Whoa, I didn't know that. The Dreamcast's 9/9/99 launch date in North America is so memorable, I had no idea that the Playstation came out exactly four years earlier. So there are two birthdays today!
Lots of people feel this way. This thing is going to come in at a price around $650 or $700, sell pretty much exclusively to the people who need the latest high-end PlayStation regardless, and then free up a bit of inventory of second hand vanilla PS5s. It’s a way to justify keeping prices high, because they can’t afford to lower them.
I feel like short of making it free to play and having a complete art style rework this game doesn’t have great hopes of ever being relevant. I mean from what I’ve gathered the gameplay itself is decent to good. But yeah they just misfired so hard with this.
Despite it all, I feel bad for the majority of devs who spent so much of their life working on this and who are likely going to be out of a job. Of course I don’t know anything about the inner workings, but I’d be willing to bet it’s not most of their fault’s that sony had been pushing so hard for live service stuff under their former leadership
I think that’s common in gaming development. You work on a project until it’s done, then pivot to another or get let go.
The game bombing likely doesn’t help but I expect most devs involved expected this. Apparently development ran 3-4 years, which is a good time to leave a job in tech generally, if not earlier if you want to maximize income.
they still got paid and made stuff for their portfolio, while executives get to explain why there is a hundred million missing and entire studios worth of manhours in the void
Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.
Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.
Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.
Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.
Devs be applying like “Hi! I’d like to join your development team! My professional qualifications are that I’ve spent eight years working on a failed game!”
Of course, it won’t be the individual devs’ fault but I don’t have any difficulties imagining that some of them have a harder time finding new jobs than people who were let go after the launch of more popular games.
I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.
If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?
At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.
I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.
This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.
As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.
The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.
It’s def not a great look but it’s also only 1 former dev. I’m not going to judge the whole team on the words of 1 person who isn’t working there anymore
This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.
You’d be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don’t really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it’s made with passion and emotion.
Just read the article, id hardly call that a “meltdown” lol. Sure, it was unprofessional, but it wasn’t a rant. This article feels like it’s trying to spin a narrative that doesn’t exist.
The post in question.
eh, i don’t really care. it was a huge labour of love from a lot of insanely talented people making an awesome game. why would i care about a bunch of talentless freaks hating on it? i’m sure having fun playing it, and i wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Note that this is the only post they’re talking about. It wasn’t like a drawn out thread with name calling.
Again, not saying it’s professional, but calling this a meltdown? Come on now… Y’all are being ridiculous. This is like the tamest fucking tweet.
Make it F2P but charge for cosmetics that completely rework the art style. Almost all the characters look insufferable and I particularly want to punch Lennox in the face every time I see him.
I had to look his name up myself. 😄 I was going to post a picture of his punchable face, but seeing the whole cast, he didn’t even stand out all that much compared to the rest. They all look like a bunch of bad cosplayers.
It’s interesting that they are so repulsive to almost everyone (including me). I wonder what the specific traits are that makes people dislike the cast, I can’t quite put my finger on it.
(Except maybe for the roomba/hoover robot, that one seemed kinda interesting as a concept)
Don’t feel bad for them. Firewalk Studios may only have Concord to it’s name, but the Devs are all from Bungie and Activision. That should already ring some alarm bells.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They are the ones that sold the idea of Concord to Sony. For once I doubt Sony had to push for any of the bad decisions.
They didn’t waste $100 mill+ and 8 years development time on a random passion project. This was designed for a single reason, to make money in ridiculous amounts. To squeeze every penny out of kids and their parents.
I can’t feel bad for anyone that worked on something like that when it fails.
Stop making live service games and “shared world” faux-mmos. If it’s not single player, P2P multiplayer, or providing the server executable for me to host, I’m not buying it. There are already enough good MMOs anyways.
Some of the best FPS games are live service games but it’s because they’re great games at their core. Plenty of companies are focusing on making live service games instead of games so good that they become live services.
I loved the first Division game. It had a great community, great gunplay, and prior to the crafting nerf(s) a really good loot/crafting feedback loop. But it could have just as easily been made as a local co-op or self-hosted game. I have yet to encounter a game that can only exist as a live service game, unlike e.g. Eve Online which can only exist as an MMO.
