8 ms·

Concord had a dev culture of toxic positivity that halted any negative feedback

93 points by xnhbx 2y ago

harry_ord 2y ago
[flagged]
pjmlp 2y ago
Personally I don't see any difference between toxic positivity and the environment my parents grew up, where any possible remark could land on PIDE/DGS office, followed by a state policy security offices visit to clarify one's ideas.
- kranke155 2y ago
  Lol exaggeration much? Comparing an office with little criticism to the Portuguese political police.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Nope, one might not be sent to jail or war frontline on the colonies, yet can get their career completely ruined. 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.
TheAceOfHearts 2y ago
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?
- flohofwoe 2y ago
  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.
  - chii 2y ago
    > 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.
    - walls 2y ago
      The lottery has amazing content - as judged by the sales of tickets and such.
    - nerdjon 2y ago
      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.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        > 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.
tailsdog 2y ago
How did Sony drop the ball on this one? If they were the publisher then they should have been on top of the feedback loop.
- klabb3 2y ago
  No experience in games, but I’ve seen first hand how a thick layer of ladder climbing middle management can create a culture where all important signaling mechanisms become internal, isolated from the outside world. In such a culture, what faceless hypothetical users[1] think slowly fades away, and what other “important people” within the org thinks is all that matters. Basically high school popularity contests – quite banal. However, the emerging behavior of such an organism can be very perplexing. [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”.
  - tryauuum 2y ago
    "web scale"?
    - xenihn 2y ago
      Look up "MongoDB is web scale"
      - klabb3 2y ago
        That’s right I was referencing the meme. However the scale argument seems to apply to faang and those inspired or derived by them. “We do things at scale” can become an excuse to ignore individual voices, whether it’s users, customers, or external criticism. Which in turn enables all kinds of delusions.
  - Rapzid 2y ago
    Jeff Bezos has interesting things to say about this in regards to his time at Amazon. He's said it was basically his job to go around sniffing those situations out and fixing them.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it. And if you expect people to shell out a lot of cash up front when the successful competitors are mostly free. 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?
- 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
  If nobody listens to well-founded criticism like yours and just says "nah, people will love it" -- yes that would be a good example of toxic positivity.
- jsheard 2y ago
  > I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it. 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.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    Maybe Overwatch seems to exist solely for Blizzard/Microsoft to screw up, but it seems odd that they seem to be constantly on the verge of shutting down OWL, despite it being a top 20 Twitch game. They got so much right while creating a completely new set of characters, and then constantly leave players with the uncertainty of whether they care about the game at all.
- josefx 2y ago
  > I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business Valve is currently working on Deadlock and seems to have no issues getting players despite its still unfinished state.
jrmiii 2y ago
I had a coworker introduce me to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team[0] as a useful tool for framing problems with team dynamics. 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_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...
- dazzawazza 2y ago
  The videogames industry is completely paralyzed by fear of conflict. It's in a transition between the old guard who never had any training and revel in conflict (sometimes, but rarely, too toxic levels) and the new starters some of whom seem to have no idea that criticism is an intrinsic part of the creative act. 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.
  - scruple 2y ago
    There are pockets here and there, even inside of AAA studios. But I agree, I'm unlikely to stay in games once I leave this job or am laid off.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Not only the games industry, we seem to be on a fluffy world where any kind of negativity has direct impact on job evaluation, and can even lead to losing the job. A couple of years ago I worked on such good vibes project, uff.
- 2y ago
jgalt212 2y ago
I believe the Challenger and Columbia disasters can be largely attributed to toxic positivity and intolerance of dissent.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I don't know about that. The slide the engineers sent to management for Columbia warning that the problem had never been simulated was, shall we say, not brimming with positivity. It just was incredibly unclear[0]. [0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...
r0ckarong 2y ago
Hubris: The videogame
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
funnyfoobar 2y ago
for me, toxic positivity is basically everyone pretending that everything is running smoothly even though it's not. 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
- kranke155 2y ago
  Bad leadership. Leaders should ocasionally take time to listen to bad feedback.
rmrfchik 2y ago
I think it's wrong metrics: gameplay vs woke culture. You can't sit on two chairs at moment. Choose one.
123yawaworht456 2y ago
even reddit was laughing so hard at that game that moderators had to purge and lock threads about it all the time. this was the first one I recall seeing: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_might_have_the_ugliest_characters_designs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_mig... 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.
- archagon 2y ago
  People don’t play games because they look good. Pubg looks like garbage and uses off-the-shelf assets but still has millions of players. I suspect that if Concord was fun and/or sufficiently novel, the visuals would have made no difference.
lupusreal 2y ago
Toxic positivity is just a new way of saying it was a "Emperor's new clothes" situation. Everybody could or should have been able to see that the emperor had no clothes but was too scared to speak out. Only somebody not constrained by the system, a naive child in the story or in this case consumers who weren't in the corporate structure, was able to point out the obvious truth. 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.
- throwaway9524 2y ago
  Agreed in general. Though the points on character design may be a bit too reductionist. Concord didn't really need characters with clear sex appeal. Or even characters people immediately want to be like. The original characters aren't that bad! At least judging from the concept art. They just suffer from extremely poor and downright unprofessional execution. Take this redesign for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1fdz1m7/actual_concord_redesigns_kevint_comm/ 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.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Is any of the original concept art public? I've seen some images purporting to be that but if you track them down they're actually redesigns made after the game flopped to show how it could have been done better. 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.
cobbzilla 2y ago
a super-cynical take would be: 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?
akimbostrawman 2y ago
i wonder if $400 million dollar was worth the improved ESG score
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hatenberg 2y ago
It’s not so different from mid 2000s BioWare culture (where many hits were created). Games looked like a shitshow right till the end and the general answer to these conceran was faith in “BioWare magic”. 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.
falcor84 2y ago
I see this story is on Forbes now, but apparently without any additional details: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report-says-sonys-concord-cost-400-million-to-make/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report...

