Concord's Death Cost Sony Dearly.

[@Voltaic_Fire]

Can't blame them, Concord cost so much that it would bankrupt a small town.

[@SimuLord]

Concord cost so much that it would make the Chicago Tribune run an editorial about wasting gobs of money. And given Chicago's level of civic governance, that's saying something!

[@TheTallGuy1992]

small town? Under stating that! The cost of Concord ($200 million confirmed) was almost as must as a number of poorer nations GDP, not including advertisement (rumoured to cost another $200 Million). It's ridiculous how much was spent for something nobody wanted.

[@onlypho]

Small town ? Do you even how much much are 200-400 million

[@SimuLord]

@@TheTallGuy1992 According to the CIA World Factbook, Liechtenstein has a GDP of approximately $7.4 billion USD. Luxembourg clocks in at $82 billion and grew, even adjusting for inflation, by over a billion US dollars in 2022 alone. Even South Sudan, with a per capita GDP less, by a significant margin, than what I've already made in salary this week through 22 hours of work in Seattle, has a nominal GDP of $7 billion USD. As bad as Concord was, "GDP of a poorer nation's GDP" (or even a microstate's nominal GDP) is still way higher. I leave it to the reader to decide whether this means countries are richer than we realize or whether the US dollar has lost all its value and numbers are meaningless in 2024. And that's before we even consider that the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have nearly an order of magnitude more money in their personal fortune than Concord cost to make.

[@YourBlackLocal]

@@TheTallGuy1992 You have no understanding of money if you think an entire nations GDP would be $200 million...

[@TurtleChad1]

All 10 people who wanted Concord back are heartbroken

[@SimuLord]

I think you're being a bit generous with your population-size estimate there. I think a convicted Saudi Arabian thief could still count the number of people who want Concord back on his hands.

[@steel5897]

You'd be surprised at how many redditors suddenly came out of the woodwork to express their wish for the game to come back. It's almost like Overwatch 2 PvE, there's this weird fascination people have for cancelled stuff that they can't have, they suddenly want it. It becomes good when they can't play it, it's hilariously irrational.

[@SimuLord]

@@steel5897 I'm going to take your reply as a sign that my efforts to excise the stupidity-laced parts of the Internet from my consciousness are doing well. Because I never gave half a second's thought to Reddit when cracking my joke.

[@strikeforcealpha9343]

Ten??!?!

[@olencone4005]

Maybe they should have done a better job at their job then.

[@SteamedToast]

So tired of companies burning billions of dollars, hundreds of studios, wasting IPs, and creating a game drought in the desperate crusade to reinvent fortnite.

[@nicholasvogel9783]

strangely I was more reminded of Unreal Tournament 3 (a game while also harmed it's IP) from concord then fortnite

[@TheOneFlyron]

There are plenty of new games if you know where to look. But yeah, for AAA… tough luck.

[@SteamedToast]

@@TheOneFlyron for sure, and indie is the last refuge for the spirit of gaming, but indie is limited in its own ways. Its just sad to see these companies squander so much potential when you think of how vibrant and varied gaming was 20 years ago before innovation was priced out by reeiculous dev costs and profit expectations.

[@size15shoeswinkwink]

Imagine if you were a big investor with money on the line, how tired would you be then? lol

[@jellyface401]

I remember when they tried it with Call of Duty. It was a way cheaper endeavour.

[@Henlak-]

There was no way the concord studio could stay open. Every game they made from here on out would be toxic as all articles would say "THE STUDIO THAT MADE CONCORD ARE MAKING A NEW GAME" which would put people off instantly.

[@Gaze73]

Are you saying the modern audience is not big enough to support a modern studio? xD

[@arthurtwa]

It is true. There is no way any studio could recover from being the absolute worse failure of AAA gaming in history.

[@1ProAssassin]

@@arthurtwa Nowhere to go but up from there. Gamers tend to be very forgetful.

[@rafinery576]

Videogames used to take couple of years to make, you paid once for them and they were just better. It has to come back. I'm already disinterested in Marathon, expecting being pestered by cosmetic store and battle pass crap ad nauseam. 100% done with this garbage.

[@padtrick]

on top of that. they will offer some sort of dlc's which they later "vault" (in my eye's stealing) from you. after they started vaulting content, i paid in destiny 2. i abandon that scam game.

[@guiorgy]

Then just ignore the double and triple A bull sh*t, there are plenty of amazing indie and small studio games to never get bored

[@floorpizza8074]

Yup. They have totally enshitified what made the original Marathon so good. Just adding modern graphics to the original game was all that was needed. And yes, I did play the original when it came out on Macintosh; I'm that old.

[@SimuLord]

@@guiorgy Depends on where you draw the AA line. My Time at Sandrock had a $12 million USD budget, pretty firmly in AA territory, and was my 2023 Game of the Year. Likewise, Medieval Dynasty had some pretty decent AA money behind it (thanks to German publisher Toplitz) and it just gets better and better three years after it came out of Early Access (and was, again, my Game of the Year) in 2021.

