Concord had a dev culture of toxic positivity that halted any negative feedback
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It's easy to draw parallels between what's described and those dysfunctions. In case you're not familiar, this framework by Patrick Lencioni outlines five obstacles that can mess up a team’s flow: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.
Particularly relevant to this situation: > Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate
Just to warn you though, there is a tradeoff. You can also just act like an asshole and cite a culture of toxic positivity if people take issue with your behavior. The key is collaborate, productive focus on the outcomes with the other human beings involved in the endeavor.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
It's very sad and products are failing all over the place while the industry works it's way through this. It might not make it as the current solution is to homogonize all staff and remove their intrinsic value.
Oh well, I enjoyed the first 20 years in the industry, not so much the last 10 years.
A couple of years ago I worked on such good vibes project, uff.
The character designs alone are so laughably bad that they border on caricature. They don't only violate the most basic of design fundamentals, they show a shocking amount of incompetence on all levels.
Lots of money, but not vision. It's not a coincident that Concord was a hero shooter. Of course big money doesn't understand what they invested in and everybody was just chasing trends without understanding a single dime of what made Overwatch a success.
Why "of course"? SIE did the due diligence, not just the executives (e.g. Hermen Hulst, the head of WWS, who signed off on the deal, is lauded as the genius of game design with such amazing titles as Killzone and Horizon under his direction during his tenure at Guerilla) but very senior people at the Playstation studios (Bungie, Naughty Dog, Insomniac etc.) checked this out and identified it as a sensible investment into a successful game. These are not some VCs investing into the most hyped thing this week, these are some acclaimed developers closing their eyes on the abomination of a game they purchased with money they don't really have.
There is nothing remotely normal in this process, this is something like Toyota buying Fisker for $10B and putting its badge on Karma.
Case in point: in my current team there's one very vocal senior who needs to have things done his way, but other than that, the willingness to participate in discussions is inversely correlated with experience, and the most experienced devs simply ran out of fucks to give because they're not getting paid extra for the time they spent in fruitless discussions. The end result is that the knowledge ends up being unused and we implement stupid ideas.
What do you do when you don't fear the "conflict" (passionate argumentation in search of better approaches) but having it leads nowhere, because people have different opinions?
For example, I responded to a comment where a person had a difficult situation with a coworker, though I didn't really have any solutions myself either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601023
There's a lot of abstract stuff out there, without always having a clear cut "best" answer, but which will have different drawbacks long term, which will impact people differently (e.g. in regards to webdev, that could be using an ORM vs not using it from a type of workload where either could suffice, composition vs inheritance, DB views vs dynamically built queries in the app, using the DTO pattern vs not, using projections for returning DTO data directly from the DB to avoid needing arguably unnecessary mapping in the app code between an Entity and DTO object).
Probably there's dozens of things like that, that apply to game development as well, with people whose opinions have been shaped by differing experiences.
I think that you will probably need to compromise a lot and with outcomes that might feel sub-optimal, hopefully without souring the team dynamics in the process.
Even if you have developers that know better than to toss aside each other's linter rules and don’t rewrite each other's code in the name of “refactoring”, then if you still have people with differing views working on the codebase, its consistency over time will become less than more.
Whereas if developer A tries to be agreeable then more and more of the code will be written in the way of how developer B wants it to be written and that might make developer A’s life harder over time.
Did they ever do player testing or get outsiders to try it out before release? Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?
The marketing seemed to basically rely on "if they see 30s of gameplay, that will be compelling enough".
If we remember TF2, they launched with a bunch of really well conceptualized "Meet the character" videos which built humor and personality into the characters as well as taught some of the mechanics.
Overwatch launched a whole pile of interesting and very fresh player mechanics, as well as about triple the characters available with TF2.
Again, I can easily imagine they had players testing it. I'm not sure they had many people market testing.
Well they certainly weren't dogfooding it after launch. The Concord credits list 1,972 professional roles [1] while a week after release the game had fewer than 150 players on Steam. [2] The game was so bad that not even the people who spent 8 years working on it had any interest in it.
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[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/229488/concord/credits/playst...
Fallout 76, No Man's Sky (at least they managed to improved after release).
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Redfall, Babylon's Fall (Dead after release?).
And many games just force player to do meaningless things (for example, cast one magic 100 times for an achievement or unlock an unique item). Do they actually think this is funny during QA or design stage?
I was playing Bioshock Infinite recently and it had an achievement along the lines of "Loot 200 Containers." Not a huge deal except it pops up every time, 200 times, as you are looting.
> Do they actually think this is funny..
What's funnier is that thousands of players discovered there was a word to describe what they wanted to do to the team: defenestration.
I guess they just couldn't find the magic formula to keep the game even longer in development like Star Citizen managed to do.
Wasting a huge part of your life for your employer is what you get paid for if you have a job.
Nearly everybody has grandiose wishes.
It’s still a disaster, it’s impressive that concord is somehow doing worse
Concord basically doesn't have fans, at least in any number that can support a moderately successful game. No matter what they did business wise, the idea and characters and world simply weren't appealing enough to justify the work put into it.
which has amazing content - as judged by the sales of the ships and such in the game, even before gameplay existed.
The problem with concord is that there are a bunch of wokes at the helm, trying to push a personal agenda via this project, but failing to see that gamers aren't buying what they're selling. Gamers who, first and foremost, want fun games, cool graphics and immersion in fantasy.
Most games today are diverse, some more than others. Including many Sony games that sell incredibly well.
