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.
If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.
I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.
Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.
All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.
They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.
The servers will be shut down in a few days.
There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.
Why would you promote a product that does not exist?
Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.
I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).
It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.
It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.
I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.
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.
No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.
If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.
If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.
…
If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…
Who, other than children, do not know this yet?
That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.
It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.
It originated as a marketing term for Skull and Bones, right?
Realistically, its a corporate buzzword that is supposed to mean that the game delivers an exceptionally high quality experience, graphically, narratively, gameplay wise…
…but what it seems to actually mean is that the budget and manhour count and development calendar time ballooned to far greater than the original plan/estimates due to incompetent management.
At this point, I propose that ‘AAAA’ applies to basically any extremely costly game backed by a huge publisher that owns many development studios, that has been in development for over 4 years before any kind of release, ie, stuck in development hell, execs convinced its going to be a massive hit such that they sunken cost fallacy other games or even other studios out of existence so they can keep funding their uber project.
With a definition like this, Skull and Bones qualifies, so does Concord and Suicide Squad.
Basically… it doesn’t have to be from a grandiose marketing campaign attached to a AAA game, its more about being stuck in development hell and continuously funded to the point of destroying other parts of the business making it, like a financial cancer.
If you are attempting to ask which game popularized 3d, third person shooters, then yes, the original Tomb Raider is probably the most early, widely popular game that popularized this.
There were a few BF42 mods that, on certain maps with certain vehicles, allowed you to spawn in vehicles.
IIRC, Forgotten Hope had a number of para-assault maps that allowed players to spawn inside of the aircraft they would parachute out of.
I believe you could also do this in… I can’t remember the name of it, but the Star Wars themed 42 mod (which the BattleFront series either largely copied or was directly inspired by), I think it had some spawn-in-able vehicles as well.
Also BF Vietnam, the official game, used a similar concept of having ‘tunnel exits’ that could be built/placed by Viet Cong engineers, which were placeable spawn points, and the US had the ‘Tango’ … mobile river boat with a helipad thing… which was a mobile spawn point.
I am 99% sure it was BF2 that first introduced being able to spawn on a player, I don’t think any of the mods for the earlier games pulled that off always had to be a vehicle or placeable static object.
DICE hired a few of the DC devs to work on BF2, then promptly laid them all off about 6 months or so after release, and then the laid off devs and others who weren’t hired made Kaos Studios, and made Frontlines: Fuel of War and Homefront, before being corporate acquisitioned into non existence.
Day Z the standalone game was a result of Day Z the mod for Arma 2.
While Day Z (the mod) and Minecraft were in their early phases around the same time (i alpha tested both), I have never heard anyone say that Day Z was inspired by Minecraft, beyond the idea of it being possible for an indie game with a small development team being able to become a huge commercial success.
After years of open beta development the game had a controversial Steam release in March as a pay-to-access game that was otherwise free with their own launcher, now has relaunched as completely free....
Many games on steam are purchasable/downloadable/installed through steam, and then default to opening up whatever launcher the game normally uses.
In some cases you can customize or skip this with an additional parameter on runtime, but for any game that requires you to be … some kind of logged in to the game’s own user management system, usually this does not work, occasionally it can get you banned by the game.
tl:dr; steam probably just launches the gaijin launcher that then launches the game.
Back before my pc was stolen, i tried to play this on linux.
Doesn’t work, is not supported.
Sometime later I got around to watching gameplay vids on YT:
Yep, pay to win as fuck, classic gaijin in the sense that you can technically progress if you play the game like Cartman plays WoW, but the game is designed to make that so frustrating that you cave and start paying.
Tons of bugs with lag and netcode, the AI is basically braindead, issues with clipping through objects and the world. Game balance is basically fucked.
One thing that stuck out was that… when you progress, and purchase uniforms or weapons or what not for your squad… those are not shared amongst your squad members. You have to progress each individual squad member.
And it showed a beautiful new/upgraded engine, introduced some new characters, and revealed absolutely nothing about gameplay, yet this did not stop seemingly tens of thousands of people from pulling whatever their idea of a neat feature is out of their ass and connecting it in the least substantial way possible to some random part of the trailer.
Yeah, the strat to beat them non lethal is basically unload all your massive lethal weaponry on them until they have a tiny bit of health, then tase or tranq or whatever non lethal right at the end.
Which is kind of lame, but it is basically the same as the few similar types of battles in the original Deus Ex, though some of those you can avoid various story paths or outright flee from them.
Out of curiosity… anyone know if it is even possible for Gunther to just not survive Liberty Island without you killing him?
Maybe set up TNT boxes that get shot by enemies as he escapes and blow him up? Or is he just invincible in the first level?
If Labor of Love had to go to a huge project, it should have gone to CyberPunk 2077. The devs had it at least as bad, if not worse, and oh they actually massively significantly improved the game.
Still laughing at anyone who watched Fallout 76 happen then willingly purchased a Bethesda game before two weeks after release to allow for some actual reviews to happen and the hype train to lessen.
Try telling that to a Warthunder player, or League of Legends, or anything like that.
They know the games are ruining their lives but uh sunken cost fallacy.
Its always amazed me that people can become addicted to an actual negative experience that has many negative side effects… but half (more?) The games industry is built on that these days.
Which is basically the same situation as being in an abusive relationship.
And all the people who keep coming back, knowing it will never actually improve, are ultimately deluding themselves in some kind of way, and are too addicted to want to stop, or too immature or stupid to realize that dedicating a ton of time and energy to something that on net lets you down or harms you is not a healthy way to live.
Concord is going offline beginning September 6th (blog.playstation.com) angielski
Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429
Does AAAA just mean awful triple A games now? angielski
It seems the general direction the internet is going and I’m all for it
New Starfield free update added a ground vehicle (lemmy.world) angielski
What games popularized certain mechanics? angielski
I was trying to think of which games created certain mechanics that became popular and copied by future games in the industry....
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Bungie Lays Off Over 200 Employees, Announces Plans For Deeper Integration With Sony - Game Informer (www.gameinformer.com)
WW2 Shooter Enlisted re-launches for free, for real this time, and is met with positive reviews. (store.steampowered.com) angielski
After years of open beta development the game had a controversial Steam release in March as a pay-to-access game that was otherwise free with their own launcher, now has relaunched as completely free....
Rockstar might be bringing GTA+ to Nintendo Switch (wolfsgamingblog.com) angielski
And now you get the bad ending (lemmy.world) angielski
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After 10,000+ hours grinding, MapleStory's first level 300 player slams the brakes at 299.99 to rant about the MMO and then quit, all on a dev-promoted stream (www.gamesradar.com) angielski