[@andyespinozam]

Don’t forget fairgames 😅

[@space.raider.2271]

Corporations really need to accept that the whole focus group and wider audience shtick will never produce the desired results.

[@scaper12123]

They won't. They are too blind to how games are made, too mired in corporate mindsets.

[@SimuLord]

Any company that still thinks focus groups are worth anything should be shown the Simpsons Funzo episode on loop. Or the Poochie episode.

[@fastestdraw]

I mean, I think focus groups have a role. Market research is useful, its just that when you use it to avoid responsibility for important decisions it sucks. Most of the time 'lets do a study' is a delaying and responsibility diffusion tactic, not an actual investigation followed by real 'reputation on the line' strategic or creative decision.

[@OG_McLovin]

If you develop a system to reliably predict consumer trends, there are several billion dollars waiting for your pocket.

[@ukbuddhist]

Corps make profit. Not games, not culture, just profit. They are not in business to make epic experiences, they are there to only make profit. Everytime you buy a Sony product you are encouraging these bad behaviours.

[@GELTONZ]

I love that the company is literally called "Probably Monsters". Yes. They probably are.

[@XBluDiamondX]

They're business model sounds pretty shady. They put together a team, develop some half-assed slop, then sell it to some sucker of a publisher. That way, they don't have to suffer the consequences of a flop of a game.

[@bulkvanderhuge9006]

You'd think that CEos and Game Devs would learn that when the public says "NO, WE DON'T WANT THAT GAME!" that they would listen and NOT make the game, instead of telling us all to "BE QUIET YOU WILL LIKE THIS GAME", and then waste millions when nobody buys it.

[@jamescousins9216]

Unfortunately, the only public that gets asked for input on games are… people who’ve never played video games, or even people who came up in the industry. It’s just professional executives and investors, the people who don’t see any artistic or creative content in their products. Just revenue, costs, and profit. We’re just the inconvenient middle man between the bank accounts and their C-suite bonuses. The Live Service model sounds like the perfect investment vehicle to the business class. They have no understanding of deeper relationships in video games or the intricacies of video game development. This is like asking someone who doesn’t know anything about manufacturing quality being put in charge of making airplanes.

[@bearstrike]

People don't know what they want

[@Vulcanfaux]

Sustainable Financials? Then they better start making games that are under 50 million again.

[@yingkouzen]

Game developers who have good technical skills would need to be compensated enough for their contributions but the pen pushers & executives would want salaries as high or higher as an ego tripped. Therefore the salary costs alone are hard to be contained in a AAA company setting

[@stephenmeinhold5452]

before you go ahead with any product/project you have to have interest in it thats rule one and they cant even get that right?

[@chaadlosan]

Marathon has nothing to do with "Marathon" it's DOA.

[@Svafne]

Sure seems that way.. No one should buy this until it's been released and reviewed.

[@augustday9483]

Marathon (the classic FPS series from the 90s) deserves better than this.

[@RNvidcast]

​@@chaadlosan totally agree. Why a PvP extraction shooter? Who really wants that? There is a gap in the market for a pve looter shooter though as the current market leader has gone seriously downhill 😂

[@haramotozero7316]

@@RNvidcast Live service monetization, obviously

[@todesziege]

Halo was much more similar to old Marathon than this new one seems to be.

[@Svafne]

I have _extremely_ low expectations of Marathon, it's set to be another live service shooter right? Probably won't fail quite as hard as Concord, but I wouldn't make any bets.

[@xXYannuschXx]

The trailer for Marathon looked absolutely amazing; but the amount of dissappointment I felt when I saw that it was another PVP game...

[@Morflow_]

Sony's tax filing for this year could go down in CPA history as one of the most insane filings of all time. The tax write-off fandom must be going craaazy right now

[@SimuLord]

NGL, as an accounting professional I do get a kick out of reading particularly interesting income statements from big companies, because it is an absolute hoot to try and parse how they're hiding the bad news or trying to do accounting tricks. My capstone case study at Nevada-Reno in 2012 was Electronic Arts, around the same time Riccitiello's career was imploding (well, for certain values of "imploding"-any dev using Unity probably wants to smack me right about now), and THAT was a fun project. My professor had worked for Boston Consulting Group before going into academia and even he referred to my conclusions as "a very interesting turnaround candidate." (vulture capitalist-speak for "maybe I should call my friends in private equity.")

