Sony shutting down Concord, refunds after 2 week launch. 8 year dev, 25k sales

Yeah I remember doing nothing but playing video games, especially these shooter games, as a kid, but now I only play games rarely and they tend to be of the “avant garde” variety—meaning, they’re often free or very low priced indie games from small developers (think of LISA, Undertale, Nikke Yumi, that sort of thing).

And here I am, a 45 year old husband, developer and everything and have over 3k hors in Destiny ;)

I'm waiting for content in like 3 live service games at a time. I rotate between them when they get new stuff.

I find some time nights and weekends.

> only kids have the kind of free time to grind these out week after week

Adult will still have time to watch netflix, youtube or tiktok, read books, engagement bait on twitter etc.

What these games are competing against is not "free time" but any block of 15min that would go to another activity.

Given the number of people binge watching Netflix, it's a decent marketing segment.

To expand on that: there's also the issue that these games have to be (somewhat) competitive multiplayer games: multiplayer because otherwise there's no way to create enough content, and competitive since otherwise there's less of a reason to play the game for long periods of time.

If you've ever played a dead/dying competitive game as a newcomer you will know the problem this creates: since the people that stay around are either new or very dedicated players, the skill gap becomes gigantic, which turns of most new players.

if your game wins the Life-Service race, you draw other players in. If your game dies the very same structure that keep players around will prevent new players from joining.

they didn't have anything to advertise

the primary lure of overwatch always was the characters

they were bright, colourful and attractive, almost magnetic in terms of drawing you in

and they had something for everyone, and once you were in the gameplay kept you there

meanwhile the characters in this game just look off

I suspect they're not completely giving up, and will try to run it back with some minor tweaks as a free-to-play title in a few months. It's a time-honored failed-launch tradition and probably worth a shot once you let the bad publicity clear. I can't imagine it working well here though, you can't really fix bland bones with a some cheap touch ups, and free is not really a unique selling point in this genre.

I wouldn’t say there was no effort. Sony made it the flagship announcement of their summer games presentation, and it apparently has its own dedicated episode in the anthology series by Amazon and the Love Death Robots showrunners coming out in December. They had betas. Even other majorly botched games have had literally orders of magnitude more players at launch. At the time of this announcement, there were 24 total players in the game on Steam, which, assuming all were in a game, is literally only enough to fill two lobbies. It really is an unprecedented failure.

My guess is that the show is their Hail Mary. They are sending out refunds now given the absolutely calamitous release, and are banking that the episode in December will drum up enough interest that if they release it as a free to play game at the same time they might have a better shot at getting some kind of player base.

Concord is more of an Overwatch competitor, not much to do with Deadlock which is more FPS LoL. Overwatch is basically dead already, for reasons that Concord didn't seem to have tackled, so not sure what their plan was there...

It didn't even seem like that bad a game. The gameplay looked solid and the people who played it largely liked it despite the generic characters. I was hoping to try it sometime with the assumption that they'd eventually give up on buy to play and make it free to play. I was right about the giving up part, I guess ...

>They launched at $40 when most of their competition is free-to-play.

Sounds like something Sony would do.

no, they can write off the loss regardless of whether it's been released

Everyone I've seen actually review the game say the gameplay is just alright and the characters look pretty bad. Even if the characters looked like they were made by the overwatch team "alright" gameplay isn't going to sell for 40$ when literally all of your competition is free though.

Actually blaming it on the "politics" is also being dishonest. The game had 700 concurrent players on launch and then kept dropping all the way down to 60. Unless all but 700 of the gamers are caught up in taking ideological stances, there is no other explanation except that it was a mediocre game with unmemorable gameplay and characters that launched 8 years too late in a saturated genre with nothing new to offer.

Most likely it's just a combination of factors:

- bland character design

- already saturated competitors space (Overwatch and dozen of OW clones)

- very recent controversy of Helldivers game requiring a Sony account

- social justice politics

So it's mostly politics, but I really don't believe Overwatch clone could be successful, unless it tries to do something very unique. Concord had nothing. Their main hook was 'nextgen graphics' and a movie-like trailer. And as we can see, good graphics isn't enough to sell a game.

It is not so strange. Game journalism is mostly completely out of touch with majority of gamers and often part of 'woke' echo chambers with their fallback usually being blaming things on review bombing and other problems.

Fortunatelly we have free market.

Yes but the social justice stuff is mostly overblown.

It's a case of the "go woke go broke" crowd taking themselves more important than they really are.

Who in his right mind would follow the 8 year development of just another generic Overwatch clone and remember anything the devs or some marketing dude said during that time?

Right nobody.

Gamers don't really care about any of that.

They lock onto Steam, see the store, which says: "Here is another generic Hero Shooter which looks like all the others, its completely unoriginal has no strong IP and no new gameplay. But it costs 40 bucks and is mostly Ok".

The gamer goes "jeah whatever, my library is long enough already" and plays something else.

there is nothing suprising about journos leaving out that there agenda is unpopular. It's either ignoring or pointing finger and name calling.

That didn’t go so well by wow standards. Paying extra to “avoid the late access” and the xp nerf after early access didn’t go over well with the players.

Isn't it YALSF...

yet another live service failure

Failed, Another Live ServicE... FALSE