12 ms·

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

96 points by IronWolve 2y ago

cheschire 2y ago
Well it launched up against Deadlock, another shooter by a company people actually know, and which dominated streams for a bit. If nobody plays your game live on launch, then you don’t make sales. More info from LMG: https://youtu.be/7GzzatlUNtE https://youtu.be/7GzzatlUNtE
- FanaHOVA 2y ago
  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...
Dig1t 2y ago
There are tons of indie shooters that sold way better than this game, saying this didn’t sell well because of a saturated market is just being dishonest. Read the actual reviews for the game and the reason it did poorly is glaringly obvious. The answer is not politically correct but it is true nonetheless.
- thatguy0900 2y ago
  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.
- darth_avocado 2y ago
  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.
  - add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
    Look at their submission history, this is clearly someone who's been successfully trained to see everything in life through that lens.
  - chmod775 2y ago
    They're not blaming it on politics. However the explanation can be politically hazardous (if you at all care what Twitter says, which you shouldn't). Wanting to play as conventionally attractive/cool characters is not some sort of political stance. It's perfectly normal and unpolitical. The act of saying the above out loud has become political in a few English-speaking places. However for the most part people just like to pretend it's been turned into a taboo subject. Generally, there isn't a taboo political topic here at all. The few outliers on either far end of the spectrum are easy to ignore.
- archargelod 2y ago
  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.
Suppafly 2y ago
It's insane that they are giving up so soon. They released it with basically no advertising. Even if you ignore the real issues with the game, people not liking the character design, the live service aspect, etc. It's pretty obvious something like this is going to fail if they don't put any effort into hyping people to play it. I'm way more into gaming than a lot of people and the first I heard of it was headlines about the launch being so unsuccessful.
- blibble 2y ago
  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
  - Suppafly 2y ago
    Sure, but there are other ways to market a game than character design, they didn't even attempt to market the game as far as I can tell.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    OW1 felt to me what Quake3 was when I was 13. You had a giant mech, could shoot like crazy and just cause total chaos. Different maps, and fun game modes. Until toxicity hit and the Blizzard blizzard. Maps were big and with a good team, it was a blast. Nothing else filled my void of Q3, now an dead genre. Deadlock is okay, but I'm not a MOBA person.
    - nothercastle 2y ago
      Teamwork required games are always going to be toxic. Quake, bf and mw work because they generally don’t require much cooperation between toxic people
- recursivecaveat 2y ago
  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.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
This game has been mired in some kind of controversy around over focus on social justice, aggressive responses from developers in response to critical reviews, and some other ‘woke’ criticisms. I find it strange that this is not mentioned in articles about this game being shut down. The social justice politics is very much a part of why this game did not attract gamers. I say that as someone who isn’t especially keyed into these political battles normally.
- grawp 2y ago
  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.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Black Myth Wukong and response to it is good proving point. By all reasonable metrics it was massive success in west as well. Million or two million copies sold at least to western market for new studio in freshly launched IP is nothing to scoff at. It really tells you that buyers of games do not really care about stuff journalist talk about. It really has rather little affect on their purchasing decisions. And that is really what should matter when you are trying to sell something.
- LordHeini 2y ago
  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.
bob1029 2y ago
I just got my auto refund for this from Steam. Looking forward to trying Deadlock. I hope something pans out in this area.
Terretta 2y ago
Hey, YALS! I liked that acronym: yet another live service…
- pixl97 2y ago
  Isn't it YALSF... yet another live service failure Failed, Another Live ServicE... FALSE
dialup_sounds 2y ago
Inevitable. They launched at $40 when most of their competition is free-to-play.
- Sakos 2y ago
  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 ...
  - polski-g 2y ago
    The characters were NOT generic. They were the most strange and bizarre characters ever seen. If they were generic Soldier man and Nurse lady the game would have done quite a bit better.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >They launched at $40 when most of their competition is free-to-play. Sounds like something Sony would do.
tiffanyh 2y ago
Is this accounting games at play? Does "releasing it", allow them to write-off the 8-year investment as a loss (but if unreleased, they can't recognize the gain/loss)? Just wondering if that's what's going on.
- iams 2y ago
  no, they can write off the loss regardless of whether it's been released
Havoc 2y ago
Heard about this from various social media angles. Surprised the math makes sense. Obviously this is a financial rounding error. Yet they're ok with me as random receiving around 3x negative messaging this week? Maybe the secret is association? Till this post concord and sony was not linked in my mind
ac130kz 2y ago
Paladins, a well-made free-to-play Overwatch clone, was released in 2018, 6 years ago. Overwatch 2 has failed to attract serious audience last year despite also being a free game. Why would people spend money on yet another Overwatch, if it's not outstanding?
akimbostrawman 2y ago
As if online only games as a service slop wasn't disgusting enough, they added hideous DEI character for ESG scores. They really did reach the modern audience
IronWolve 2y ago
Another shooter? Also "The War Within" wow expansion launched at the same time.
- celdon25 2y ago
  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.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Suckers gotta pay
gigaflop 2y ago
People can only spend so much time on a Live Service style game. They aim to be "The game you log into daily", but usually only kids have the kind of free time to grind these out week after week, let alone keep up with multiple. Then, each have their own $10ish Battlepass, and you need to grind to get to the end of it. Aside from a new map or character, these are the bulk of 'new stuff' that gets added. Gaming as a Service doesn't scale well on most people who can afford to whale out, once they've already found their slot machine.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  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).
  - tracker1 2y ago
    I have a little nerve damage, so it's hard for me to even play these kinds of games anymore. Combined with the fact that I like these kinds of games as it's usually been reasonable to drop in, play for a while, have fun and not dedicate a portion of my life to leveling up or mastery. For me, the peak in terms of time investment are around Q3A and Unreal Tournament. So it's been a long while since I played regularly. What's funny is I want to play, it just gets frustrating when your hands/fingers just don't respond right.
    - pipes 2y ago
      Q3 and UT are probably two of the best games ever made. They came at a really special time in games. Goldeneye goes in that list too.
      - tracker1 2y ago
        Absolutely... I also played the original Team Fortress mod for Quake as well. Just a fun time to play in general. I think it was around Doom 3 that it was less fun to me. I mean, the more realistic looking environments (for the time) were really nice. And not to call out D3 in particular, just seemed that by then a lot of the fun in FPS games had waned a lot imo. It will be cool if GPUs can maybe double/triple current performance on the high end and that reaches mid-tier. The opportunity for really immersive environments. That said, we need more compelling gameplay and too many studios seem trapped in the exercise of trying to extract maximum value over a compelling story. I think some of the politics in games holds them back as well. Of course, I'm no longer the audience for reasons in my prior post.