[@wingn3849]

You know what else cost $200 million to make? Elden Ring. Sony could have easily funded a new AAA Soulslike 🤦

[@damonullerick6572]

The thing is, even IF Concord was good and had found moderate success (which let's be honest here, that's the best it ever could have hoped for, seeing as good hero shooters are a dime-a-dozen) it _STILL_ would have been an absolute catastrophe. With a $200 million dollar budget, you have to sell copies by the literal shipping container-load to have a hope of breaking even, let alone making a profit! On that note... why did this game cost $200 million? I'm still scratching my head over that one. Looking at big-budget games from yesteryears, none of them come CLOSE to that number, even with inflation, and those games were far more ambitious in what they tried to do. Bioshock? Cost about $25 million. Halo 3? $60 million- and half that was purely marketing, so simply _making the game_ only cost $30 million. Final Fantasy 7 OG? $45 million excluding marketing, because Sony foot the bill on the marketing, Square didn't have to pay a dime of that. Just... what the actual fuck? Concord was a HERO SHOOTER for fuck's sake, a genre that should not cost as much as they spent on it!

[@wintermute5974]

It's been nearly a decade and a half since the youngest of those games was made. The number of people involved in any big budget game has expanded enormously since then as people's expectations for things like graphics have increased. For example, God of War Ragnarok also cost 200 million.

[@rodrigobogado8756]

​@@wintermute5974nah, it just bad project management plus money laundering

[@nathangamble125]

"E.T." for the Atari 2600, regarded as one of the greatest video game flops in history, cost around $25-30 million to develop (most of that was a licensing fee) which is equivalent to about $100 million today, and sold around 2 million copies. E.T. cost half as much and sold almost *100x* as many units as Concord. "Big Rigs: over the road racing", which was developed by an obscure indie company called "Stellar Stone", released in a pre-alpha state with non-functional AI, and is widely regarded as the worst video game in history, sold a similar number of units as Concord. Concord is a disaster of completely unprecedented proportions.

[@jellyface401]

Just like Warner with Barman V Superman . Are the game studios becoming Movie studios? 😅

[@VarenvelDarakus]

exept that kind of style not sells as much games but ingame purchases , 5-10% of players contribute to 95% of microtransactions revenue , these players spend thousants if not ten thousants on single game , herd stories of even 60k they want to tap into that , but gaming industrty hit brick wall several years ago , players ran out , you herd me , all gamers who play game already got their games they play , medioker games wont sell , live service games have to be good or noone going to "stop playing games they are already playing to play it" yet alone buy it live service game market is so saturated now i dont think if fortnite relesed today if it would even break even on development. but like every corporation they would rather lose it all , then relese good game players want. and these companies not relese good games anymore.

[@ogun6464]

Sony continues to watch Microsoft fumble and respond with "hold my beer." If I had been a ps4 owner I'd be pissed to have bought a ps5. It's looking like it's back to a decade of PC

[@juliothom2408]

Microsoft ain’t fumbling like Sony is. Certainly not in the money department. MS is shaking tons of money out of Sony players’ pockets with COD.

[@steel5897]

PC has gotten better and better. In this age of console games looking like ass thanks to FSR and running at terrible framerates, you can get pristine image quality and high framerates on PC and basically every single game that comes out is better on PC. Do it!

[@polonight1]

As a PS5 owner who picked up the console due to missing out on the PS4, I honestly can say I have little interest in getting a PS6 next generation with the utter lack of games. Picked one up from fond memories of my PS2, but there just isn't the experimental titles that the PS2 and everything just gets ported to PC anyways. Plus, I'm just not that good or interested in shooters which narrows the field drastically for me. Feels like I wasted my money a little. Only console I find value in is my Switch really.

[@ogun6464]

@@juliothom2408 with respect, that's a lot of recency bias. MS has fumbled this entire generation until now, Sony had the lead until they went full brain off. But fair, I forgot that CoD matters to a lot of people.

[@bradbradson4543]

Moving from PS4 to switch was the best gaming decision

[@Lanthirrhos]

Gotta love how Xbox/Microsoft was driving itself down the drain, and all Sony had to do was stay the course with their single player line up... instead they decided to dive head first into the toilet to race xbox down the drain.

[@cormoran2303]

Firewalk Studio. The developer so bad they took another developer out with them.

[@XBluDiamondX]

Probably for the better. Not sure why Sony thought tapping a mobile game dev studio to make a live-action looter shooter was going to be a roaring success.

[@LiftandCoa]

@@XBluDiamondX hmm... i can see the logic behind that decision. Gaming gets increasingly mobile-fied so IG they though they getting in experts.

[@collaterale1]

​@@XBluDiamondXIronically, said mobile game studio never even produced one.

[@kharmachaos667]

I'm willing to bet that marathon followed very closely in concord's footsteps, and that is why they did not put out a demo/gameplay. It does NOT take so much time as they have taken to build gameplay and graphics enough to make gameplay footage.

[@size15shoeswinkwink]

How many of those fired people were the executives who thought this game process was a winning formula?

[@tiagocosmos]

And nothing of value is lost. Except, you know, the money Sony burned on this.

[@O-D-X]

And the jobs of 200+ people.

[@Mark-nh7zg]

Sony will pass the cost of this to the consumer. Expect to see more aggressive monetization in the next coming years.

[@tiagocosmos]

​@@Mark-nh7zg I'm not a consumer of theirs, I'm on PC so I'll be dandy

[@thacoolest13]

@@O-D-X unfortunate but that’s what happens after this kind of disaster. Studios don’t typically bounce back from that

[@argnator]

And all the projects they did not fund due to this tumor existing.

