Every game executive and investor wants a Fortnight. That’s why no matter how many times gamers reject it live service games will continue to be developed. Because AAA games are made for investors not players.
While that is true, the issue is that they are trend chasing for a quick cash grab and put in next to no effort to make the game good or listen to consumers saying that this isn’t what we want.
I mean aren’t those just issues that any business venture has to deal with? I don’t think the game type matters per se. It’s more a problem of poor business decision making. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with chasing trends and they certainly had the right budget. $100m+ is hardly chump change but taking 8 years really put them quite behind.
I think the shareholder takeover of gaming removed one big thing from the tendency to “take inspiration” from competitors, and that is developing the world and characters in order to make the clone feel unique and deep.
actually yes, there have been alot of games in the rpgmmo ish game like genshin and the ark / survival builder games like Palworld.
Whenever a game becomes popular people and studios try to make thier own. Palworld is an example of one that worked (it being Ark survival evolved: pokemon editon)
Genshin-likes are being very popular in the east, this year we got Wuthering Waves (which is actually much better), and 2-3 years ago we got Tower of Fantasy (which was terrible), now the same studio from ToF announced Neverness to Everness which is the same concept of an open world anime action rpg but in an urban setting, suspiciously years after Project Mugen had been announced which is has the exact same premise.
I mean sometimes it works. Pubg was the big Battle Royale in town until Fortnite (as a battle Royale) came along. League of Legends too. The problem with Concord is it took about 6 years to come out so it couldn’t draft on the hot trend.
League of Legends is a pet peeve of mine, since one bad person took down DotA forum, stole ideas from it, created LoL, and acted like a big shot. He wasn’t alone, but you know what I mean.
To this day I think that Blizzard hates esports, because they left DotA with 0 support, and only after many years of Dota 2 they created Heroes of the Storm, which was even more watered down than LoL.
And LoL is such a simple game, which is OK, but once you actually understand Dota, it doesn’t come anywhere close. It brought nothing innovative. Which is sad.
Source: I played hundreds of hours, and put hundreds of dollars into LoL back in the ~2010.
Conceptually, LoL filled a hole. DotA was DotA, complicated, hard, lots of nuance. Some people wanted an even more complicated DotA. Heroes of Newerth filled that hole. Some people wanted a simpler DotA. LoL filled that hole.
I personally preferred HoN, but I can’t fault people for preferring LoL.
It's not like gamers are rejecting live services as a whole, because there are still quite a lot of successful live service games. And when a live service is successful, it's really successful. So much so that it's worth it to investors to keep gambling on them, one hit can compensate for a dozen flops.
Usually they don’t completely flop though, they just underwhelm expectations but if they can stay active long enough with the right amount of whales and fish they can usually break even or make a small profit. Concord is just a high profile legitimate flop that was turned off before it could do anything.
Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn’t even launch Hyenas because they realized they’d only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it’s not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn’t need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.
To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it’s a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they’re not the first one of these to market.
This is the truth people don’t want to admit, but Final Fantasy XIV being successful carried square enix through their darkest days when everything wasn’t making a profit. Cygames using all the money they got from the granblue gacha to finance an action rpg and a fighting game, etc.
They serve as a safety net, we lost mimimi last year, I don’t think anyone would say they made bad games, but they just didn’t sell enough so they closed.
Problem with trying to get a Fortnite was that Epic was wanting to get it’s own PUBG after realizing that trying to get their own Minecraft was a failed endeavor. They quickly pivoted the game formula from a Minecraft type tower defense to a battle royale game.
Concord should have seen the writing on the wall early on and pivoted it’s game into something else thats flavor of the month.
Wait wasn’t the original concept for fortnite actually a wave based tower defence game? I remember being excited for that and then battle royal happened and I lost all interest.
Yeah, the original trailer made it clear they were trying to go after the Minecraft style of gathering resources, building up a base and fortifying it, then defending from zombie mobs at night, like the Minecraft mobs.
Maybe not so much the pixel/block graphics, but the ideas behind Minecraft, with an actual objective, which Minecraft lacked.
Yea I recall it being like 20 something. That’s why I never pre-order. Without having poof I would assume they got refunded if it stopped development, it’s epic games. I do recall it did get released eventually but I had lost interest by them.
I was a sucker and my friend convinced me to get and pay for the orginal game. I think it was only like 3-4 weeks after the game was available when they shoehorned battle royal mode in. It wasn’t long after that before they switched to free to play and gave us I think in game currency that was worth the $60 or whatever the game costed at launch. I stopped playing altogether because I paid for a co-op PvE tower defense game, not a free to play PvP battle royal game.
You just made me realise I’m a gamer, not a Fortniter. But I probably should’ve realised that based on my Steam "years of service* and disgustingly large catalogue.
I’m a proven guaranteed money pot, publishers! Make me something good and I give the moneys!
That’s what killed it for me. I really enjoyed the Lawbreakers beta, but paying $30 for a game that would either die at a fixed price or quickly shift to F2P made no sense.
You know what f2p means to me? It means you can play the game for free but the experience is guaranteed to be miserable because you’re going to have relentless ads crammed down your throat for skins and other bullshit I couldn’t give a single fuck about, and no matter how much you pay it never stops.
So if it’s between that and just paying $30 for the game, I’ll take the $30 every time. I avoid f2p games like the plague.
It was originally advertised as f2p, at some point they changed their minds and decided to charge for it, clearly it didn’t go well since people already associated it with free.
So funny when a corpo is forced to seem positive about something where there is absolutely no positive way of spinning it. It has this surreal energy where the person doing PR seems almost uncanny, like some kind of lizard person.
To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there’s some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.
Imagine working years on something and every time leadership has a meeting they keep asking you to add even more bullshit or change some stupid stuff. Must suck to be a game dev, I feel for them.
I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don’t trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it’s typically lies or false claims…or they make cinematic trailers which don’t even represent the game at all because… cinematic.
That can even be a guide to many things like tools, if it’s pricy but has good word of mouth and not heavily advertised (sometimes the biggest expense) then it might just be worth the cash
I don’t think this game even lasted long enough for word of mouth to have popularized it. I didn’t hear about it until it was dead. I am wondering how many players Helldivers 2 had at 11 days (not a great example because it was an existing IP with existing fans). Could they have made it if the game had actually been good? I am not sure. Shutting down super fast got them more publicity than anything else they did.
I’m not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that’s a minority of advertising these days
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
Yeah, they definitely didn’t market it very well, at least to the PC crowd. It seems the PlayStation version is doing much better, with advertisements in the PSN store.
itsnt it some generic looking shooter stuffed with micro-transactions? I really cant fathom why people even care when yet another live service “AAA” “game” gets shat out.
Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must've had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what's technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam's most played with 137k concurrent players).
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