“Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional,” Hulst continued, “but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options [and] after much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.”
But why? Did they actually think it was going to cost more money to keep the servers running than it would bring in? What’s the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?
Matchmaking took upwards of 10 minutes. Maybe they could capture a core audience but all that waiting would alienate even more people. Increasing the wait time even more. They could have invested more money and re-release it, but how much money would it take to overhaul the game. And there is no guarantee, that a 2.0 would be played more. So giving it up is probably the best solution, not burning even more money. Keep in mind, it costed about 400 million $ to make.
These companies really need to learn the private server model. How is your game ever going to get up enough players to be popular when you’re financially incentivized to bail as soon as possible? Put up some public servers for players to hop on, put out a private server, and let people do their own thing. You can still monetize DLCs or even go the route TF2 went and release paid items and loot crates.
People are still playing TF2 and still spending money in the item shop. They definitely wouldn’t be if Valve had bailed on it entirely the first time they had a slump in their playerbase.
That’s kinda a weird take, since the private server model was the only model until 10 years ago or so. Companies definitely know it. It’s just not financially efficient comparing to benefiting from economies of scale with hosting. Plus you don’t lose a ton of money or piss of players if you over or under estimate how popular the game will be.
Had they gone with private servers here, they would have lost even more money than they already have. The problem here is they spent too much money on a game no one wanted to play, chasing a fad that ended before it launched.
How exactly are you presuming to accurately estimate future sales that don’t exist yet? They increased their cost of operation substantially by relying solely on servers they themselves host, and tie the future viability of their product to hosting those servers. That means there’s a clock on how long it makes sense to make the game available to the public.
If they allowed for private servers, that small initial batch of players could potentially grow. Especially if they build in the extensibility of allowing players to mod the game. As it stands, the game now won’t make them any more money, and creating the opportunity for it to ever make them money had a continuous cost. There would be no incentive to shut down access to the game itself if it didn’t carry a cost to the company.
If they happened to be one of the few successful games in their genre, then sure, hosting their own servers exclusively is a potential means of revenue. But if they’re not? It makes much more sense to leave the thing out there for people to fool around with. You never know when one streamer with a following might pick up a game and decide they like it. Can’t happen if it doesn’t exist though.
Oh shit, I’m sorry. I misunderstood what you were saying, I thought you were referring to them purchasing and running their own physical server hardware as opposed to running their servers off of a cloud platform.
I was keeping in mind that they put that much money in, surely all that money has made something playable that would make some money, whereas throwing it all away makes nothing at all, right?
Headline is misleading. There is no canon timeline and never has been, regardless of what officially-licensed book it was published in.
The game designers have said many times that they don’t take any sort of timeline into account when designing a new Zelda game. They nail down the mechanics, and the story comes next, and if it happens to match up thematically in relation to another game, that’s just a bonus.
I mean that’s one way to look at it I suppose. However I don’t think the story being secondary to gameplay means we have to discount what is there available to us. Like if you want to ignore it that’s fine but I don’t think you can say it’s wholesale not canon.
Edit: also want to say I am not taking this link as gospel, but just showing how the words can be interpreted many ways.
Also the newest timeline is on display at the official Nintendo live event in Sydney, which I would argue is more legit than a licensed book
Regardless it’s not really that important, so if people like the timeline, who cares? Nintendo clearly acknowledges it, and the devs don’t use it when making new games. Both can be true
Nah, I saw that piece of shit in theaters and still wish I would have walked out. I know what he was going for, but like every other roth movie I’ve seen (doubly for anything he’s written), it’s just not well done outside of the cinematography. And frankly, well shot porno and gore scenes don’t make for a compelling movie on their own.
Unfortunately, I feel like only console developers that long ago released their games for arcane bi-flagonal deprucified CPUs get to put out expensive anniversary editions. Everyone who owns Steam copies can still run it just fine.
Very reasonable, I hope the dev sticks to his guns and keeps a manageable pace. I feel that it’s right to expect content updates coming in if the game is marked early access, but so long as you don’t pull a Valheim, people shouldn’t be mad at you
I think it’s going to be like 7 Days to Die and just never be completed. I’m hoping they’ll eventually do one big announcement or final release that will get my friends to log back in
Nothing that bad, but the updates are insanely slow and the roadmap of things they promised in 2021 took 3-4 years instead of one. At this rate the game could spend a decade in early access.
I had a lot of good times and even more bad times with DotA over the years, until I finally freed myself from it years ago.
IceFrog being behind this backed by Valve bodes well, and I think the premise of an FPS/MOBA hybrid has promise, despite the market being insanely oversaturated already.
I’m not really interested in competitive games these days, but I hope it’ll be good to watch at least. Following The International was fun even after I quit DotA.
Was gonna say. How is the hero shooter market over-saturated? There’s like 3 games that people actually know about, and like 2 of those are good/decent.
I could be mistaken, as I don’t really play competitive games anymore. I thought between Overwatch, Valorant, Apex, The Finals and what have you there was lots of stiff competition.
Maybe they’ll actually upgrade the hardware to be half decent on this thing, if they want to discourage piracy, make better shit. If I want to play any switch games currently, I’ll just pirate them and play it on the steam deck.
What’s the point of paying for early access if need to pay again when it’s stable?
Early access users took a gamble of paying a low price for a likely buggy game, that might evolve over time through user’s feedback and that has a possibility of failing and never come out of early access.
Asking for the early access users to buy the game at full price is a slap on the face.
And we thought identity theft was shitty before. I hope that we’ll have better tools to identify AI voices in the future. In some cases right now I have a hard time telling between an actual person and a faked voice.
The only way to limit the damage is the tedious old-fashioned way: An honest debate, thorough public education, followed by laws and regulations, which are backed up by international treaties. This takes a long time however, the tech is evolving very quickly, too quickly, self-regulation isn’t working and there are lots of bad actors, from pervy individuals to certain nation states (the likes of Russia, Iran and China have used generative AI to manipulate public opinion) which need to be contained.
I’d honestly go one step further and say that the problem cannot be fully solved period.
There are limited uses for voice cloning: commercial (voice acting), malicious (impersonation), accessibility (TTS readers), and entertainment (porn, non-commercial voice acting, etc.).
Out of all of these only commercial uses can really be regulated away as corporations tend to be risk averse. Accessibility use is mostly not an issue since it usually doesn’t matter whose voice is being used as long as it’s clear and understandable. Then there’s entertainment. This one is both the most visible and arguably the least likely to disappear. Long story short, convincing enough voice cloning is easy - there are cutting-edge projects for it on github, written by a single person and trained on a single PC, capable of being run locally on average hardware. People are going to keep using it just like they were using photoshop to swap faces and manual audio editing software to mimic voices in the past. We’re probably better off just accepting that this usage is here to stay.
And lastly, malicious usage - in courts, in scam calls, in defamation campaigns, etc. There’s strong incentive for malicious actors to develop and improve these technologies. We should absolutely try to find a way to limit its usage, but this will be eternal cat and mouse game. Our best bet is to minimize how much we trust voice recordings as a society and, for legal stuff, developing some kind of cryptographic signature that would confirm whether or not the recording was taken using a certified device - these are bound to be tampered with, especially in high profile cases, but should hopefully somewhat limit the damage.
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