[@interdictr3657]

that colour palette for marathon hurts my eyes

[@LornRoberts]

I don't think Concord could have been salvaged without spending years and tons of money - better to incorporate the assets into IP not named Concord.

[@tasa4904]

I'm thinking that that was bounced around and then discarded. The background assets likely can be remade or pulled from other games because this game wasn't around long enough for people to pick out the odd ones. The characters were deliberately made ugly. Unless Sony wants to take another shot in the dark, they have to be reworked at the very least. The only asset you can probably keep is the map, and I heard that the map designs weren't great either.

[@Akrymir]

This is why Jim Ryan -was fired- "retired" at the 1 yard line before all his efforts as CEO bore fruit. Sony saw the writing on the wall well before it happened, but it was still too late and they didn't really have a choice but to try and sell what was made.

[@SimuLord]

Jim Ryan's exit was after Earnest Byner fumbled the ball and before the Broncos picked it up (apologies to any longtime Cleveland Browns fans who may be reading this.)

[@Folutu]

And unfortunately it seems that the new CEO will continue the fumblage.

[@jellyface401]

The crazy thing is that he was scared of Microsoft would defeat them in the service space.

[@Akrymir]

@@Folutu Oddly enough it's 2 CEOs. Herman Hulst is handling the gaming/studio side of things and a I believe the CFO is taking over the business side of things. I'm guessing they planned of having more time to groom Herman before Jim's departure, so instead they got someone with more experience in that side of the business until he's ready.

[@RedRabbit-ZA]

Herman Hulst is the worst thing that has ever happened to PlayStation lol. Even worse than Lyin' Jim Ryan.

[@dnakatomiuk]

It's why I believe Andrew House, Shawn Layden left Sony they saw what was going to happen and split, they also didn't get how after a great PS4 run they want to duck it all up with the PS5 plan.

[@SimuLord]

Hulst should buy an NFL team. He'd fit right in among owners like David Tepper and Jimmy Haslam. I pity the poor fans of whatever team he'd end up owning in that scenario though.

[@Barbaroossa]

I agree. He needs to be sent back to Guerrilla with a mandate to take a couple of years break from not-Far Cry and give us a new Killzone game.

[@OhNoTheFace]

Yesm blame the market, not the crappy game made by committee

[@alderoth01]

The problem is video games feeling like a mandatory HR video you have to watch after getting hired at a new job instead of being a video game with relatable dialogue/situations. People don't like to be preached at, but they do like learning. Keep human resources put of the dialogue and games like concord will do better.

[@Skrallizar]

Investors, CEOs and other people in charge LOVE the dream of the next OW2 or Fortnite, and they keep chasing that dream because they themselves will never face the consequences of it. Many of them KNOW infinite growth is a myth, but finding the limit is what they're after, at which point they'll take a golden parachute out of problems they created and repeat the cycle. I hope AAA games crash, but I don't want the groundfloor devs to suffer for it either.

[@rodrigobogado8756]

Btw that's why things like The Day Before existed, they literally scammed investors by promising a super revolutionary game. I would never understand who those people just blindly throw money at empty promises without even knowing who the industry works. A similar thing will probably happen with Star Citizen

[@SenkaZver]

​@@rodrigobogado8756star citizen is different since it was crowdfunded, not privately invested. They could walk away more easily at this point but they have more incentive to finish and will probably get close to something. Day Before did the bare minimum to pass the private investor deal requirement and dipped. It was legal fraud lol

[@balsalmalberto8086]

Here's a little secret. They won't have to worry about infinite growth if they're dead.

[@Doggieman1111]

Marathon Is going to be yet another piece of sh*t, if it's ever released at all.

[@SimuLord]

I said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. The funniest part of this entire catastrophe has been just how hilariously everyone and their sister is comically missing the point. Sony comically missed the point when they thought a generic live-service hero shooter would sell in 2024. Firewalk Studios comically missed the point when they completely failed to deliver any compelling characters or hooks that would sell the game-it was like Bizarro World Overwatch. And the Internet comically missed the point because DEI is a red herring that distracts from serious discussion of the actual merits (or lack thereof) of a piece of media.

[@CorruptedDogg]

robot with pronoun

[@bwhere45]

How can you both hit and miss the point about what DEI does in the same sentence? Peak sped behavior.

[@Denkmaldrubernacht]

@@bwhere45 people would call new Vegas DEI filled if it released now because it has gay and lesbian characters lmao

[@wolfvermillion1729]

@@SimuLord DEI is just as valid a point of criticism and valid a reason for someone to choose not to purchase a given piece of entertainment as anything else. Older games, particularly older RPGs, had plenty of well written and interesting characters of all stripes, such as Garr or Momo from Breath of Fire 3 to Agrias and Ovelia from Final Fantasy Tactics, to even Catiua, Canopus and even Ravness from the PSP release of Tactics Ogre.

