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.
If it wasn’t for hundreds of people likely losing their jobs it would be really funny that Sony’s greedy, cynical attempts to cash in on the live service fad keep failing
It’s probably not even the artists fault it turned out this shit. My gut feeling is that the game is victim of incompetent leadership. Indecisiveness on important matters and micro management on stupid things.
It’s also the same incompetent leadership who will get bonuses and promotions after this.
Shit in terms of having no players and being pulled back after just two weeks.
From what I understand, the game itself was alright. It had no major technical or gameplay problems. At least the team of programmers and game designers were competent.
The main issue is that the game was incredibly unappealing, and I believe this can only come from poor leadership.
I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.
I don’t think the parent comment was trying to say that it’s particularly evil. They rather meant “greedy” in the sense that these companies get a bit too excited about money.
Basically, live service games are pretty expensive to make and generally result in an incomplete/worse experience at launch. But if they’re successful and gain enough of a player base, then they pay for themselves manyfold.
That’s why these companies keep on gambling, by building live service games, rather than two or three smaller games from the same budget.
Sony shuts down all of their Japanese studios and redirects their efforts into developing “cinematic” experiences to appeal to western gamers
Sony liquidates countless other studios in the pursuit of funding this game
Sony buys Bungie to aid in developing this game
Sony thinks this is going to be a huge success rivaling COD and Fortnite, so they fund an entire multimillion dollar CGI-animated episode to be aired in Amazon’s Secret Level anthology series
200 million sounds like a lot, but it’s like 2 weeks of PSPlus money.
For all this losing, they’re sure making a lot of money. Just not out of this game.
And that money ain’t gone yet, there’s for sure a pivot towards a F2P, MTX ridden version of the game to be relaunched.
The problem is that gamers say they don’t like that sort of thing, while the success of the likes of Fortnite indicates that there’s a lot of gamers out there saying nothing, but buying V-bucks like a motherfucker.
The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.
Let’s acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let’s acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I’m still glad it failed.
Those artists and programmers had about six years to find different jobs in the industry, I have zero sympathy for the ones that stuck around and did not see the writing on the wall.
I did too until I realized they almost always come buggy as shit.
I couldn’t run Horizon Zero Dawn for more than 15 minutes until about 8 months past release. They ain’t spending that time between PlayStation release and PC release getting ready.
The delay is purely about piracy, if I had to guess. It only makes sense if you believe piracy affects sales negatively, but these corporate publishers are incapable of thinking anything else. Their entire business model revolves around artificial gatekeeping, so they simply cannot admit that that whole segment of their work is pointless.
Piracy is a service problem, and releasing a buggy port with enormous delays is bad service. It doesn’t make me want to spend my money with them.
You think it’s piracy? Or PlayStation being so deluded that they think you’ll absolutely spend $600 to buy their system because “(Game) is so good”. I mean shit I’ve never played, and will likely never play Bloodborne.
Idk who the person where $600 + $60 Game = Must play makes sense - but it ain’t me.
There is the exclusives thing, but I think it goes the other way. The consoles are loss-leaders, meaning they’re manufactured at a loss, then they make their money on game sales. So they need game sales to make up the numbers.
Yes, people buy playstations for the exclusives, because they know there will be many. Also I guess once you buy it you may need to justify the expense with more game purchases.
Now Sony is the publisher, so they get money either way. It may be that the cut is apportioned differently for PS sales, maybe the PS division needs to protect their numbers, but I know games companies in the past have talked about their reluctance to release on PC because of piracy, and the attitude seems to me to be that PC users need to be taught a lesson.
Personally I think the whole walled garden ecosystem is bullshit and in an ideal world we’d all be running open source software on open source hardware, and the only new hardware you’d get would be for performance upgrades, or because you wanted a handheld or a second machine. There wouldn’t be this situation where people buy three separate machines just because some people decided their proprietary games would only work on their proprietary machines. It’s absurdly wasteful.
PS VR2 was designed from the ground up specifically for PS5 – so you’ll notice that some key features, like HDR, headset feedback, eye tracking, adaptive triggers, and haptic feedback (other than rumble), are not available when playing on PC
As someone who just has a PSVR2 and a PS5, I agree. I think being able to include those features in PCVR games might entice VR developers to provide more feature rich ports of their games to PS5. Here's hoping it just needs some kind of official driver or something.
They want people on the hardware as they don’t need to share a cut with valve on software sales. Makes it easier to pitch other services to users when they’re locked into your platform too.