96 points by IronWolve 2y ago

Well it launched up against Deadlock, another shooter by a company people actually know, and which dominated streams for a bit. If nobody plays your game live on launch, then you don’t make sales. More info from LMG: https://youtu.be/7GzzatlUNtE https://youtu.be/7GzzatlUNtE

FanaHOVA 2y ago
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...

Dig1t 2y ago

There are tons of indie shooters that sold way better than this game, saying this didn’t sell well because of a saturated market is just being dishonest. Read the actual reviews for the game and the reason it did poorly is glaringly obvious. The answer is not politically correct but it is true nonetheless.

thatguy0900 2y ago
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.
darth_avocado 2y ago
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.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  Look at their submission history, this is clearly someone who's been successfully trained to see everything in life through that lens.
- chmod775 2y ago
  They're not blaming it on politics. However the explanation can be politically hazardous (if you at all care what Twitter says, which you shouldn't). Wanting to play as conventionally attractive/cool characters is not some sort of political stance. It's perfectly normal and unpolitical. The act of saying the above out loud has become political in a few English-speaking places. However for the most part people just like to pretend it's been turned into a taboo subject. Generally, there isn't a taboo political topic here at all. The few outliers on either far end of the spectrum are easy to ignore.
archargelod 2y ago
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.

Suppafly 2y ago

It's insane that they are giving up so soon. They released it with basically no advertising. Even if you ignore the real issues with the game, people not liking the character design, the live service aspect, etc. It's pretty obvious something like this is going to fail if they don't put any effort into hyping people to play it. I'm way more into gaming than a lot of people and the first I heard of it was headlines about the launch being so unsuccessful.

blibble 2y ago
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
- Suppafly 2y ago
  Sure, but there are other ways to market a game than character design, they didn't even attempt to market the game as far as I can tell.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  OW1 felt to me what Quake3 was when I was 13. You had a giant mech, could shoot like crazy and just cause total chaos. Different maps, and fun game modes. Until toxicity hit and the Blizzard blizzard. Maps were big and with a good team, it was a blast. Nothing else filled my void of Q3, now an dead genre. Deadlock is okay, but I'm not a MOBA person.
  - nothercastle 2y ago
    Teamwork required games are always going to be toxic. Quake, bf and mw work because they generally don’t require much cooperation between toxic people
recursivecaveat 2y ago
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.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

