55
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An important update on Concord - "At this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024"
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- Title
- An important update on Concord
- Published
- Sep 3 2024
- Word count
- 349 words
I can't help but feel that they just straight bungled the marketing for the launch, because the ONLY thing I heard about it prior to release was that it was lackluster. Not bad, just ho-hum, with nothing to really differentiate it from its competitors. The art style was kind of bland and forgettable, the characterization thin and uninteresting. In fact, the most positive thing I heard was that the gunplay, which players of FPS/team shooters hold up as supposedly their prime concern, was reportedly pretty good.
Mind you, this is what I heard from various media types prior to launch, and aside from the game's aesthetic, which I can confirm is uninspiring, that's ALL I heard. There seemed to be a collective popcorn party waiting for this to fail, and Sony never bothered to get a word in edgewise. If you allow gaming vloggers and influencers to control the narrative around your middling-quality live service game, they will inevitably root for its spectacular implosion. They know that kind of stuff drives engagement, and history shows that predicting the failure of big budget competitive multiplayer games is a statistically safe bet.
I never saw a single ad, article or video that pushed back against this and offered anything positive about the game, but that might be down to targeting. I am not the type of gamer who plays anything competitive, much less MP shooters. I simply don't have the experience necessary to compete at a satisfying level, and don't honestly have desire enough to work to overcome this shortcoming. This means my experience of most competitive shooters goes something like, 1. Spawn two or more minutes away from enemies; 2. get loadout figured out, restock if necessary/applicable; 3. haul my ass to the battlefield; 4. Immediately get shot in the fucking dome by either a bot or some kid on summer break who's spent most of the last 43 hours in a PvP flow state and dirty britches; 5. rinse; 6. repeat. YMWV, of course, but I am not eager to shell out $70 for a fresh flavor of this type of hell.
Thing is, I don't think I'm alone in this. If you look at the surprise early access successes of Palworld and Helldivers 2, I think you can see evidence of a more general rejection of competitive multiplayer games in favor of cooperative titles. This isn't really a new thing, I think, considering the overwhelming popularity of games like Minecraft over the last 15 years, but I think a few standout successes like PUBG, Overwatch 1, and Fortnite, and the relative ease of development for that sort of game, has kind of misled big developers into chasing the success of others instead of taking multiplayer gaming in new directions. The result is a steady stream of "like Overwatch, but less aesthetically pleasing," or "like Fortnite, but a dark tone that's incongruous with the cartoony art style we need in order to sell merch and skins." That's super reductive, I know, but not entirely inaccurate.
This, plus everything afterwards, is exactly how I feel and it generally has to do with age and responsibilities. I'm sure most can echo that. Also your step by step description of the game is spot on lol. I grew up with Counter Strike and when I recently booted it up in some sort of nostalgia, some kid with a reaction speed I'll never be able to overcome biologically quickly reminds me why I shouldn't play these games.
But multiplayer competitive shooters are not at all dead and gone. Counter Strike is still up there in daily players and Valve's new Deadlock is cannibalizing, what I assume, the entire potential Concord player base.
Time is limited and there are only so many live service -let alone competitive with a practice requirement- games people can play in their day to day. I'd extend your argument from just competitive shooters to live service. One or two can hit it big, and the others just fail. They need something special and most games just aren't that.
I agree, and I didn't mean to give the impression I thought otherwise. I do think they are settling into their niche though, and probably won't get quite the same following they've enjoyed going forward. They're fantastic for esports, but that doesn't signify success as a public release. Consider how many people watch professional American football as opposed to how many have actually played it recently.
I also don't know that life responsibilities really factor in as much in people's decisions about what games to play as people make out. To use my own example again, I've never cared a bit about comparing e-peen with other players. It's not that I can't enjoy friendly competition, it's that I've always accepted that there will be people who are better at certain things than I will ever be, and I don't find much of a thrill in competing for 750,000th on a worldwide leaderboard. That informs my game purchasing decisions much more than whatever else I have going on in my life, particularly so because my ability to actually spend the time playing a game has very little to do with whether I buy it, as my extensive library of untouched Steam titles can attest.
I don't think live service is going anywhere for the foreseeable future, but I would like to see some evolution in the paradigm. I want to see more cooperative PvE storytelling experiences, something along the lines of what Baldur's Gate 3 attempted in its multiplayer modes. I want devs to find new ways to limit players' ability to cause grief that don't completely cut out communication from the equation. As much as anything, I want them to find new ways to monetize that don't involve putting players on a never-ending Skinner treadmill, or enticing us to gamble like some greasy weirdo on the corner in a trenchcoat ("find the red queen and win a rare weapon skin!").
Maybe we'll get there eventually. I dunno.
