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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

It still amazes me that a project can fail this hard without anyone speaking up. Based on what was said in the clip, there wasn't a great overarching direction to define the game. I haven't even heard anyone discussing the Concord story, what were they cooking to make them think they would be able to create something comparable to StarWars? Nearly everything I've heard about this game has been that it's a fairly generic hero shooter.

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?

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I'm not sure it's a play test failure. If it were, you would think there would have been a burst of users and then nothing. It seems to me more like a market appeal failure. I didn't get the sense that anyone was intrigued by the story or characters, and the hero shooter as a genre has Overwatch, TF2, Deadlock and the bodies of Battleborne and others. They didn't showcase any stunning new mechanics in their intro, nor did they manage to make a funny or compelling story.

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.

> Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?

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.

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/229488/concord/credits/playst...

[2] https://steamdb.info/app/2443720/charts/#max

It already happened many times:

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?

> cast one magic 100 times for an achievement

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.

You forgot Star Citizen. "Unlimited" budget but nothing special.

its the same thing with Gemini. if speaking up can get you fired, socially ostracized and black listed there is ample reason to just shut up.

I mean... the game was in development for 8 years and paid the bills for (apparently) 150 people working on the game for nearly a full decade. That's pretty good for a complete failure ;)

I guess they just couldn't find the magic formula to keep the game even longer in development like Star Citizen managed to do.

Disregarding the finances, 150 people spent eight years of their life on this. I don't think they were all just phoning it in and paying the bills. It probably stings more than a little bit.

> 150 people spent eight years of their life on this.

Wasting a huge part of your life for your employer is what you get paid for if you have a job.

This might be hard for you to believe but some people actually want their work to be more than just an exchange of their time for money.

> some people actually want their work to be more than just an exchange of their time for money.

Nearly everybody has grandiose wishes.

Yes, but on the other hand working on one game after another that are never released or flop spectacularly is not unusual at all in the games industry, especially in AAA (the long development cycle until the money stopped flowing is though).

Star citizen has been more or less shipping continual updates, and openly engaging with community.

It’s still a disaster, it’s impressive that concord is somehow doing worse

The difference being that Star Citizen has some very passionate fans willing to put an obscene amount of time and money into the game. Lots of people dislike that game or think it's a grift, but lots of people also like it and throw lots of money at it for things like fancy virtual ships.

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.

> like Star Citizen

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.

The lottery has amazing content - as judged by the sales of tickets and such.

I guarantee you that was not the actual problem with this game. The more inclusive part of this game was barely talked about because most don’t care and have realized they the world is bigger than their narrow view.

Most games today are diverse, some more than others. Including many Sony games that sell incredibly well.

> The more inclusive part of this game was barely talked about because most don’t care and have realized they the world is bigger than their narrow view.

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.

You’ve made a valid point mainly because, for a significant portion of people who use the term, "woke" has become a blanket term for anything they don’t like.

The word has lost any specific meaning. “The game is bad because it’s bad”.

You've just made the same mistake as the OP.

Ok.

So educate me.

What exactly is the critics definition of “woke” that somehow is anything other than diverse?

Hostility towards anyone who criticizes anything that could be considered diverse. You see a lot of that.

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.

> Hostility towards anyone who criticizes anything that could be considered diverse. You see a lot of that

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.

No, you very much can criticize something that is diverse because there are aspects outside of that. Like Concord.

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.

Concord didn't even sell enough for "people aren't buying it because it's woke" to be plausible lmao

I rather suspect the game was just boring, "woke" or not.

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