Good people don't necessarily make good games. They should be asking themselves why this team of great people spent so much time and money working on something that nobody asked for, appealed to nobody, and offered nothing new in the space it was trying to compete in if they want to know why the game failed.
Thats not the entire story is it? How often is it corporate meddling?
Corporate meddling gets blamed for ruining things all the time but the truth few want to admit is that some amount of meddling is necessary.
Look at all the big flops Xbox has released over the last year - Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.
When it comes to AAA, it's so expensive you need some amount of corporate input to make sure people will actually buy the damn game.
Of course there's extremes to both sides - pretty much anything Activision ever touched was ground to a lifeless micro transaction shell.
But everything we know about concord is trekking6 us that the team itself, including the big bosses, were overly positive internally. Nobody had the balls to interfere.
If they had just one exec who was willing to piss the entire team off, maybe the result would be different.
Redfall being a prime example. We kept hearing how Microsoft was happy to leave those studios to it, to give them the time and resources they needed and they still released dog shit.
Yeah, the studio that developed Prey (a dumbass name that zenimax forced them to use) went on to develop Redfall after Microsoft bought them.
Clearly they were a bunch of idiots before the acquisition who had no idea what they were doing, and the only problem afterward was that Microsoft didn't boss them around enough.
The way I see it meddling by incompetent corporations in competent teams is bad, meddling by incompetent corporations in incompetent teams probably makes something even worse, meddling by competent corporations in incompetent teams probably doesn't nearly have enough influence to make something actually good and only meddling by competent corporations in competent teams might actually have a chance of helping at all.
I don't think you can claim that the team behind concord is incompetent. I think they delivered something that nobody wanted but they delivered that competently.
I agree that incompetence generally doesn't end up with a good product but sometimes even good competence all around doesn't win. Sometimes it really is luck and timing.
As if development teams choose their projects in publisher owned studios.
The project came before a publisher owned them.
It's crazy how average gamers with spare $40 can completely fathom within 30 seconds of the gameplay showcase that they need not burn their money, but people in the industry with 100s of millions on the line are like "yup, this is the next star wars".
Because ones with the money are so out of touch with everything. Most likely only game they even play is golf.
Most likely they also never thought about not buying something that is "just $40" in their life.
"The team in the kitchen is really great! We all joke around and laugh together constantly! So the food is under cooked and full of sawdust and glass shards. And? We have fun making it!"
It's not even that though. The developers could have been amazing for all we know but great devs doesn't help a paid game in a genre that already has too many games in it, most of which are free. This is especially so when the publisher does absolutely zero advertising for it past the initial announcement trailer.
People like him are the reason the industry is so screwed. I've been saying for years now that the corporate kills uniqueness in games. They just want money so there is no innovation, they take a game that works and just copy it expecting a high return.
Sometimes, it fails miserably, and still, they can't fathom why? They are way more fucked than I thought. At this point I expect failures like this to repeat more and more often. The bubble is going to burst and I'll enjoy every second of these idiots losing money in the millions every time.
As much as corporate is cancer, PlayStation is famously one of the most hands off owners in the industry. Concorde failed because it tried to emter a saturated market filled with F2P with a premium option that was underbaked and had nothing new to offer. Tale as old as time, shit, just from the top of my head I can cite lawbreakers from Cliffy or Blink. Both concord and lawbreakers had excellent gunplay and promising mechanics, but in a world everything else is free, why would the typical audience of these games shift to a new option while paying more?
Whoever greenlit this needs to be fired and have their head examined.
While that's true, it's crazy how Marvel Rivals comes out of nowhere and grabs the attention without sweat. Same for Helldivers 2. Clearly there are lessons here, even when entering saturated market.
Sony bought the studio, Sony published this, and so Sony effectively greenlit it. Sony corporate then? This was not an independent game developed for PS5, this was in house.
Sony funded and founded the studio, however, sony is not a monolithic abstract entity, within the organisation there are people who make decisions. Whoever made the decision to produce Concord as a premium game instead of F2P needs to get their head examined. Also, most in-house developed games at sony get very little oversight from corporate other than the occasional vertical slice demo.
What the Sony gaming division needs is to pivot back to filling their roster with Japanese and European talent, the california move is resulting in overwhelming enshitification. Holst is up to his head in shitty US office politics and career driven useless MBAs that are ruining the company from the inside out by focusing on abstract metrics and driving the generational know how away from the company. They need to GTFO of San Mateo, Yesterday!
Seems like the gaming version of this effect of not investing in enough disruptive innovation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpkoCZ4vBSI
I mean that's one of life's main lesson, right ? You can be nice, invested, do everything right, and still fail
Well, they didn't do everything right. There was no marketing for this game and no indication that it had even a single differentiating selling point compared to its already-entrenched competition.
I'm told the pace was a lot slower. Less twitchy, more tactical. Higher time-to-kill.
I'm also told it was ugly as sin. That's one way to stand out from Overwatch's waifu parade.
None of the gameplay elements matter cause only 600 were playing it at it's peak.
That's not disproof they did things differently - or well. Any multiplayer-only game without players is a dead game, even if the gameplay it would have is mindblowing.
Why would it matter who made it? It was a corporate trend-chasing exercise, for an abusive business model, arriving years late and costing the wealth of Croesus.
Multiplayer-only shooters are a death wish. Either you succeed instantly and massively, or your game is nonfunctional. With digital distribution it's not even a coaster. If all these nice people were allowed to be smart people they'd deliver the PvE that Overwatch lied about.
That's how live service games work. The vast majority don't make money. It's a go viral or die market.
To be honest, I also can't fathom it being such a massive flop. On Steam it peaked at 700 players. Shadows of doubt release peaked at 2200. Something had to go seriously wrong when a niche indie title with no mainstream appeal has a better launch than a AAA game. I don't think it should've been a success, but it definitely should've done better than that.
I didn't hear a single thing about the game until after it was already dead, and that's why I'm not surprised it flopped.
If they'd done better(read: any) marketing or public testing, then it might have been at least salvageable, but from what I've read it seems like people weren't fans of the character designs and gameplay either.
My hope is that consumers have lost confidence in games that they know have no value if they don't attract a massive audience. We used to get games like StarCraft and Halo that had single player, cooperative, and competitive modes. We used to be able to host our own servers. Without those things, the value proposition drops precipitously if it isn't a massive hit. I hope that's the reason it flopped.
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