You are ignoring one important factor, matchmaking hell. You start off in lobbies that are more than likely 90% bots. Work your way up until you get some real human games. Then work your way up until each match is basically statistically pre-determined to have a 50/50 win/loss rate.
After that your options are move onto PvP flow state in dirty britches sweat mode to increase your rank until you have to wait 20+ minutes for MM to find you a match; or accept that every match from now until dead gaem will be telegraphed as your 50% loss (or win) match within the first 2 minutes to the point that you don't care anymore because you know there is nothing you can do to affect the outcome besides hook a rubber band over right stick and spin around in circles while you heat up a pork bun because MM has already determined it's your turn to lose (or win) this time.
This feels like a complaint about SBMM. However, OP has stated that they're in the more casual side and getting flattened by experienced players loading in. I suspect 50% win rate from SBMM is quite an improvement over what they would experience otherwise.
It's also not like SBMM puts you in with players with 200 MMR then players with 3000 MMR while you're at 1500 MMR to keep that 50% rate. It just tries to pick teams that are about the same. This doesn't prevent stomps ever happening - people have off games, people deliberately rank their MMR for easy games, etc.
But for a non-SBMM mode to be "easy games on demand" because you're not feeling it, you already need to be in like the 80th percentile of the player base in skill.
It kind of is, but I don't think of myself as a highly skilled no SBMM pub stomper...I just grew up before SBMM was even a thing, so pub stomps were the norm and you got over it (or got really upset at being autobalanced to the losing team near the end of the game).
I play Chivalry 2 fairly frequently, and it runs the old way, you join a server and get what you get. I am usually between the middle and bottom of the scoreboard, and still have fun. Something like Destiny 2 ranked matches are wayyy less fun in comparison because you can tell within 1-2 minutes if your team is going to win or lose....but there's that faint hope that the match might be balanced because of SBMM, except it's all an illusion, and you realize the match was pre-determined. You just had 3 wins, now you need to have some losses to keep everything in balance.
Without it you have that slight chance of getting a balanced match on the very rare occasion that one team is not stacked, and you really don't know what the outcome will be. Those rare instances of uncertainty are way more entertaining, and make up for the obvious wins/losses from stacked teams, than the powerless feeling you get from every pre-determined SBMM match.
All of this is just IMO.
I think we need way more ridiculously chaotic multiplayer games like Battlefield, PlanetSide 2, and Chivalry 2 so that casual players can just have fun. I think the focus on small team/squad based games that can potentially lead to professional e-sports leagues is killing the fun of online PvP games. I think this is another reason Helldivers 2 did so well, not just that it was co-op PvE, but also that it's a hilariously chaotic game, it's hard to take it too seriously, and thus hard to not just have fun.
Sorry for the wall of text.
It's a bit odd hearing myself described as "casual" in a gaming context, considering the huge percentage of my life I've spent playing games, but you're not wrong, at least not when it comes to competitive shooters. I tend to prefer using a controller when playing shooters generally, if that tells you anything.
This is my lack of experience showing. I knew this was a thing, but because I avoid competitive multiplayer games like I avoid swift forceful impacts to the balls, it didn't occur to me.
I guess this is a point in cooperative games' favor, because skill mismatches, while still a concern, are much less impactful on player experience. It sucks to get paired with someone who's put 5,000 hours into a game and blasts through a cooperative challenge like they're on the main stage at AGDQ, giving you no time to get immersed in the experience, but the mismatch in skill levels can be much wider before it becomes a real issue. That's something that developers can influence to a greater degree as well.
As for the marketing (or rather: advertising, marketing would also be done before production), it’s a multiplier for what is there. How do you advertise a game that is not good? You‘d literally mislead players, which goes well until the first actual customer gets to play it, at which point the story is now how the advertising was misleading.
Advertising is making sure that as many people as possible know how good the game is. In many ways this game has gone viral in how well the gaming scene knows it. They just know that it is bad.
Notably, this game was released about a month and a half ago, on July 18th. Kinda crazy to see especially from a major publisher.
Edit: Sorry, apparently it only launched 2 weeks ago? I haven't been paying attention to the game but that makes it even crazier.
Eight years, tens of thousands of man hours and millions of dollars down the drain, just to "jump" on a trend. And yet they cancelled The Last of Us multiplayer, which was likely almost infinitely more anticipated than this. What a waste.
When I heard about this being a flop after 8 years of development, then remembered the years of hype for Last of Us Factions 2 that ended up being shelved, it makes me think of all the great single player games (that Sony's known for!) that we could've gotten for all that effort. Instead of some new IP that could've been the new Last of Us, or a sequel to a beloved series, we got... nothing at all. They could've had multiple GOTY candidates with the combined dev time wasted on those 2 games.
Live service games just make a fuckton of money with crazy profit margins. Big GOTY AAA releases do numbers, but they pale in comparison to Fortnite.
