concorde has failed more quickly and spectacularly as most people expected, though most did kind of expected it. And Sony is not so dumb that they did not hear the choir from far away. There is a reason this game did not get a lot of marketing before hand.

Now, as with any other company, other products need to pick up the slack and refinance this misstep. Its why games need to make this much money to be worth it for big pubs.

On the bright side, Helldivers and Astrobot seem to do fine. Its almost like Sony tried to develop different games in different genres that target different audiences to try to diversify its lineup and make a dud like Concord hurt less.
 

Men_in_Boxes

Snake Oil Salesman
I stopped reading when the dude said "...the progression felt rewarding."

The progression was so f***ing awful and one of the primary reasons the game failed so miserably. You played for 10 hours and unlocked a pink glove, a bowling pin weapon charm, and brown shoes.

Honestly, I hope everyone realizes how awful progression was.
 

Nikodemos

Member
I stopped reading when the dude said "...the progression felt rewarding."

The progression was so f***ing awful and one of the primary reasons the game failed so miserably. You played for 10 hours and unlocked a pink glove, a bowling pin weapon charm, and brown shoes.

Honestly, I hope everyone realizes how awful progression was.
According to a YT guy called Rowby (who put out two videos about Concord, one a review, the other a post-mortem of sorts), the progression would have felt rewarding, if the basic game modes didn't suck ass.



 

Edgelord79

Gold Member
Its dead. Game was a failure. Get over it. This has nothing to do with anything other than everyone besides a handful of people considered it a bad game.
 
There's already options for established hero shooters with fun gameplay, huge amount of cosmetic progressions, and diverse casts - all for free.

This wasn't the game to challenge the latter status quo of people expecting these types of games to be F2P.
 

Vyse

Gold Member
Who thought pricing this at $40 bucks was a good idea? Who was the focus group for this?
 

Danny22

Neo Member
What I don't understand is why were there no bots in a pvp game that was obviously going to lauch with a low playercount?
It's literally forcing the last 100 or so people to not be able to play.
 
I stopped reading when the dude said "...the progression felt rewarding."

The progression was so f***ing awful and one of the primary reasons the game failed so miserably. You played for 10 hours and unlocked a pink glove, a bowling pin weapon charm, and brown shoes.

Honestly, I hope everyone realizes how awful progression was.
i think it was taking about another kind of progression
 

Sgt.Asher

Member
What I don't understand is why were there no bots in a pvp game that was obviously going to lauch with a low playercount?
It's literally forcing the last 100 or so people to not be able to play.
Before the beta Sony most likely thought this was going to be a major hit. Hence the controller and the Amazon show.
 

Doomtrain

Member
I love the narratives they're trying to push.

"Sony didn't market it." Of course they did. The game has its own controller. It got prominent placement in State of Plays. It was going to get an episode of Secret Level. It had a widely-pushed open beta. Wasn't there going to be an animated series? I got constant notifications directly on my PS5 to check out the game, and I generally don't get notifications like that for *any* game. This doesn't even touch the insane hype the gaming press tried to give the game (and is STILL trying to give the game). Concord got pushed hard.

"Sniveling chuds caused it to fail." This is always the weirdest one for me. The chuds are simultaneously a tiny, inconsequential group of basement losers, AND a powerful all-encompassing force that caused the game to fail.

The masses of average, decent, non-political, non-terminally-online gamers were well aware of Concord. They didn't want it. But cool, gaming press, keep doubling down on a losing strategy, I guess.*

*Unless the strategy has nothing to do with trying to be a good person, or trying to get people to play Concord, and it's really all in service of the almighty click, in which case, well done.
 

BadBurger

Many “Whelps”! Handle It!
From what little I saw of it, it seemed like an Overwatch-type clone.

Maybe the gameplay was great, I don't know and guess I'll never know now, but it just looked like an uninteresting game given there were already well populated games like it already. Like, one can go on PSN or Steam right now and search for "arena shooter" or "hero shooter" and get a ton of results that all seem to look and play like Concord did.
 
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StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Nothing bleak about it in fact its great they pulled the plug as fast as they did and we don't have to watch State of Play after State of Play pushing it down our throats
Funny thing is they plugged that Season 1, 2, 3, roadmap before launch.

So at that time, not only did Sony have confidence in game to keep on track launching it, but during production was confident enough to work on three seasons of content. Season one was planned for October, so right now it's probably already done. So seems like they had echo chamber blind eye during development thinking this game would be a big enough hit to spend resources making season content concurrently as the main game.
 

Doomtrain

Member
I keep coming back to this "it failed because of the chuds" thing. In what way? Is it because:

A. The chuds didn't buy it, and they needed them to buy it for it to succeed
B. The chuds convinced the masses not to buy it

Logically, it has to be one of these two, right?

In Case A, the solution is obvious: if you need the chuds to buy the game for it to be a success, you have to target the chuds. Not sure what else to say about that one.

Case B is a little more complicated. In this scenario, the target audience -- clearly, hardcore leftists -- were originally going to buy the game, but internet chuds somehow convinced them to abandon their values and ignore the game instead. In which case, clearly the former group didn't hold those values very deeply in the first place, and clearly the latter group isn't making any arguments that are very objectionable.

