Shutdown within two weeks of release.
Never broke 1000 concurrent users on steam.
Estimated $100 million budget.
oof.
I don’t think I even heard about it until now. 😂
What went wrong?
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.
… 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.
It looks like someone in the art department had a liking for intestines and wanted something to remind them of it everywhere
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
Inceloids are so whiny nowadays a game about squares gets complaints about diversity pandering
yes
I read something along of 200 million? And 8 years of development? Not even sold 25.000 times?
If it wasn’t for hundreds of people likely losing their jobs it would be really funny that Sony’s greedy, cynical attempts to cash in on the live service fad keep failing
It’s probably not even the artists fault it turned out this shit. My gut feeling is that the game is victim of incompetent leadership. Indecisiveness on important matters and micro management on stupid things.
It’s also the same incompetent leadership who will get bonuses and promotions after this.
Was it shit?
Shit in terms of having no players and being pulled back after just two weeks.
From what I understand, the game itself was alright. It had no major technical or gameplay problems. At least the team of programmers and game designers were competent.
The main issue is that the game was incredibly unappealing, and I believe this can only come from poor leadership.
Is that not a game designer thing?
deleted by creator
Was the fame alrifgr, or “incredibly unappealing”? What made it so ubappealing?
I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.
I don’t think the parent comment was trying to say that it’s particularly evil. They rather meant “greedy” in the sense that these companies get a bit too excited about money.
Basically, live service games are pretty expensive to make and generally result in an incomplete/worse experience at launch. But if they’re successful and gain enough of a player base, then they pay for themselves manyfold.
That’s why these companies keep on gambling, by building live service games, rather than two or three smaller games from the same budget.
Do they lose their jobs?
They delivered the product, they got paid for their work.
I can’t imagine hundreds of people still working on the game beyond release. They’ll probably move on to different projects.
A failure this monumental will almost certainly result in Sony taking the entire studio out back and shooting it, just to placate investors.
Edit: For context, Sony owns Firewalk - the studio - outright, they’re not just the publisher.
Most big game corps just shutter studios, usually letting them know via the grapevine after a board meeting or twitter post…
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.
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.
Chose a publisher as your leader in business? Well we know how that goes.
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.
Will the industry learn any lesson from this?
(no)
“Let’s all laugh at an industry / that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee.”
–Yahtzee Croshaw
“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?
“Refunds for PlayStation Store and PlayStation Direct purchases may take 30-60 days to appear on your bank statement”
Why do companies do this? They can process millions of dollars of incoming payments instantly, but take up to 2 months to reverse? Give me a break.
Bank transfers are slow. It is generally taken out of the account the next business day, sits in escrow for a few days, then appears in the destination account where it takes another day to clear. About a week total.
Though, if it gets held for suspected fraud or needs to cross international boundaries, it can sit in that escrow account for much longer.
In the EU we use SEPA and transfers are instantaneous. Used it when buying something of our local ebay when at the person’s house. Also most banks even have Venmo style payment systems… scan qr of your bank, click on my banks icon, authorize, done.
Companies sit on cash simply for cashflow reasons. Keeping the money in your account for an additional x days means it can be used for other stuff.
Sounds like I should start holding my payments in escrow, just in case the publisher decides to shut down their game less than 2 weeks after taking my money. Got it!
The company I work for does B2B and clients do the same shit. 45-90 day pay cycle after invoicing. That shit kills smaller businesses.
Your card is charged instantly, but it can take a week or two before it’s cleared the fed’s anti-fraud measures and they’re assured you’re not reversing it through your bank. Then they send the refund and it can take another week or two before your bank clears it and makes sure that they’re not reversing their payment. Add in some wiggle room to cover yourself in case something gets flagged as potentially fraudulent and someone has to manually review it, and it can take a while.
In practice, refunds should arrive this week, but they want to be careful not to promise that in every case. What they’re mainly worried about is people buying the game, immediately refunding it, and simultaneously doing a chargeback while in some faraway country.
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”
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.
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.
I wonder why they didn’t make it free-to-play and try to cash in on microtransactions
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.
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.
Wow, I expected they’ll go straight to free-to-play but I guess the game has such a bad reputation that they decided to take it down completely. Refunds being issued is awfully nice though.
Yeah, ain’t no monetizing scheme is gonna save this one. There’s just too much bad rep.
There’s just too much bad rep.
On the one hand, that’s not a bet I’d take since No Man’s Sky exists.
On the other hand, NMS is definitely the exception, not the rule.
I assume, NMS made money from their launch, despite it being so underwhelming, and that’s what they used to patch up the game.
Concord seems to have made essentially no money…
People wanted NMS, they wanted NMS to be good.
It was a let down when it wasn’t.
No one wanted this. No one thought it would be good.
It was a laugh when it failed.
They aren’t the same.
Yeah, ain’t no monetizing scheme is gonna save this one.
This is the key marketing fail. They released an OW clone, and then failed to highlight the differences. I might have thrown $40 at it, if I’d known that there wasn’t going to be a battlepass or something equally asinine to come with that price tag.
I played through their free weekend beta some time in July and didn’t hate it, but it was clunky and the designs were uglier than OW. That said, I had expected them to clean it up before release; anything except let it stand with its overarching veneer of greyige+olive green over every character.
I think they just released it to say it was released and be able to do the write-offs. Otherwise, any game that had been in development this long would have seen a huge marketing campaign that highlighted why players should abandon OW, et al for Concord instead.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.
I didn’t realize that there was a physical release for this game. I just bought myself a copy to keep sealed in my collection.
May I ask why? Genuinly curious.
I’m a collector, and this is a game that may have a high value in the future due to being rare. If it was literally only available for 2 weeks and they pulled all the remaining copies and refunded people, there’s not going to be many, and I will have a sealed copy. Of course, it’s possible that they may re-release it in the future if they decide it’s worth the money to tweak it, but I honestly kind of doubt it. You may be wondering why it matters if it literally can’t be played and who would want it, and that’s absolutely a fair question, but in the end, the answer is collectors.
Don’t think of it as a pyramid scheme, think of it as a pyramid team!
Have noticed any trend in how “collectible” something is with the introduction of “online/periodic patches”. I always wondered since there seems to be a lot of software at different versions gluing everything together vs what used to be the standard before (console software was for the most part finalized at launch).
I haven’t really noticed anything in that regard. I’ve also been curious about the collectibility of physical copies of online only games. If the game is no longer playable, is there actually any value? I feel like things are a little too early to say at this point, but given how rare this title will seemingly be, I’m hedging my bets.
It’s tempting lol
Remove from sale. Add more monetisation features. Rerelease as F2P. Cross fingers and hope for best.
The Multiversus approach!
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.
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.
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.
And I’m saying that if you throw in a quick deathmatch mode, it’s playable with only one friend. And when a game has LAN, that means that you can play with a gaming VPN regardless of the presence of official servers.
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.
That’s what I thought it was going to be from the initial trailer, but then seeing it was yet another hero shooter made me lose all interest.