Yea, but then you also have to be better than Fortnite.
Fortnite has solid gunplay, a constant churn of new first-class IP skins, a destructabile and buildable world with modding and custom game possibilities. Its crossplay across every platform other than iOS now. It's a walking meme factory and is easily watchable/streamable.
Even as I am irritated by it, studios would be foolish to think they can yank the crown from Fortnite without monumental effort.
It's a large enough effect I could see a world where kids end up choosing Android over iOS purely for mobile Fortnite.
Not to say that nobody should try...I'd very much appreciate something fresh and better....but expectations need to be set accordingly, and it needs to be a solid, bug-free gameplay loop with a fresh hook from day 0 if there's any hope of success.
Also Fortnite didn’t start as the fortnite they have now. It was a fluke accident. Decidedly not planned lightning in a bottle.
Just adding onto what you said. Fornite is possibly the most successful pivot in gaming history, and it's the one-in-a-thousand case that jumping on a trend for the sake of it actually paid off. It was supposed to be a PvE coop game, and I remember seeing ads for the coop tower defense mode when it first came out. But then just a few months before the game was set to go into early access, PUBG came out and became a success, and so they made a Fortnite battle royale mode. They just happened to have built the perfect foundation for the next big trend which they had no way of anticipating while working on a completely different game concept for the past six years.
It's not something you can plan for. The original elevator pitch for Fortnite was "Minecraft meets Left 4 Dead". If the BR subgenre hadn't exploded in popularity at that exact time, the game would probably be remembered as exactly that, a moderately successful coop survival game with a cutesy art style.
No one could seriously expect to outshoot Fortnite (someone will, but no one should expect to.) But you don't have to be the bigger planet to orbit, you simply have to have enough mass that you don't slingshot away.
Simple truth is this: even when a giant dominates a field, you can still succeed without truly competing, you just have to have a strong enough design to be reminiscent. Concord... didn't.
I mean, you’re not wrong, but this is the kind of thinking that gives us endless rehashed sequels instead of fresh new ideas. Obviously Sony made some missteps here, but I appreciate that they took a risk with something new instead of revisiting the franchise well.
A Guardians of the Galaxy themed Overwatch clone, and a sequel to The Last of Us 1 multiplayer, were fresh ideas that took a risk doing something new? That's the opposite of what Concord was, and for TLOU2 multiplayer I guess we'll never now how good it would've been.
I was saying instead of doing "safe bet" games, they could've made a new IP, which could've grown to be a new poster child for them like The Last of Us was when that first came out, or revitalized a beloved series (in a good way, not a lazy sequel way) like they did for God of War 2018. GOTY material single player games can be sequels or new IP, and Sony has done both very well, and done it recently.
After all of the money that went down the drain chasing WoW's success back in the day, one might think that game studios would've figured out by now that spending vast amounts on chasing trends, particularly for titles with huge ongoing costs, is a losing proposition but I suppose they haven't.
In fairness, it was reported that one of the reasons they shelved the Last of Us factions game was because Naughty Dog would have had to morph into a one game studio that just supported it. I'm happy the game was cancelled so we can continue to get great games from them.
That’s the thing with publishers chasing “safe” trends: If a game taking 8 years to build is the new normal, you’re almost guaranteed to miss the trend by release.
Worse: They probably don’t even understand why a certain type of game is popular. It’s probably both a fresh idea and excellent execution. Sometimes you can jump in within a year or two and do outdo something with extra production levels or audience appeal (see PUBG being followed by Fortnite). But random generic hero shooter XY won’t cut it. Nobody has been waiting for that.
I’m currently looking at Valve’s Deadlock and honestly think they’ll probably have another Artifact on their hands.
I don't see the connection. What makes you say that?
Bad rollout and bad monetization strategy killed Artifact.
Deadlock monetization strategy is unknown for now, but 100% Valve will go with the same proven one they run in Dota2 and CS - that is F2P + cosmetics. It works there, it will work for Deadlock.
Deadlock just looks so generic. I really hope it fails, it would be really tragic if it doesn’t. Valve still hoards a ton of design talent, it’s painful to think of them being stuck with rehashing the same idea for eternity.
The original Last of Us multiplayer was very good, but that was a different studio, right? Dunno how it would work funding wise for stuff like that, but I feel like ND probably just didn't want to work on it.
I'd like to propose "the Concord" as a unit of time for measuring the lifespan of a live-service game. Much like the Mooch to measure executive-branch appointments, the Concord is a very small unit of measure - a mere 15 days. Destiny 2 has been running for 170.27 Concords and FFXIV has 268.33 Concords (that's post-ARR relaunch - a caveat that sounds like maybe should be relevant for this game)
I'd like to point out the irony of a fortnight already being a unit of time (a mere 14 days), yet Fortnite has been out for 173.4 Concords with no signs of slowing!