Any way you slice this, if people want to attribute any modicum of power to the chuds, the only logical response, if you want to make money, is to start catering to them. Thus, anyone who holds the chuds are responsible for Concord's failure is indirectly advocating that future games target the chuds as their audience.

Games journalists: chuds don't have to be your audience.
 

dottme

Member
Helldivers 2, though, was a breakout hit that already had an established fanbase. Concord, on the other hand, was a brand-new franchise that didn’t get much of a marketing push
Seriously, who believe there was no marketing push for Concord? Like it is having a dedicated episode in Secret Level. You really think this happen because Amazon was thinking we really need to talk about Concord and not because of a marketing push from Sony. There’s been a lot of YouTube video, it’s been in state of play, they paid streamer to play it.
That’s already a huge marketing push. That’s why the failure of Concord is interesting. It did got a huge push.
 

kiphalfton

Member
Earlier this week, after warping across the galaxy for 90 hours in a sentient spacecraft, Twitch streamer John Wissmiller realized that Concord was the best first-person shooter he’d played in a decade.

“The gunplay was crunchy, the movement was smooth, and the progression felt rewarding,” he says. “I was even more enthralled by the world the developers had created when I looked into the lore.”

He wasn’t alone. “One of the biggest perks about the game was the absence of toxicity within the player community,” says Kelle Dees, a content creator at KDeesGamez. “Everything about the game was positive and inclusive.”

On Wednesday, less than two weeks after the game’s August 23 launch, Sony announced it was taking Concord offline and offering full refunds to anyone who had purchased it on PlayStation 5 or PC. “While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” wrote Ryan Ellis, Concord’s director at Firewalk Studios, a division of Sony Interactive Entertainment.


“I was completely devastated,” Wissmiller says. “We’ve never seen a first-party title from Sony get this kind of treatment.”

In fact, we’ve never seen any AAA video game get this kind of treatment—and that’s what could make Concord a horrifying canary in the coal mine for gamers and game workers alike.

“It’s unprecedented for a game of this scale to be shut down so quickly,” says Liam Deane, a video game analyst at Omdia. “Usually publishers keep games that struggle at launch on life support for a while, but in Concord’s case the launch was so bad there was clearly no way back.”


Like Fortnite, Destiny 2, and Valorant, Concord was meant to be a live-service game that constantly released new updates over the course of several years. But while those other games are free to play—and rely on microtransactions to make money—Concord cost $40 up front. “It's just very difficult to break into competitive multiplayer games [and] displace the existing top titles,” says Simon Carless, an industry analyst who publishes the GameDiscoverCo newsletter. “These are the kind of titles that players socialize with their friends in, and they're often not motivated to switch games.”

Sony hasn’t revealed how many copies of Concordsold between August 23 and September 3, but the number of active PC players on the Steam platform peaked at just 697 on launch day. That’s abysmally low for a major release that spent eight years in development; Sony’s previous live-service game, Helldivers 2, had over 155,000 players on its first day, back in February, and later peaked at 458,709.

Helldivers 2, though, was a breakout hit that already had an established fanbase. Concord, on the other hand, was a brand-new franchise that didn’t get much of a marketing push and drew the ire of “anti-woke” snivelers who complained about the game’s use of pronouns on its character selection screen.


“For big companies, it's difficult to work out what bets—and how large bets—you should make,” says Carless. “Some of the corporate overexuberanceduring Covid and low interest rates has meant that large companies overextended, and the pullback has been—and is going to be—painful.”


Stop giving these type of morons attention.

This is exactly what they're looking for, and you fell hook, like, and sinker OP.

Wait, there was a Concord Reddit? Why?

Because it's reddit. And it's piss, it's shit.
 

StreetsofBeige

Gold Member
Not at all if anything it gives hope the market is rejecting these type of soulless corporate projects
It's getting there but slowly.

Harley Davidson and some blue collar parts and machinery companies publicly canceled their DEI stuff since there was customer backlash.

Of course, who knows if they are being truthful. But even just stating it from the horse's mouth is a big enough deal to piss off wokeys.
 
I keep coming back to this "it failed because of the chuds" thing. In what way? Is it because:

A. The chuds didn't buy it, and they needed them to buy it for it to succeed
B. The chuds convinced the masses not to buy it

Logically, it has to be one of these two, right?

In Case A, the solution is obvious: if you need the chuds to buy the game for it to be a success, you have to target the chuds. Not sure what else to say about that one.

Case B is a little more complicated. In this scenario, the target audience -- clearly, hardcore leftists -- were originally going to buy the game, but internet chuds somehow convinced them to abandon their values and ignore the game instead. In which case, clearly the former group didn't hold those values very deeply in the first place, and clearly the latter group isn't making any arguments that are very objectionable.

Any way you slice this, if people want to attribute any modicum of power to the chuds, the only logical response, if you want to make money, is to start catering to them. Thus, anyone who holds the chuds are responsible for Concord's failure is indirectly advocating that future games target the chuds as their audience.

Games journalists: chuds don't have to be your audience.
wait. people are saying it failed because of "chuds" (I don't even know what is that)

i tought the allies were saying it falied because of the price point and hero shooter predominantly
 
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