That still doesn’t make sense. All this does is enable the PS VR headset to be used with a PC to play steam games. It gives people that already own a PS VR another option for usage: plugging it into a PC and playing VR games they purchased through steam. It lowers the barrier to entry for the user to experience PC VR games by being able to use hardware they already have on hand instead of having to purchase an Oculus or Index. Valve still gets their software sales cut because you can only use the PS VR to play games in your steam library on PC.
They don’t care about you buying the hardware itself, they want you to buy into the PlayStation platform where they get a cut of all sales and don’t pay a cut to valve.
Yeah that’s quite the letdown. I’ve been hoping to upgrade my VR headset from a Quest 2 and I was looking forward to this so I could get away from Meta, but those features were a big part of the appeal of the PS VR2. I don’t own a PS5, so buying a headset that should be able to do all these things but can’t would kinda sting. It seems this was intended as more of a bonus for existing PS VR2 owners rather than an attempt to drive sales to PC-only players. I hope those features do make their way to PC eventually, because HDR on the OLED screen would make this an amazing PC VR headset and I really wanted that. I’m going to have to pass on this headset for now though.
AFAIK, HDR was theorised to have been disabled due to problems on AMD GPUs, as said by a third-party driver developer (iVRy). They also said that issues with USB communication was why they weren’t able to do it properly either with the adapter having a more direct connection. The adapter should be able to support it when SteamVR is updated, so hopefully Sony releases firmware updates for it.
twitter.com/iVRy_VR (I’d provide a Nitter link but it’s playing up right now. Use whichever redirector extension if you’re that bothered.)
I’m new to VR. Over the past few months I was considering a Meta Quest 3, specifically because I wanted to finally play Half-Life Alyx. However, I really didn’t want to give Meta money/data (I deleted Facebook back in 2019), so that’s why I’ve held off for so long in hopes that either Valve updates the Index or another option comes out.
Could you elaborate what I’m missing with some of these features compared to a Meta Quest 3 or Valve Index from a PC perspective? In my eyes, playing this on PS5 is a bonus to me.
HDR - I understand colors won’t be as deep and brightness/blacks as high/deep which is a bummer considering the OLED screens inside the PSVR. I don’t think the Meta Quest 3 had HDR? Neither does the Index?
Headset feedback - vibration on head? I’m assuming the other headsets don’t have this, so I’m not missing much from PC games that don’t leverage this.
Eye tracking - I don’t believe Meta Quest 3 has this, neither does the Index? So it’s in parity with the PC feature set?
Adaptive Triggers - I have a PS5 and when this feature turns on, it’s kinda cool for a second but then it gets old fast. The only really good execution of Adaptive Triggers I’ve experienced so far is in Returnal. I just finished up FF7 Rebirth and the adaptive trigger sequences in there seemed dumb and unnecessary.
Haptic feedback - is this just a more detailed rumble?
I guess my main question is, doesn’t this seems like the better option when compared to a Valve Index or Meta Quest 3? For my particular circumstance,I don’t mind being tethered by a cable (at least I don’t think I will, again I’m new to VR. Besides I’d be tethered anyway using a meta quest 3 on PC) and the headset screens on the PSVR2 seem to be really nice compared to the others.
Adaptive triggers make sense because not many games use it even on PS5 and it’s a very specific function that isn’t replicated by any other hardware yet; but why doesn’t eye tracking or HDR work with existing software on the PC side?
Because their eye tracking and HDR software are made with proprietary licenses they don’t want to pay to port over from PS5’s flavor of BSD to whatever OS you run on PC.
But why would I have to use their software? There’s no other options for the triggers that I am aware of, but there’s tons of software for HDR and face tracking. A lot of it is FOSS, too.
They probably don’t see any value paying development time and resources for something they won’t ever use and won’t be able to recoup the costs of, when they can better spend it on shit that helps them make money.
I’m just wondering if the internal camera would at least be picked up as a generic camera so you could use any of the things that let you get face tracking just from a camera feed (as I do now), or if they literally have no translation drivers for it to even be detected on Windows or Linux as hardware.
Someone told me adaptive triggers work in some games on PS5 controllers, I don’t know why the VR controllers couldn’t do the same. Maybe I just heard wrong
They do work in a couple of PS5 ported PC games. IIRC, Returnal and R&C: A Rift Apart have working adaptive triggers on PC. But you also have to have the controller plugged in with the cable; it doesn’t work via BT.