93 points by xnhbx 2y ago

[flagged]

Personally I don't see any difference between toxic positivity and the environment my parents grew up, where any possible remark could land on PIDE/DGS office, followed by a state policy security offices visit to clarify one's ideas.

kranke155 2y ago
Lol exaggeration much? Comparing an office with little criticism to the Portuguese political police.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Nope, one might not be sent to jail or war frontline on the colonies, yet can get their career completely ruined. 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.

TheAceOfHearts 2y ago

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?

flohofwoe 2y ago
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.
- chii 2y ago
  > 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.
  - walls 2y ago
    The lottery has amazing content - as judged by the sales of tickets and such.
  - nerdjon 2y ago
    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.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      > 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.

tailsdog 2y ago

How did Sony drop the ball on this one? If they were the publisher then they should have been on top of the feedback loop.

klabb3 2y ago
No experience in games, but I’ve seen first hand how a thick layer of ladder climbing middle management can create a culture where all important signaling mechanisms become internal, isolated from the outside world. In such a culture, what faceless hypothetical users[1] think slowly fades away, and what other “important people” within the org thinks is all that matters. Basically high school popularity contests – quite banal. However, the emerging behavior of such an organism can be very perplexing. [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”.
- tryauuum 2y ago
  "web scale"?
  - xenihn 2y ago
    Look up "MongoDB is web scale"
    - klabb3 2y ago
      That’s right I was referencing the meme. However the scale argument seems to apply to faang and those inspired or derived by them. “We do things at scale” can become an excuse to ignore individual voices, whether it’s users, customers, or external criticism. Which in turn enables all kinds of delusions.
- Rapzid 2y ago
  Jeff Bezos has interesting things to say about this in regards to his time at Amazon. He's said it was basically his job to go around sniffing those situations out and fixing them.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it. And if you expect people to shell out a lot of cash up front when the successful competitors are mostly free. 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?