How many The Day Befores in a Concord?
The Day Before lasted 3 Concords.
Oh that's right, the company lasted less time than the game. I thought the game was canned in four or so days but it was just the company.
Hah, I like this idea.
I'm pretty shocked that they're effectively unreleasing the game after launch. Previous titles like Cyberpunk 2077 paused sales because the game was unplayable on some consoles, but that's not the case here. There is no fatal flaw, no gamebreaking bug, no terrible optimization or port. I don't think they can "fix" a game like this, it's just a poorly timed bland product.
I'm willing to bet Concord gets a free to play release in a couple of months, with a new marketing campaign. Their weekly update model will be canned and they will double down on monetizing in-game purchases until Sony makes their investment back. After 6 to 8 months Sony will lay off most of the studio, with a skeleton crew running the store until they shut down the game for good in another year or two.
I feel heartbroken for the people who put together this game. I haven't played it, but by all accounts there could have been something there given more time or better management.
I don't know what happened here but it just reeks of management meddling and FOMO. The $40 entry price was ridiculous in this segment and I assume they thought it would work because Helldivers 2 pulled it off. The weird Walmart guardians of the galaxy vibe turned people that knew about it off.
A reminder that when you have a team of people you have a responsibility to them to use their time well. How the hell do you list this on a resume?
Well... I disagree. From what I've seen of the game, it didn't really have anything to make it stand out. There wasn't 1 nugget of a good idea that was buried by corporate meddling, it seems like corporate just picked what was popular in 2016 and said "do that." If it had better management, it would've been an entirely different game. To make it not just perform "ok" but to actually be successful long term, it probably needed an art direction rework with better character designs and a gameplay rework to have some kind of unique draw. Even then, hero shooters just ended up being a much more bloated market by the time they finished this game than when they started. I doubt there's much room for any more, as there's only so many hours in a day for gamers to invest into live service games. I bet the only reason people care about Deadlock is because it's an actual new non-VR game and new IP from Valve of all companies.
In terms of having more time, it already had too long of a dev cycle to be honest. When this game started development, the Switch was only known as the "NX" and the PS4 was younger than the PS5 is now. I don't think more time in the oven would've helped anything.
Deadlock pulled in something like 15+ times Concord's 600-person active players figure while specifically dissuading people from giving it attention, though. I'm not crazy about it, but I try it again every now and then because my friends have been playing it nonstop. For like a month straight. There's a bit more than the Valve stamp going on.
The fact that Concord released while Deadlock did this is comical to me; here's the exact negative of Deadlock - an unproven studio with tons of money dumped into it, trying to polish this game for 8 years, receiving nothing but bad press, with little appeal to anyone in particular, asking you to pay $40 to be in a club that you may not like and may be skilled out of, in a sea of competing competitive shooters. The hubris and incompetence from management are astounding. Deadlock may be Valve, but it's still an alpha product with giant matchmaking flaws and continuing redesigns. And yet it's still addicting, it requires ZERO monetary consideration right now nor any concessions to F2P design, and it has clever aesthetic design that people are latching onto.
Deadlock currently lists an all-time peak of 171,490 players, that's 285 times Concord's 600.
15+ is still technically correct though. 🙂
I heard somewhere between 10k-15k before the pseudo-NDA broke, but uh. Yeah. Jesus Christ.
Damn, knew this was going to go poorly for Sony but I didn't think they'd just shut it down outright. Hopefully they're just taking it down temporarily so they can relaunch it after a proper marketing campaign with more success. I still wouldn't buy it since I'm just not interested in hero shooters right now, but I'm sure there's a decent audience of disgruntled Overwatch players that Sony failed to capture due to basically nobody even knowing the game existed.
I'm not so sure, I'm sure there's a bunch of disgruntled OW players that hopped onto other games, it feels like hero shooters are just super oversaturated right now, with Marvel Heroes coming in soon, Deadlock and Valorant all trying to take a slice of the pie.
Deadlock honestly feels more like a 3rd person dota than hero shooter. Its much closer to smite than OW.
Valorant is way more tactical shooter than hero shooter. It's basically Counter-Strike with some Overwatch-lite flavoring.
Deadlock leans very heavily into MOBA gameplay, enough that I think it will appeal more to MOBA fans than Overwatch fans.
Meanwhile Overwatch is actually doing really well the last few seasons. I think the time to take Overwatch's crown was last year when the game's reputation was at its worst.
Unreal. They actually have the balls to take it down, cut their losses and run. I didn't think they'd have it in them and would stiff upper lip this until they couldn't anymore and quietly pull it when nobody was watching. But no, full refunds too. Good on Sony for recognizing what's up.
The game had like 60 players on Steam a week after launching. It was over before it began.
I’m still playing The Finals while everyone fights over hero shooters 🤷