[@BlackWingGenesis]

I don't know why people like you bury their heads in the sand and keep saying that "DEI" had nothing to do with it. Hero games like these live and die by their character designs and this game had AWFUL characters that tried to be as inclusive as possible, making them all look unappealing. That's not all that DEI does, it also influences their hiring practices, they wanted a "diverse" staff, which means far left activists and complete beginners to the industry, I'm sure most of the team wasn't made out of of "ex bungie and cod veterans". These people don't care about making good games, they just want to push agendas, and no one can tellthem "no", and this is the end result.

[@LifeWulf]

Btw Bellular I’ve noticed a common mistake in the thumbnails. You want “its” not “it’s” for possessive. Apostrophe is for contracting “it is”.

[@JailBo-id7ko]

You also use the apostrophe for possesives.

[@LifeWulf]

@ Not for “it’s” vs “its”

[@BeamMonsterZeus]

@@JailBo-id7ko Possessives* - the irony

[@mechanical_chaos]

If only they could have predicted. If only they had gotten just a little feedback over the years from their players telling them they didn't want this game. If only they hadn't turned off comments on social media posts about the game because of how much hate it was getting. If only they didn’t have game reps openly insulting their playerbase in posts because they knew players didn’t like their game. If only there had been ANY way to forsee that this game would be poorly received all the years leading up to its release. Poor Sony, what a blindsiding. 😢

[@IRMentat]

The more that companies pander to exclusively sub percentile non-buyers while actively letting their public facing employees aggressively upon the mainline gaming population the more times the failures like Concorde will pile up. Nothing of value was lost. Not to the core gamers at least and not to the casuals either.

[@MoreImbaThanYou]

How can gambling on the next big live service be a "sustainable" endeavour?

[@MrBaskins2010]

Live services are cool if you’re young with time and money. People working full time jobs with families want narrative driven games that don’t require constant internet connection. The always online requirement ignores large chunks of the United States (the Midwest in particular)

[@SuperZura91]

Eh, there's plenty of old people that work and dump a lot of money into live services and other bad monetization tactics. There's only so much money young people have, and it's way more likely for a working person to drop money on a game just to keep up. Source: I have friends who work and dropped a lot of money into live services such as Heartstone, Wow, Apex. The problem with live service games is, that these people won't have the time, as you said, but the one thing I want to add is that they don't have the time for more than 1-2 games to dump money in. Live service games are fighting over whales pretty much.

[@TrackMediaOnly]

No, there were a lot of bad ingredients. When a stew is bad it isn't like if you take the pieces out so it is no longer a "stew" it will suddenly be good. If there were actually enough good pieces of the stew something could have been salvaged, but Sony finally saw, what many of us already did, that the greater portion was bad and threw the whole thing out.

[@r.awilliams9815]

Good. I'm glad that Sony takes the big L on this, I despise that company. I haven't forgotten them trying to rootkit everyone's PC back in 2005.

[@ThatsMrMaxHeadroomToYou]

Except they aren't "taking a big L bruh". They're relaunching it next year as a freemium live service funded by microtransactions. Sorry to disappoint you "bruh".

[@miken3963]

Sony is shutting down the studio. So no more development and no launching it as free to play.

[@ThatsMrMaxHeadroomToYou]

So you truly believe that after a multi-national corporation dumps $500M into it, only to constantly update the game's repositories and test builds on Steam since it was removed early September in order to quote; "explore options, including those that will better reach our players." they're just done with it? Also, whilst they only just updated the commercial licence only nine days ago, you genuinely are dense enough to believe that the whole project is going to be just flushed down the toilet by Sony execs? Wake up and smell the coffee mate, it might bring you back to reality...

[@r.awilliams9815]

@@ThatsMrMaxHeadroomToYou Source? Show me where Sony said they're bringing it back free/microtransactions. Go on, I'll wait.

[@extra4542]

@@ThatsMrMaxHeadroomToYouno dude, the game is permanently closed. The free beta only had like 2300 players for gods sake, why would they waste more money upkeeping the game and its servers. People don’t want that trash

[@EastyyBlogspot]

Funny thing during the Marathon talk they said something along the lines of " We do not want to give to much away" ....ermm why ? lol giving something away might be a start

[@Surkk2960]

In order to sell something, it's kind of important to... you know... show what you are trying to sell.

[@GTTB-227]

This proof that if people not give a crap and not engaging it will effectively kill the said product. This also applies for public figure. So if you don't like a product or a public figure, start speaking with your money and don't give it any attention whatsoever, that's how it should be anyways.

[@claytondora]

"Game Director took on blame to shield the team." - Bellular. Wow, what a sport. Wait...

[@zeeochance]

Bioware should be next on the chopping block. If developers want to keep catering to the bottom one percent of gamers and a mythical audience that doesn't exist, then they deserve to fail.

