They could have built 2 Concords for the cost of that game.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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...or booked about 400 million shows with musical comedy duo Flight of the Conchords.
or they could have had a Flight of the Conchords concert on a concord that's flying.
Call it "Business Time"
or
Flight of Flight of the Conchords on a concord concert
Wow, as a fan of Flight of the Conchords, what a waste!
Honestly thought they were talking about the airplane until I saw the magazine. Never heard of the game. I imagine it wasn't successful?
It came out less than a month ago. They closed the servers after less than 2 weeks.
The character designs looked like Unity made them to say "this is what a videogame can look like". It played like TF2 but without any soul.
A few days after release, Valve opened Deadlock's stream/review embargo and gave everyone infinite invites to the beta.
I entirely thought that this thread was going to be about the plane.
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?
just how bad does a game have to be to sell this badly?
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:
- Nobody, nobody is paying 40 for a similar game that they can get for free elsewhere. This is the most important failure
- The second failure is lack of promotion, hype creation. For this kind of megaproject high sales expectation, they should have had big campaigns and flooded the PS store with ads
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.
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.
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.
I'm surprised by the lack of buzz for it when it came out. Unless it's unplayable due to bugs, it usually takes a few days to a week for everyone to figure out that a game sucks and for the number of players to drop. This thing seems to have been dead on arrival which is a bigger mystery.
Releasing into a saturated market
zero unique features compared to competition
not free to play like the competition
Boring, generic-looking characters
zero marketing/promotion before release
No linux support
I mean is it really a mystery why it was dead on arrival?
No linux support
Well, you got 4% max that care about that, the rest though.
And 400mil and no marketing is surprising as usually it seems to go the other way, at least they delivered something... god the bar for AAA is low, but not wasting money on poorly targeted ads and otherwise hyping is new
if they had announced Linux support on release, at least some of that 4% would have enthusiastically hyped it up before and now, and would have played it. Average Linux users are more enthusiastic fans than the average non Linux user for anything that includes Linux, and that niche could have been a good initial support. But it wasnt so.
Statistically speaking, if the other 96% of normal people who play games of that genre couldn't be asked to play it, what percent of the 4% would be any more interested?
And as a pretty long term linux user, any good game I care to play so far has had no need to market to my small demographic. Not using shitty practices rampant through AAA basically guarantees it just works under wine, it's incredible really.
Also as someone slowly building a game, that won't be a demographic I'll explicitly market to. Linux support is necessary as it's what I use, but also as a result of using open source software. Godot is the engine I picked as it was the most prominent FOSS option at the time, and turned out to be a damn good pick.
My point is, normal people don't care about Linux, they just want something that entertains them. AAA continues to get more greedy and cut their deliveries, people who like games will feel more burned and start looking around.
If this can be a guiding light to Linux or whatever, then that's great. But the people who care about that sort of thing have to make sure there actually are other things to look to, by the time Linux desktop user share reaches 5% (maybe).
I don't think they marketed it well, if at all. Usually a big 1st party like this has PR all over months or even years before release. I like to think I'm pretty plugged in for games, as I go out of my way for news on new shit and I didn't hear a damn thing about Concord until the day of release and have seen many others who noticed that, also.
I don't doubt it was expensive but Colin Moriarty is a grifter
What did he do?
Very problematic relationship with Holmes
Late to the party. Generic designs. Boring uninspired gameplay that did nothing to advance the genre, and basically no marketing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a tax-loss project by the 8th year of development.
For a moment I thought they were talking about the Concorde plane.
Multiple sources disputing:
https://80.lv/articles/multiple-sources-dispute-concord-s-usd400-million-budget/
watched a gameplay. not impressed at all.
~~400 million dollar investment fraud scheme you say?~~
Nah just good old incompetence. Damn shame.
My favourite part of the saga is that the marketing was poor and yet they managed to get the game represented in an Amazon show