I was excited when I saw full DualSense support, including adaptive triggers, in the patch notes, but then disappointed when it didn’t work wirelessly. I don’t understand why it doesn’t work over BT on PC; it does on the actual PS5 🤷🏻♂️
Maybe to see how many former PSN users haven’t decided to pick up a PS5, since that’s what they’d see after my account coming online for the first time in years.
Same for me with Ghosts of Tsushima. I haven’t pirated a single game in 15 years. It’s crazy that Sony doesn’t sell a game in a EU country for God knows what reasons.
Definitely pirate it, it is a fantastic game. There is a whole area you find by accident that has more to do than a lot of games main story. The story is brilliant, I really love these two games.
It sounds mental, and I suspect there’s a key piece of the puzzle missing for now which is cloud play.
I mean, that has to be the plan, right? They can’t possibly be releasing a £200 remote play solution just for people who want to play in bed or on the toilet… The market for IBS sufferers with a PS5 can’t be that big.
games that are streamed through PlayStation Plus Premium’s cloud streaming, are not supported
but also says
Games that must be streamed on PS5 using a PS Plus Premium membership are not compatible
hopefully it can be hacked and reconfigured to be used with a PC, so i can get it for $50 when they will do the fire sale (i still regret not having bought the ps tv when they got rid for all the stock at 20 euro)
But PS5 streaming is in beta, PS3 and 4 streaming have been a thing for ages, and I can’t think for a minute that Sony are dumb enough to release a streaming only handheld that they don’t plan to connect to their cloud streaming services in the future.
Especially since the PS5 is unlikely to come down in price any time soon. Could be a decent way to get poor/casual gamers paying for a gaming subscription they’ll barely use.
Fucking exactly. Unless the offer the game free of charge for those that have already bought it on ps, there is no reason to have a second account for every other game.
The other games that have had this requirement at least had some kind of store/online function somewhere. AFAIK, GOW:R doesn’t have any online functions. What in the hell is the account even for?
FYI, you can use the same account, you don’t need two.
I own ghost of tsushima on ps4, and logged into my PSN account for it on PC because I was curious how it would work. The PC version shows up in your trophies as a totally separate game ‘ghost of tsushima PC’ so they don’t blend.
But the point still stands, there’s no good reason for a PSN requirement for this game.
As much as I hate more tracking and stuff, would they allow me to use my existing PSN account from back when I picked up a console or two for some exclusives?
Bank transfers are slow. It is generally taken out of the account the next business day, sits in escrow for a few days, then appears in the destination account where it takes another day to clear. About a week total.
Though, if it gets held for suspected fraud or needs to cross international boundaries, it can sit in that escrow account for much longer.
Sounds like I should start holding my payments in escrow, just in case the publisher decides to shut down their game less than 2 weeks after taking my money. Got it!
In the EU we use SEPA and transfers are instantaneous. Used it when buying something of our local ebay when at the person’s house. Also most banks even have Venmo style payment systems… scan qr of your bank, click on my banks icon, authorize, done.
Companies sit on cash simply for cashflow reasons. Keeping the money in your account for an additional x days means it can be used for other stuff.
Your card is charged instantly, but it can take a week or two before it’s cleared the fed’s anti-fraud measures and they’re assured you’re not reversing it through your bank. Then they send the refund and it can take another week or two before your bank clears it and makes sure that they’re not reversing their payment. Add in some wiggle room to cover yourself in case something gets flagged as potentially fraudulent and someone has to manually review it, and it can take a while.
In practice, refunds should arrive this week, but they want to be careful not to promise that in every case. What they’re mainly worried about is people buying the game, immediately refunding it, and simultaneously doing a chargeback while in some faraway country.
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.
I never saw a launched game unlaunch this quick. We talked about failures that got shutdown 1 year after launch. But now the record is what, 2 weeks? Question is, will they go back to drawing board and make changes to the game for a relaunch, such as a free to play model? Nothing is stated here, so probably not.
I would consider playing this game, if it was playable on Linux (and without a PSN account requirement). But clearly Sony does not care about me.
I actually liked that game. Sure, it was unpolished and unoptimized. But there were still some fun to be had. It feels like they gave up on that game within a week or two.
“Nobody” probably isn’t literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game’s performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.
The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned “Player count”. It’s a big, fat 0.
They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.
The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: “I think we’re done here.” There is an odd sense of foreboding, that “here” might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.
blog.playstation.com
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