This game has been mired in some kind of controversy around over focus on social justice, aggressive responses from developers in response to critical reviews, and some other ‘woke’ criticisms. I find it strange that this is not mentioned in articles about this game being shut down. The social justice politics is very much a part of why this game did not attract gamers. I say that as someone who isn’t especially keyed into these political battles normally.

grawp 2y ago
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.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Black Myth Wukong and response to it is good proving point. By all reasonable metrics it was massive success in west as well. Million or two million copies sold at least to western market for new studio in freshly launched IP is nothing to scoff at. It really tells you that buyers of games do not really care about stuff journalist talk about. It really has rather little affect on their purchasing decisions. And that is really what should matter when you are trying to sell something.
LordHeini 2y ago
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.

bob1029 2y ago

I just got my auto refund for this from Steam. Looking forward to trying Deadlock. I hope something pans out in this area.

Terretta 2y ago

Hey, YALS! I liked that acronym: yet another live service…

pixl97 2y ago
Isn't it YALSF... yet another live service failure Failed, Another Live ServicE... FALSE

dialup_sounds 2y ago

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

Sakos 2y ago
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 ...
- polski-g 2y ago
  The characters were NOT generic. They were the most strange and bizarre characters ever seen. If they were generic Soldier man and Nurse lady the game would have done quite a bit better.
shiroiushi 2y ago
>They launched at $40 when most of their competition is free-to-play. Sounds like something Sony would do.

tiffanyh 2y ago

Is this accounting games at play? Does "releasing it", allow them to write-off the 8-year investment as a loss (but if unreleased, they can't recognize the gain/loss)? Just wondering if that's what's going on.

iams 2y ago
no, they can write off the loss regardless of whether it's been released

Havoc 2y ago

Heard about this from various social media angles. Surprised the math makes sense. Obviously this is a financial rounding error. Yet they're ok with me as random receiving around 3x negative messaging this week? Maybe the secret is association? Till this post concord and sony was not linked in my mind

ac130kz 2y ago

Paladins, a well-made free-to-play Overwatch clone, was released in 2018, 6 years ago. Overwatch 2 has failed to attract serious audience last year despite also being a free game. Why would people spend money on yet another Overwatch, if it's not outstanding?

akimbostrawman 2y ago

As if online only games as a service slop wasn't disgusting enough, they added hideous DEI character for ESG scores. They really did reach the modern audience

IronWolve 2y ago

Another shooter? Also "The War Within" wow expansion launched at the same time.

celdon25 2y ago
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.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Suckers gotta pay

gigaflop 2y ago

People can only spend so much time on a Live Service style game. They aim to be "The game you log into daily", but usually only kids have the kind of free time to grind these out week after week, let alone keep up with multiple. Then, each have their own $10ish Battlepass, and you need to grind to get to the end of it. Aside from a new map or character, these are the bulk of 'new stuff' that gets added. Gaming as a Service doesn't scale well on most people who can afford to whale out, once they've already found their slot machine.

DiscourseFan 2y ago
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).
- tracker1 2y ago
  I have a little nerve damage, so it's hard for me to even play these kinds of games anymore. Combined with the fact that I like these kinds of games as it's usually been reasonable to drop in, play for a while, have fun and not dedicate a portion of my life to leveling up or mastery. For me, the peak in terms of time investment are around Q3A and Unreal Tournament. So it's been a long while since I played regularly. What's funny is I want to play, it just gets frustrating when your hands/fingers just don't respond right.
  - pipes 2y ago
    Q3 and UT are probably two of the best games ever made. They came at a really special time in games. Goldeneye goes in that list too.
    - tracker1 2y ago
      Absolutely... I also played the original Team Fortress mod for Quake as well. Just a fun time to play in general. I think it was around Doom 3 that it was less fun to me. I mean, the more realistic looking environments (for the time) were really nice. And not to call out D3 in particular, just seemed that by then a lot of the fun in FPS games had waned a lot imo. It will be cool if GPUs can maybe double/triple current performance on the high end and that reaches mid-tier. The opportunity for really immersive environments. That said, we need more compelling gameplay and too many studios seem trapped in the exercise of trying to extract maximum value over a compelling story. I think some of the politics in games holds them back as well. Of course, I'm no longer the audience for reasons in my prior post.