Haha holy shit that was fast. Stop shoving live service down your customers fucking throats maybe, sony?
Don’t worry, they’ll try again with the next “game”
Game Preservationists When a Game Sucks:
“Good I’m glad it’s gone.”
One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.
Eh, there is no such thing as preserving a live service game. Lots of OW1 copies on disc that are coasters now
If Concord doesn’t see a F2P re-release, it will DEFINITELY be some highly-sought cultural relic in the future
It looked like every other generic hero shooter on the market. They were late about 6 years or so.
With an even more generic art direction.
And PSN requirement for PC gamers.
I can’t even name another apart from Overwatch.
Unless you’re counting each hero as “soldier with a slightly different machine gun”.
- Apex Legends
- Team Fortress 2
- Paladins
- Dirty Bomb
- Battleborn
- Gigantic
- Monday Night Combat
- Deceive Inc.
to name few
Dirty Bomb, Monday Night Combat
These aren’t even hero shooters. They’re just basic arena shooters. Unless they have drastically changed since they released (which was the last time I played either).
Apex Legends is a battle royale, Gigantic and Battleborn are (were) more like MOBAs, Paladins and Dirty Bomb don’t work on linux. I haven’t played all of these games, but I don’t think they’re as interchangeable as you’re implying.
Every other generic hero shooter but not free
Remove from sale. Add more monetisation features. Rerelease as F2P. Cross fingers and hope for best.
The Multiversus approach!
So to recap:
- 200 million dollars
- 8 years of development
- Sony shuts down all of their Japanese studios and redirects their efforts into developing “cinematic” experiences to appeal to western gamers
- Sony liquidates countless other studios in the pursuit of funding this game
- Sony buys Bungie to aid in developing this game
- Sony thinks this is going to be a huge success rivaling COD and Fortnite, so they fund an entire multimillion dollar CGI-animated episode to be aired in Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series
- Shuts down in 10 days
- Sony refunds everyone
Man, Sony is taking L’s like a motherfucker.
Sony shuts down all of their Japanese studios and redirects their efforts into developing “cinematic” experiences to appeal to western gamers
They shut down Japan Studio, that’s a name, they still have studios in Japan.
200 million sounds like a lot, but it’s like 2 weeks of PSPlus money.
For all this losing, they’re sure making a lot of money. Just not out of this game.
And that money ain’t gone yet, there’s for sure a pivot towards a F2P, MTX ridden version of the game to be relaunched.
The problem is that gamers say they don’t like that sort of thing, while the success of the likes of Fortnite indicates that there’s a lot of gamers out there saying nothing, but buying V-bucks like a motherfucker.
Really looks like this game was designed by incompetent suits and marketing teams with the primary goal of turning those millions into more money. The game looked good and didn’t seem to play (totally) awfully either. It just doesn’t stand out or make anybody want to play it, like at all. It really is a another one of those AAA unfinished style over substance tech demos that masquerade as a game that got released into really saturated market at a really bad time, where the competition is usually also free.
Also something, something big capital overtaking creative process is one of the great disasters of our time.
I wonder why they didn’t make it free-to-play and try to cash in on microtransactions
It’s a non zero amount of work, and there’s every chance they spend more money making that change than they would bring in.
That’s presumably why it’s going offline and everyone getting refunds
With all the negative press, I doubt they would try that. Even if it goes free, people will recognise the name and wouldn’t bother trying it.
I think the people that have never heard of it far outweigh the people that have and decided to ignore it. They’re chasing “normal” people, not people like us who would likely have ignored it even if it was a free to play, micro transaction riddled mess.
And “FREE!” does appear to be a key factor in making this kind of game take off. They live or die by initial player interest and retention.
These things are expensive to make, it’s not just going in the bin. I’m just not sure where it belongs. It’s clearly Overwatch’s stunt double, and even that seems like it’s on the wane.
Jesus christ
Shutdown within two weeks of release.
Never broke 1000 concurrent users on steam.
Estimated $100 million budget.
oof.
I read something along of 200 million? And 8 years of development? Not even sold 25.000 times?
I don’t think I even heard about it until now. 😂
What went wrong?
