Game Preservationists When a Game Sucks:
“Good I’m glad it’s gone.”
If Concord doesn’t see a F2P re-release, it will DEFINITELY be some highly-sought cultural relic in the future
it should have been a fp2
Eh, there is no such thing as preserving a live service game. Lots of OW1 copies on disc that are coasters now
One of these days, it’s going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.
The age of DRM means that they can now “unlaunch” the game and force you into a reimbursement while giving up the game. Why? What if someone liked it and wanted to keep playing? is this an online only game? This is just sad.
edit: this is a good time to remind people, if you live in the EU, please support the “Stop Killing Games” initiative, it has just past a third of the required signatures, and has 10 months to go still:
Don’t worry. The only people that like the game are the devs and I’m sure they have been playing it for a long time.
Done!
It is an online-only game.
So ? We use to have dedicated servers for online only game. There is no technological barrier to continue doing that.
There is, however, a financial barrier. One that benefits Sony in no way. Clearly no one wants to play this game anyway. Let it die.
So the person I responded to asked if it was.
And you think it’s cool to just go around answering questions all Willy nilly?
I know, how dare they?! Wait, am I allowed to respond in agreement with you???
No. No agreeing. Only bitching.
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.
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.
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.
Remove from sale. Add more monetisation features. Rerelease as F2P. Cross fingers and hope for best.
The Multiversus approach!
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.
Can’t help but wonder if this would have been a hit if it was F2P rather?
With the amount of marketing it received, I think people would still stick to Valorent or Overwatch 2. I only see videos and posts about Concord being a flop, than promoting it.
It looked like every other generic hero shooter on the market. They were late about 6 years or so.
Every other generic hero shooter but not free
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.
Jesus christ
I wonder why they didn’t make it free-to-play and try to cash in on microtransactions
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.
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.
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.
It’s tempting lol
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.
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.
Don’t think of it as a pyramid scheme, think of it as a pyramid team!
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.
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.
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.
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…
25K units sold TOTAL. 10 on steam, 15 on psn.
Some quick math, steam takes a 30% cut (10k * 40 * .7 = 280k), and since this is a sony published game sony got to keep 100% on their platform (15k * 40 = 600k). Sony made less than 1 mill in revenue on this game which allegedly cost 100M to develop.
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.
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.
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”
Get fucked
Like it’s namesake it was quick and ended in a big crash.
Concorde ran for 34 years, with only a single accident.
This lasted less than a bunch of Concord grapes. Maybe only the British resolve at the Battle of Concord would be less.
