Both were live service; one at Bend, one at Bluepoint. Bluepoint was helping work on God of War: Ragnarok until 2022, at which point they were developing this now-cancelled God of War live service game.

  • @kromem
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    616 hours ago

    Live service doesn’t need to be shit.

    There could have been games where there was just a brilliant idea for a game that keeps having engaging content on an ongoing basis with passionate devs.

    But live service so an exec could check a box for their quarterly shareholder call was always going to be DOA.

    • @ampersandrewOP
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      19 hours ago

      Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.

    • dindonmasker
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      315 hours ago

      The game they killed 3 days after release might have been good but i haven’t seen a single gameplay video or have any idea of what the game was about. Are they that scared of releasing a shit game and keeping it playable but dead for a while?

      • @ampersandrewOP
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        29 hours ago

        Keeping it running has ongoing costs involved. It would just be setting money on fire.

        • dindonmasker
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          37 hours ago

          I mean, they spent what 400 millions on developing it and they won’t spend 10k - 100k to keep that game running for a while? Like “NO NOT A SINGLE CENT MORE SPENT ON THAT SHIT GAME!” XD

          • burgersc12
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            13 hours ago

            They were shoveling money down the tube for a game that you literally couldn’t play due to how few people there were.

          • @ampersandrewOP
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            47 hours ago

            Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.

            • @[email protected]
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              23 hours ago

              Valve tried holding out on a failed game with Artifact, and git 0 return on investment, even after revamping it.

              Still, Concord seemed kind of interesting with how ambitious it all was. I wonder if they could have pushed it off the ground with some redesigns

              • @ampersandrewOP
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                13 hours ago

                I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.