That’s awesome! Thanks for making an MMO I personally have 500 hours in on steam. It’s actually the MMO that made me open to playing MMOs, I hated the genre before because all I knew was WoW and Korean stuff that’s all walls of bland text and dull repetitive tasks that don’t respect your time.
The stories of SWTOR and full voice acting were something else entirely. I really enjoyed it and have some very fond memories of my first time playing it as a teen years and years ago, it basically absorbed my holiday vacation that year as I found a guild, made friends, got into some RP, and really just found some cool experiences. In a market starving for anything halfway decent that’s star wars I’m glad we have it.
I actually found it pretty soon after it went free to play, I thought I’d check it out and then BAM I’ve completed all class stories, maxed levels, got into housing decoration, and even have an unhealthy number of alts I’ll definitely get around to playing through again someday.
I remember being so happy it was on steam largely for the auto updates. Seems it’s been a very healthy success since then.
It sounds like you’ve already got a curated list of games - what are a few standout multiplayer that you enjoy that meet your criteria?
I’ll start off - when knockout city, an excellent dodgeball “shooter” closed shop, the devs released the server hosting code so the community could still play
Multiplayer games that I love, that I can self-host or play P2P?
Project Zomboid, ARK, Grim Dawn, Starbound, Space Engineers, Satisfactory, and Bellwright
I would have included Minecraft Java, but MS went and made it online only recently, where you can’t play at all without signing into their launcher, even singleplayer.
It fully released August 23rd. Beta started in July
While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If you purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to your original payment method.
Customers who purchased from other digital storefronts will also be refunded.
Apex Legends is a battle royale, Gigantic and Battleborn are (were) more like MOBAs, Paladins and Dirty Bomb don’t work on linux. I haven’t played all of these games, but I don’t think they’re as interchangeable as you’re implying.
These aren’t even hero shooters. They’re just basic arena shooters. Unless they have drastically changed since they released (which was the last time I played either).
Bad marketing, low interest in Overwatch clones after OW2. Some people say diversity pandering but I like to imagine it’s that people still remember Sony being a butt with Helldiver’s 2.
This video does a good job explaining it. TL;DW Its an overwatch clone that came out about 6 years too late, looks generic af and can hardly compete with the free and interesting games already available
The characters look absolutely boring design-wise too, with muted colors for some reason, giving off strong “We have Guardians of the Galaxy at home” vibes. In a hero shooter.
… What’s that about culture war bullshit? Whatever corner of Xitter that youtuber went scurrying under, there’s like a couple dozen people there.
Some people (conservatives and some absolutely brainrotted terminally online leftists) love attributing sales data to Wokism or Wokism being Defeated. thisengineiswoke.jpg.
Literally no-one actually cares, not even conservatives, because they sure as shit play Elden Ring despite the character creation presenting gender as “A” and “B” or whatever. It does not matter. “Go woke go broke” is a literal fucking meme. If people actually cared about gaming politics then FIFA wouldn’t be one of the top selling games every year and reddit would have killed pre-orders as a practice 10 years ago.
The game is bland, a cheap knockoff, already very old-fashioned, infinitely too expensive, terribly marketed and uniquely non-appealing. That’s it, no need to bring weird politics into this.
I also don’t buy his take that the game started development in 2016, this is what was big culturally in 2016, and the team just retreated into a bunker until launch and didn’t have any way to course correct.
That’s not how game development works. I guarantee the headcount for this project didn’t peak in 2016 and stay steady. This was a low-priority item on a few people’s kanban boards for a couple years, probably had multiple starts, dead-ends, and reinventions.
I have to think Sony saw the writing on the wall, pushed the project out the door because they didn’t think it would get any better barring significant reinvestment, and braced for the impact. I credit them just a tiny bit for not writing it off on their taxes and canning the project like Hollywood has been doing lately.
It missed several boats and came out with a sticker price when most of the other games in the same market are free to play
It also released 2 weeks ago, so I can see why they’d be disappointed! It’s apparently a decently fun game and getting support pulled so quickly would be sad
blog.playstation.com
Aktywne