this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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It wasn't a genre I enjoy, so I don't really know much about it beyond the stuff about how badly it sold. I have to wonder though, just how bad does a game have to be to sell this badly? Whenever I see people complain about something in gaming, I inevitably see people talking about how people should vote with their wallets, but then whatever the thing in question is seems to be quite profitable despite the complaints and calls for people to stop buying it. What was so wrong with this one that actually caused practically nobody to buy it?
It's hard to say if Concord was actually that bad, I think the biggest issue was that it was a full-priced game when games in this style have generally been free-to-play for a long time. Even ones that started as paid like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch/Overwatch 2 are now firmly free-to-play and exist alongside a lot of other free-to-play competition including Valve's new Deadlock which is in free public beta. In the context of that marketplace it's a hard sell to get people to spend $40 on a title like that. Perhaps if it had been in the Overwatch era, but not now, when it's all free-to-play.
So who knows how bad it actually was, it bombed hard and fast because not enough people played it to begin with. Who can say a game is actually bad if they haven't played it? That means only the small number of people who played can tell us if it was good, and their experience is tainted by small player count and quick shutdown.
It's not really that Concord was bad, and more that it was unremarkable.
The game was trying so hard to be a clone of Overwatch that what they ended up with was the gaming equivalent of those knock-off GI Joe clones your mother would buy you from the dollar store. Except that Overwatch is free, and Concord was $40. Why am I going to spend more money on getting the knock-off version?
Copying what works only gets you so far. At some point, you have to actually step ahead of the thing you're copying.
I am also not the fan of the genre, but it doesn’t really matter too much how good it was, I think it was dead on arrival due to failed marketing:
Most likely what happened is the bosses realized near the end that this is never going to make enough money, so they went with the quick death version, and the company can enjoy some major loss write-off from their taxes.
PS store, twitch, kick, youtube. This was a huge marketing failure. At a minimum they could have recouped a massive chunk of that $400m if they did another $10m in marketing.
A $400m loss could have been come down to $200.
This is also partially a consequence of the loss of the E3 convention. There’s no longer a central forum for showcasing and building hype.
Are those actual character models? Goddamn
Holy shit, the game developers did not know their market, at all. Yes there are a lot of gamers that could stand to diversify their thinking but you don't spend $400 million dollars and just hope the players will suddenly become tolerant.
I was really only paying attention to the aesthetics of whatever the hell they're wearing.
Grandma with a prosthesis is the only one that looks alright.
Tolerance is not quite the right word for this. These kinds of games are power fantasies and you need the player to want to be the character, for that they can't just be different in every way at the same time because every difference increases the chances that some players say "I wouldn't want to be that character" and also the chances that other players will say "I know how to bully the players choosing that character".
Tolerant of what? These character models are just ugly.
My eyes are having a hard time tolerating those shoulder pads
This aint a diversity thing, this is a someone in character design needs to be shot type of thing. They all look simultaneous bland, garish, over designed, and under designed. This is a fuckup that ruins folks career's.
Idk what it has to do with being tolerant. They just went full woke and were surprised it doesn't make the game good.
I'll admit I'm not as keyed into new gaming releases and news as I use to be, but I knew morning about it other than seeing a stars promo for it until after it flopped. I'm wondering if they didn't market it well.
A lot of shit games still sell millions on the back of marketing, so for a game to sell as little as concord, it had to be a whole new level of shit along with shitty marketing.
That's the thing. They sell it due to marketing. Concord had virtually no marketing whatsoever.
So Sony came up with $40 game that failed to be as good and enjoying as mediocre f2p ones, supported it with zero marketing and expected profits somehow. Genius.
A good game will sell itself though. How they spent 8 years on it, I don't know.
Good game, yes. Concord was not one of those. It was mediocre, nothing special, definitely not a game people would pay 40 for.