[@Marbeary]

This industry is brutal if you don't make sales, you get shutdown. What is weird these studios are not listening to their customers and just ignore everything so in return the customers ignore them, and we go back to you don't make sale you get shut down.

[@VarenvelDarakus]

i hate to be this guy but only indie devs do and not alweys , averige AA or AAA starts from market reserch and then they try making game who makes most money on predictions. , source: i studied game development , this was already standard in 2016 , today big thing is "live service overwatch/fornite/destiny" so every AAA game in past 6 years is that with exeptions of established frenchise , ask yourself what other game in past 8 years , who is not existing frenchise sequel you seen who is not that i mentioned? and even when they relese something , its slop like that new starwars game , who plays worse then aa game.

[@Sayrden]

9:15 Okay, when he said "Probably Monsters" for the first time, I legitimately thought he was saying they were bad people, not using their company name.

[@okk2460]

Payed cosmetic and a season pass while asking 40 bucks? Not even interested anymore.

[@Nightykk]

If I see a new game coming out with the tag "live service", then it's dead to me before it even makes it to the market. Complete lack of interest. Already countless live service games out there, market is completely saturated by them -- and I don't wish to touch those either as is. Most of the popular live service games currently existing, and thriving, were games that did not start out as such, but eventually leaned into it - especially as the years passed. For some of them we're coming up on 20 years, 25 years for Counter-Strike in less than a month.

[@chanybing40]

I hope these publishers don't look at helldivers 2 and think they can just sell free to play games for $40. They have to tune the extra monetization to not be as offensive as their normal games to balance out the up front cost.

[@ItaChu787pr]

Oh... That ended out of nowhere 🤣 I thought there was gonna be more haha I wasn't paying attention to how much was left in the video

[@TEk0n]

For this price of _this_ live service game just think how much cheaper it would have been for Sony to fund a bunch of experimental single player experiences

[@KryyssTV]

At this point I'd rather see publishers spin up several games with $100m budgets split 50/50 on dev to marketting that sits in development for two years. That is how many games were made in the late-90s and early-00s and tools have become far better in the last 20 years so you can do far more with far less.

[@VarenvelDarakus]

they wont do that , they so used to releseing next big thing they would rather spend their entire budget on 1 game in hopes "its next big thing" companies not even split budget even if they do , AI generative is replacing lots devs to relese more slop remakes

[@KryyssTV]

@VarenvelDarakus The money itself will push them to drop this AAA nonsense. The risks of putting all your eggs in one basket is well known and this isn't like roulette where only one stake wins even if you hedge your bets. Speaking financially the numbers just don't add up on the AAA end. If you pour $300m into one singleplayer game retaiing for $60 then you need a smash hit to turn a profit. But there is a finite number of customers who will only buy that game once. But if you make three ganes for $100m each, sell them for $45 and they are all smash hits then the same amount of investment goes more than twice as far. And let's be clear here, budget size has nothing to do with how popular a game is nor how well it sells. Especially in the modern day of streaming where publishers get free advertising oftheir product as long a it is fun and engaging. So a $100m game has just as much chance to be a smash hit as a $300m one.

[@demarcorr]

love the effort put into ignoring the ginormous elephant in the room re: cocnord

[@williamvanhauen9019]

The code for Huel doesn’t work for me? Is it region specific? Didn’t work for the danish page atleast

[@guilherme5094]

Something tells me Sony hasn't learned its lesson🤔.

[@kukuhimanputraraharja8084]

its corporate toxic positivity destroying immersions as usual.

[@miinyoo]

Deadlock is a great game. Very sweaty but boy it flows nicely. Never considered a MOBA would work in a shooter format but Valve nailed its core and is working on the details.

[@markvicferrer]

Resurrecting old franchises for nostalgia is easy money, but does anyone really care about Marathon? I've only ever heard it as "Bungie's game before Halo".

[@pocketsizedweeb]

I've literally never heard of Marathon before, so I'm assuming no one.

[@SianaGearz]

It was really good but try selling a live service extraction shooter to 45 year olds like me is pretty futile, i mean, sure i game, but... i don't want to put endless hours into it, i want some rich self-contained entertainment the shorter the better. Guardians of the Galaxy was really good for me, completed in a weekend, completely ecstatic. Love Yakuza games but even they're a little long to me. Cloudpunk was the right amount of length and actually right amount of everything. Half the problem is that Marathon was a mac-only game series and i and many others who experienced it were actually sort of retro enthusiasts who checked it out via Aleph One in the mid late 2000s. Like sure we HEARD of it before but it wasn't really accessible. And i played Oni shortly when it came out, you never even heard of Oni right. Played it on a Pentium 3 or Athlon with a TNT2. OK i'll make a bit of an exception for driving/racing games, i have ETS2, i have some sim gear, those OK OK, might get Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown when it's a little more fleshed out.

[@Ditronus.]

Spiderman 2 wouldn't be called a bad game. But did it need that much money to be called a good game? It feels like big budget can only cover for a lack of creativity so far. The new Spiderman games were good, but they weren't too creative or anything special.