This is never the problem with games that fail due to "woke" things. You, probably like the Concord devs, have a different definition of "woke" to the critics, and until you realise that you'll continue to make this mistake.
The word has lost any specific meaning. “The game is bad because it’s bad”.
What exactly is the critics definition of “woke” that somehow is anything other than diverse?
When you can't criticize something that is diverse then it ensures it will be shit. You can have diverse things that are good, but not when it isn't allowed to be criticized since they will call anyone who criticizes it a racist bigot. That is what the critics means with woke.
So if the game is woke, the game is inherently hostile to your criticism? You, the consumer, are being attacked by the game? How can a game be made in a way that is hostile to your criticism without fourth-wall breaking finger wagging?
Hating on Concord right now is the literal safest opinion you could have about it. This makes it not Woke by your definition.
> That is what the critics means with woke
This is not what most people mean by woke. It's nice that you have a sunnier definition of it that criticizes surface-level diversity in place of substance, but anything with women or black people in it is considered woke nowadays, regardless of quality.
You will often see people change their minds about something being woke once it sells well because it goes against the narrative that if something is "woke" nobody wants it. We've seen this with Barbie, Baldurs Gates 3, and even Life is Strange. A game that is the closest thing to "woke" anyone could mean.
It's just a dog whistle for people that want to keep things white.
You could even criticize how it’s diverse. If it’s done in an insensitive manner for example. Maybe they changed a character after they were established, (as a gay man myself I hate when they change a characters sexuality). Could complain that something is too sexual for the target audience(hint, gay couples existing and showing affection isn’t “sexual” when a straight couple can do it and no one bats an eye).
But if your criticism is the existence of diversity, you’re a racist bigot and you should be called out for that. There is zero valid criticism on the mere existence of someone different than you in media.
investment banker: for the low low annualized price of $50m/year I’ll sell you this company. it’ll never make money, but it’ll attract lots of your negative marginal product workers from across your company, thus improving the success of your other games. it can run for about 10 years. at the end, you shut it down and it’s a big tax write off.
massive game company: where do I sign?
A single player game can succeed if you do something remarkable in terms of graphics, story, gameplay, etc. Not necessarily all of them but some of them. A PvP game has fewer factors you control (less story) but requires absolutely that you create a two-sided market of players —- it’s like saying you’re going to make Facebook in 2024. Even if the base game was better than Overwatch 2 or Fortnite it would a struggle, but the fact that they wanted to make another hero shooter proves they don’t have the vision or creativity to make something better. Is that toxic positivity?
Valve is currently working on Deadlock and seems to have no issues getting players despite its still unfinished state.
That's why Valve fans will need less convincing than Sony.
The time and cash is key here. Time in that if you are just doing what your competitors are doing with nothing new to show for it AND to expect people to pay for it. Deadlock is neither
Funnily enough Overwatch 1 came out just over 8 years ago, so Concord was probably pitched as a "me too" clone of that from its inception.
I still think people are tip-toeing around this a bit though. Suggestions that Concorde failed because the genre isn't popular anymore seem like they're trying to avoid some hard truths in particular. I am uninhibited though so I'll say it. Overwatch has characters people want to fuck or see themselves as, and gamers like that. Concorde has characters designed to make people squirm uncomfortably, daring people to criticize their design so they can be called toxic gamers. The character design is deliberately offensive to gamers, defying them instead of pandering to them.
Take this redesign for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1fdz1m.... The results are pretty close to originals and do not pander to any specific demographic. But there are just enough interesting and unusual details in the new designs that make you want to learn more about those characters. That's what the released game is missing entirely.
My pet theory is this had to be nepotism in hiring. I struggle to find another explanation for how they botched the execution so badly that the characters can be legitimately seen as "designed to make people squirm". Which I don't believe could be any executive's intention.
The first redesign you link to isn't really "my type" but even so I think that's a viable character with sex appeal. They ditched the ugly lipstick, redistributed her mass to give her wide hips, and swapped out her depressed "I just want to die" facial pose with a big smirk that's full of life. They changed the gross loser into somebody who looks fun and lively.
And if you don't like that comparison, I would make the political correctness one from McCarty days, where talking about worker rights was a very bad idea in US.
Sure, different track record but still, this kind of mindset is the norm more often than not because of an industry where failure of the project also means loss on job - so there’s no incentive whatsoever for studio level people to flag in progress failure that may lead to a studio closing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report...
[0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
could happen because of either of these two reasons:
- they really don't know the ideal state
- they are afraid of the backlash if they speak up
Leaders should ocasionally take time to listen to bad feedback.
[1]: Dehumanizing the customer comes in different forms, I suspect. I’ve seen a lot of “we can’t care about individuals because we are web scale so we need to look at user metrics instead”. Perhaps in the gaming world there is more of “gamers are trolls and toxic boyroom loud minority, so their criticism isn’t worthy of attention”.
it is blatantly obvious why that game has failed as hard as it did, just from that screenshot alone - tumblr-tier design, twitter-tier writing, targeting the virtually non-existent "modern audience". the talk about market saturation and such is just a cope - this game could come out before Overwatch was even announced and be F2P and it still would've failed just as spectacularly.
"Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made". yes, you can take a franchise with an existing following and "reimagine" it for "modern audience" and succeed (financially) to some degree, but Concord had neither a following nor positive studio reputation to burn, and the result was painfully predictable for anyone with two brains cells to rub together from the moment they saw a glimpse of that steaming pile of shit.