0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
If nobody listens to well-founded criticism like yours and just says "nah, people will love it" -- yes that would be a good example of toxic positivity.
jsheard 2y ago
> I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it. 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.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  Maybe Overwatch seems to exist solely for Blizzard/Microsoft to screw up, but it seems odd that they seem to be constantly on the verge of shutting down OWL, despite it being a top 20 Twitch game. They got so much right while creating a completely new set of characters, and then constantly leave players with the uncertainty of whether they care about the game at all.
josefx 2y ago
> I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business Valve is currently working on Deadlock and seems to have no issues getting players despite its still unfinished state.

jrmiii 2y ago

I had a coworker introduce me to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team[0] as a useful tool for framing problems with team dynamics. 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_Team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...

dazzawazza 2y ago
The videogames industry is completely paralyzed by fear of conflict. It's in a transition between the old guard who never had any training and revel in conflict (sometimes, but rarely, too toxic levels) and the new starters some of whom seem to have no idea that criticism is an intrinsic part of the creative act. 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.
- scruple 2y ago
  There are pockets here and there, even inside of AAA studios. But I agree, I'm unlikely to stay in games once I leave this job or am laid off.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Not only the games industry, we seem to be on a fluffy world where any kind of negativity has direct impact on job evaluation, and can even lead to losing the job. A couple of years ago I worked on such good vibes project, uff.
2y ago

jgalt212 2y ago

I believe the Challenger and Columbia disasters can be largely attributed to toxic positivity and intolerance of dissent.

robertlagrant 2y ago
I don't know about that. The slide the engineers sent to management for Columbia warning that the problem had never been simulated was, shall we say, not brimming with positivity. It just was incredibly unclear[0]. [0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...

r0ckarong 2y ago

Hubris: The videogame

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

funnyfoobar 2y ago

for me, toxic positivity is basically everyone pretending that everything is running smoothly even though it's not. 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

kranke155 2y ago
Bad leadership. Leaders should ocasionally take time to listen to bad feedback.

rmrfchik 2y ago

I think it's wrong metrics: gameplay vs woke culture. You can't sit on two chairs at moment. Choose one.

123yawaworht456 2y ago

even reddit was laughing so hard at that game that moderators had to purge and lock threads about it all the time. this was the first one I recall seeing: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_might_have_the_ugliest_characters_designs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_mig... 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.

archagon 2y ago
People don’t play games because they look good. Pubg looks like garbage and uses off-the-shelf assets but still has millions of players. I suspect that if Concord was fun and/or sufficiently novel, the visuals would have made no difference.

lupusreal 2y ago

Toxic positivity is just a new way of saying it was a "Emperor's new clothes" situation. Everybody could or should have been able to see that the emperor had no clothes but was too scared to speak out. Only somebody not constrained by the system, a naive child in the story or in this case consumers who weren't in the corporate structure, was able to point out the obvious truth. 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.

throwaway9524 2y ago
Agreed in general. Though the points on character design may be a bit too reductionist. Concord didn't really need characters with clear sex appeal. Or even characters people immediately want to be like. The original characters aren't that bad! At least judging from the concept art. They just suffer from extremely poor and downright unprofessional execution. Take this redesign for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1fdz1m7/actual_concord_redesigns_kevint_comm/ 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.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  Is any of the original concept art public? I've seen some images purporting to be that but if you track them down they're actually redesigns made after the game flopped to show how it could have been done better. 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.

cobbzilla 2y ago

a super-cynical take would be: 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?

akimbostrawman 2y ago

i wonder if $400 million dollar was worth the improved ESG score

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

hatenberg 2y ago

It’s not so different from mid 2000s BioWare culture (where many hits were created). Games looked like a shitshow right till the end and the general answer to these conceran was faith in “BioWare magic”. 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.

falcor84 2y ago

I see this story is on Forbes now, but apparently without any additional details: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report-says-sonys-concord-cost-400-million-to-make/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report...