[@TsunamiWombat]

Ayo hold up. I am 99% sure if I go back and watch your previous videos, you say that Concords price point played a part in it's downfall. 7 minutes into this one, you say "oh no concords price point didn't REALLY play a roll in it's downfall".

[@browncoatkevin]

I think he meant it as "the price tag wasn't the primary factor". Even free in part of its beta, it didn't break the 2,500 player mark, so it would have failed regardless. Now, if it was a really good game sold for $40 and it still failed against the similarly-good free games on the market, then the price would have been the major reason.

[@KlickPy]

I just want to add, The Finals had shit microtransactions, like they're all so fucking unappealing. Maybe if they actually had given more investment into that part it wouldn't have struggled financially. They don't realize that when you innovate, you can sell a lot more, just like valorant does with their weapon skins. Nobody wants to spend 5$ on a purple paint for a gun.

[@GioFan201051]

Nice shoutout to Mandalore :-D

[@stupiddog79]

I wonder how many more Live Service failures managers require before they get the message *shrug*

[@Drunkendrakon]

Sony needs to get a small bloody nose before they learn

[@shadow42990]

So 400mil divided by 8*12 then again by 174 employees comes to roughly 24k per person per month...still seems low they have to have lost way more money

[@SimuLord]

If I made $24,000 a month I'd be putting $288,000 on Line 7 of my 1040 when I did my taxes. $288K per person per year is a ton of money, especially when the average tech salary isn't even half that. For every dollar they lost in labor cost, they lost another whole dollar somewhere else. That's a spectacular failure to take a total loss twice over on just your salaries.

[@tasa4904]

Wasn't there like 400 employees? Still, 8 years of those numbers is insane.

[@shadow42990]

@@SimuLord of course not just salary im thinking like salary + benefits + utilities + servers/cloud license costs, licenses for dev tools all things involved in making the assets as well as hardware purchases

[@user-sf8du]

They didn't have 174 employees for the 8 years did they? The statement says they were a small team for the majority of the development of concord.

[@kukuc96]

@@SimuLord The studio was located in the Seattle area, just shy of 300k per employee is not unreasonable for the location. And that's not even the gross salary, that includes other things the employer pays for, like employee heath insurance. And we haven't even considered non salary costs.

[@Marinealver]

Remember the days when profitable studios were shut down?

[@aben776]

Marathon barely register with gamers nowadays. The game is seen as another generic hero shooter.

[@beprf]

Great news for gaming.

[@bruhverlybruh4012]

I don't even buy Nintendo anymore much less Sony, before I someone in my circle playing it without major issues. I'll buy a lot of indies tho.

[@samuelm4021]

Imagine how many wells they could have built in say… Africa with all that wasted money. Corporations are not good for this planet lol

[@jebise1126]

wait... 450 people working not so long years and it was 200 million possibly more? while larian had the same size team working for 6 years and its estimated that BG3 costed around 100 millions? somebody was screwed over big time here. also studio did not have any release at all had no names but still got all that money in? i mean few years ago heads would roll for that. now its the same everwhere. investors got too much money for how stupid they are.

[@kukuc96]

One is headquartered in Belgium, the other in the Seattle area. Their salary cost per employee will be ever so slightly different.

[@MisterNightfish]

They should have shared the concept art a little earlier. Just post your roster before you start coding and everyone could have told them that not a single of the characters looks inspiring to anyone. League of Legends lives entirely off people making characters look a certain way so clearly this is very important to people. Your hero shooter has no shot if people don't want to be those heroes and concord is not just 5% or 10% off the mark, it's like 98% off the mark. Just look at captain tupperware, for example. The design looks like a parody.

[@swaeshow]

I really can't believe this big corporations that make 100's of millions are making this bad of a choice on a daily basis right now. What is going on in the games industry that told them these games we are getting lately are what we want? I'm truely curious. Makes no difference to me though. I have a backlog and I'm happily saving my money right now.

[@Unprotected1232]

It's a shame Concord shut down. How are you even supposed to get fresh B-roll for your Concord videos? 😢

[@Halvos12]

Firewalk failed them so that they could see that Pocketpair would save them.

[@kristiansdzenis5284]

Helldivers is pve Marathon is not! It will not perform with a 40$ price tag, one reason: skill based match making - you have to keep well balanced lobbies full if you don't want your pvp game to die out and the only way to do it is with a "free game model", that's how you get those numbers to come and fill the lobbies

[@Mooruck]

That Huel shaker is not used every day - Huel customer

[@tpfrozenking75]

Bungie is just cooked. I highly doubt Marathon will be any good. The people who made Halo the gem that it was have all already left so why do consumers still believe that Bungie isn't just a dead husk being puppeteered by corporate goons?