Bad marketing, low interest in Overwatch clones after OW2. Some people say diversity pandering but I like to imagine it’s that people still remember Sony being a butt with Helldiver’s 2.
Some people say diversity pandering
This video does a good job explaining it. TL;DW Its an overwatch clone that came out about 6 years too late, looks generic af and can hardly compete with the free and interesting games already available
The characters look absolutely boring design-wise too, with muted colors for some reason, giving off strong “We have Guardians of the Galaxy at home” vibes. In a hero shooter.
It looks like someone in the art department had a liking for intestines and wanted something to remind them of it everywhere
… What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.
Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated.
thisengineiswoke.jpg
.Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.
The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.
I also don’t buy his take that the game started development in 2016, this is what was big culturally in 2016, and the team just retreated into a bunker until launch and didn’t have any way to course correct.
That’s not how game development works. I guarantee the headcount for this project didn’t peak in 2016 and stay steady. This was a low-priority item on a few people’s kanban boards for a couple years, probably had multiple starts, dead-ends, and reinventions.
I have to think Sony saw the writing on the wall, pushed the project out the door because they didn’t think it would get any better barring significant reinvestment, and braced for the impact. I credit them just a tiny bit for not writing it off on their taxes and canning the project like Hollywood has been doing lately.
yes
Kekw
I can never tell if it’s new gen z word or a spasm of some sort
Kekw is deeper internet slang than most people are willing to discover. Kek is like a giggle or snort, not a full laugh but a chuckle. The w modifier means this is a win for them, so kekw is a chuckle about a good situation. If you want more info you can ask someone on 4chan, they are super helpful and nice to new members of the community.
Yeah, they’re very helpful over there. You can learn a lot from them. But also:
Being young enough to believe that kekw is just some 4chan tier slang.
It seems all knowledge shall become lost in the eternal shadow of an aging timeline.
Ik it’s not, but the only place you see it regularly is 4chan.
?
Could have been a cool single player game
Could have been a cool split screen and LAN game.
People can barely find anyone to play with globally over the internet. It wouldn’t work as a lan game.
Gameboy Advance had single-pak link (buy one copy, play with up to 4 linked devices) 20 years ago.
Greed has defeated the technology, though.
Any game works as a LAN game. That’s the advantage of being a LAN game. Of course, when you build a game like that, you know not to assume that you’ll always have 10 players in a match, and you build it to scale to that. If they released it with LAN and a deathmatch mode for any number of players, even if they did no rebalancing on the character designs to account for it and the there were obvious top tiers and low tiers, I’d still buy it.
I’m saying that if there aren’t enough players to sustain a multiplayer game globally you’re not going to find people to play with locally.
The age of DRM means that they can now “unlaunch” the game and force you into a reimbursement while giving up the game. Why? What if someone liked it and wanted to keep playing? is this an online only game? This is just sad.
It is an online-only game.
So ?
There is, however, a financial barrier. One that benefits Sony in no way. Clearly no one wants to play this game anyway. Let it die.
So the person I responded to asked if it was.
And you think it’s cool to just go around answering questions all Willy nilly?
I know, how dare they?! Wait, am I allowed to respond in agreement with you???
No. No agreeing. Only bitching.
Done!
The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.
Let’s acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let’s acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I’m still glad it failed.
Those artists and programmers had about six years to find different jobs in the industry, I have zero sympathy for the ones that stuck around and did not see the writing on the wall.
Chose a publisher as your leader in business? Well we know how that goes.
Will the industry learn any lesson from this?
(no)
“Clearly, the game would have worked if the characters would have looked like monkeys!”
I dunno, I might buy a reboot of DK64’s versus mode.
Wait, are they still making beyond good and evil 2?
“Let’s all laugh at an industry / that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee.”
–Yahtzee Croshaw
Remember when Sony laid off a ton of Bungie employees? Talk about a series of bad decisions.
At least they’re giving refunds.
Just saw a Bungie job listing on LinkedIn too. Make it make sense. I did apply though
They want to pay less than they were to whoever was in that spot before.
That or it’s one of the essential positions they didn’t want to downsize but the previous person left for other reasons.