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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
They could have built 2 Concords for the cost of that game.
…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!
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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 don’t doubt it was expensive but Colin Moriarty is a grifter
What did he do?
watched a gameplay. not impressed at all.