[@DiabloDBS]

@7:15 I kind off disagree a bit with that. Especially when you already got a controversy running due to leaks etc. the difference between pay to play and free to play can be substantial in terms of player aquisition and retention. I agree that in Concords case it probably wouldn't have made a difference since the numbers would've still been too low. But generally a lot of people hearing about a "bad game" that is free to try want to see it for themselves but the moment you slap a monetary price on it that group of people (often young who got the time to spare) will not even try your game. And that is even more true when there is a lot of other similar scoped games around that are F2P and are already well defined in the market.

[@jomanthan]

I really want exposé of what happened behind the scenes when Concord was developed. It's clear that there was some talent their in the development team. But the pure failure of the leadership to get interesting vision going and the clear problem of playing things super safe. Make me wonder if their was a way more interesting version of the game that was killed in development hell this game most have been and how much work had been scrapped during development.

[@Aaron-l6i3z]

Amazing. Love it

[@tokinimo54]

in a small spark of positivity, people can make content videos out of them. 🤣

[@3d1e00]

I have heard that the Concord gameplay was actually pretty good? If so why don't they just gut the character art work/story and redo it? Doing that and trying to actually get people to play it as a free2play micro-transaction/ad supported product can't be more expensive than this? I really feel like we are getting way past peek failure and now at utter crapness plateau. How about we start saying what this is, absolutely, ridiculously bad leadership. And how about we actually start treating them correctly for their failures rather than taking it out on the lower paid employees? I am pretty sure they have earned more than enough while failing to survive and learn from their stupidity.

[@edmundmondo1682]

GOOD RIDDANCE!

[@DreadWulf221]

The fact that the new Marathon is an extraction shooter makes it even more dead to me than it already was, generally not a genre I like and if I want to play it I already have multiple good games for it and have no need for another one.

[@massiveman87]

The finals was great when it came out, but its off putting when there are only 3 maps and all you see are new microtransactions dropping left and right plus a focus on battle passes. I get its f2p, but a little bit of actual content would have gone a long way in the first few weeks rather than just letting people get bored with the same couple of modes and maps while pushing all these skins and such for quick cash

[@Surkk2960]

The original purpose of F2P cosmetic sales was to widen the playerbase while being able to invest into improving the game and keep the servers running, now that corpos and greedy devs realized they can make bank on the cosmetics alone, players suffer from lack of actual gameplay (the whole point of a videogame) while these companies whale hunt.

[@BuckFangs]

Guerilla is very likely to flop with that live-service game if they aren't thinking completely outside the box

[@nte2336]

Stunning and brave

[@honestlordcommissarbrighte7921]

Fire Walk literally a Walking Fire lmao

[@Chronzic4]

Just saying but if they didn't remove payed content from Destiny I feel like a lot more people would be willing to play it or keep playing it. Imagine if in WoW every 3 expansions they just took the oldest and CLT alt deleted it. So why do they think that was a good idea. The excuses for why they did it was such a joke.

[@thinredpaste]

huel is the #1 most cyberpunk product on the market and not in a good way.

[@ScantilyCladPlatypus]

6:10 I don't play destiny anymore but it rings odd to me to paint a live service game saying it's going to adjust how it's making and handling content for a live service title after content shows to not engage their player base in a negative light. that sounds exactly like the job of a live service game not to ride bad choices to the bottom of the ocean and die

[@panzfaust9812]

Question is what studio these virus going to infect next?

[@lighthawkgames5805]

If Sony wants to part with 200 million dollars more of their chump change then I could part with an IP or two.

[@Mortacxo]

Sony Entertainment was doomed the second they moved office to a pit of Vipers(LA)

[@cimerea]

God, the level of braindeadness in the upper managment of those studios is so far past the boundaries of common sense it probably discovered new plane of existence... Make a team create a game accourding to your guidelines and when it fails because of those guidelines, sack the team... Have a working game with decent mechanics, working engine and pretty much all the work done - rather than tweak it here and there, redo some models to be more distictive, fresh coat of paint on the maps, nothing major in short; throw it away in it's entirety and start from scratch... Who the hell is making those decissions? Someone aiming to topple the major players in the gaming industry? Honest to god, this is way past the incompetence and shortsightedness, it feels like a deliberate action...

[@6Catz]

im not glad the studio was shut down and it sucks their work was thrown away but its a lesson that needs to be learned WE DONT NEED MORE LIVE SERVICE GAMES

[@gp-1542]

No gameplay, lots of promises Big worry…

[@Mmachine88]

Didn't even credit the original source, Colin Moriarty

[@pocketsizedweeb]

Can we please stop with this live service slop?

[@TheCrazyCapMaster]

Welp, so much for my thoughts on Sony needing to try to recoup their losses… guess they decided they couldn’t salvage it. 😅

[@LifeWulf]

I just want a new Ratchet and Clank game that’s as good as Rift Apart but twice or thrice as long. How many more Spider-Man games does Insomniac need to make?!

[@Waffletigercat]

I just want to say that Neon Koi’s logo was pretty cool.

[@TryboBike]

Concord is a live example of the truth, that superposition of 'best practices' does not yield a masterpiece.