Is Concord the Biggest Gaming Failure of All Time? | Design Delve

This video is brought to you by Worlds of Aria, out on Steam on September 27th. bit.ly/SW_World...
In this episode of Design Delve J & Ludo sit down to look at the Concord situation and discuss how it all may have happened.
Music used in order of appearance:
Intruder - Stray OST
The Abyss - Hyper Light Drifter OST
Checking in - Celeste OST
The Notebooks - Stray OST
Secret Lab - Stray OST
Support us on Patreon: / secondwindgroup
Second Wind Merch Store: sharkrobot.com...

[@SecondWindGroup]

This video is brought to you by Worlds of Aria, out on Steam on September 27th. Check it out on Steam today! bit.ly/SW_Worlds_of_Aria

[@WhiteCaneV1]

But I don't have friends

[@FunyunRob]

Hey, I’m only 2 minutes in but I’m sure your video doesn’t include the new information about how this game’s budget was actually around $400,000,000.

[@carlosgutierrez3918]

Concord's death was the equivalent of walking to the bus stop and all of the sudden seeing a well dressed trapeze artist hit the pavement. I never even knew he was up there, I only ever noticed the spat.

[@TheMoogleKing93]

Seconds later a street sweeper comes past and cleans it up without even noticing.

[@nonspiderweb]

100% accurate. I didn't even know Concord had been RELEASED yet. Sure, I at least knew it existed, but the only trailer I saw was the cinematic one.

[@Choppytehbear1337]

This is poetry, holy shit.

[@ijustreview]

Well dressed? No he's wearing the ugliest-yet-blandest looking leotard you've ever seen.

[@Neon002121]

Not going to lie. I am very jealous of how perfect this analogy is…. Well done.

[@famijher]

The sad part is that ET was actually more successful then Concord. It sold 1.5 Million Copies, compared to Concord's 25,000.

[@Dasaltwarrior]

Well yeah, ppl knew of ET Ppl only knew of Concord when it was already dead

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

@@Dasaltwarrior that and it was one of the first big names in a brand new media. Landscape was completely different to today.

[@wintertrooper7918]

But it's fall was MUCH harder

[@squiddler7731]

ET was the straw that broke the camels back, it's failure was in the amount of people that demanded refunds, and swore off buying games in the aftermath. But with Concord, there was nothing left to break, people were already sick and tired of live-service slop and there was zero room in the market for this new one.

[@yaoiboi60]

Yeah, that was the problem with ET

[@SollowP]

There's been more "Why did Concord fail" videos than there was concurrent players at this point.

[@FeiFongWang]

The dumpster fire is very expensive and has microtransactions, the videos making fun of it are free.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

It's just riding the coat tails for views. Kind of like that dustborn game. An unremarkable title from a small studio that people want to give their opinions on.

[@lucasmatignon3407]

@@crushycrawfishy1765 Didn't Sony make it? There kinda the opposite of a small company

[@HeroDarkStorn]

@@lucasmatignon3407 Technically, Sony only bought the studio making it, because after seeing it, they were sure it will be a hit (I imagine people making that decision thought it was the game that inspired all the 34 they watch :D)

[@Bustermachine]

@@lucasmatignon3407 So IIRC Concord was in development from a studio that was trying to jump directly into the AAA deep end with no prior experience. They got bought by Sony who was in the market for a hero shooter, 100+ million dollars and 8 years later, the rest is history.

[@royalbandit8106]

To quote one of your co-workers, "Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tehehe."

[@bilateralrope8643]

Yeah. The first time I saw this trend chasing behaviour was all the MMOs trying to be the next WoW. Though at least they got championed by players who would play a new MMO for a few weeks after it launched, get bored, then get hyped for the next one. Concord didn't even have that.

[@TheT7770ify]

Personally as a hobby artist I've never seen a game come out with such bad character designs that I actively wanted to write an essay about how bland and uninteresting they were. Especially they're over use of that pale plasticky green they slapped on everyone

[@armelior4610]

I'm no artist, but it looks like the designers had a contest about making the most boring and generic characters possible - maybe that was part of the presumed development hell (8 years !)

[@caldw615]

The green dude was aparently more lizard-like in previous incarnations since he's supposed to be a reptile but you wouldn't be able to tell that much from the final design. He just looked like a green version of Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy minus the cool mowhawk weapon.

[@TheT7770ify]

@@armelior4610 it's. Not even bland, it's just straight up bad. Like the color choices are all over the place and rarely follow the 30%-70%/10%-20%-70% rule for color amounts. Hell the soldier girl in bulky pale green armor has purple lipstick for no reason that clashes hard with the rest of her design.

[@Aldevier27]

It’s absolutely fascinating the choices they made. Nothing that calls you to this game at all don’t look cool or anything.

[@ok2freezeok2burn86]

Here’s my hot take: I think the designs are actually really quite fun. Compared to Overwatch (or frankly, most things in general) the character are ugly, static, and bland. But in the context of Concord trying to evoke 70s science fiction, they not only fit right in but really get a handle on the genre. Sure, you’re front man is literally just a person painted a sickly green with cheap prosthetics glued on, but like… Wasn’t every alien Kirk ever slept with not just that? That lady with a plastic box over her head looks like the prop department was asked to give her a pressure suit and had pvc and $5 and I am tickled every time I see the same thing against shots of shitty cardboard miniature. I could watch that vacuum robot shuffle clumsily around in the Blackhole movie without batting an eye, etc etc. I’ve seen a bunch of videos trying to improve the designs by making them “appealing” and it really does just ruin the charm that the vanilla gross designs really do seem like they are seeking to invoke.

[@chopper8209]

That one Smiling Friends scene sums up this well. “Why don't they like it? We spend 200 million dollars on this!!!”

[@ekirbo]

It's been updated, FOUR HUNDRED MILLION is the number, source is Colin Moriarty.

[@eN1X]

They entered in to the most competitive space in gaming and offered up the most ugly, boring and drab game currently available and asked $40 for it. Just a massive mistake in every way possible.

[@stevenscott2718]

I love how they managed to make a game with a giant blue guy with a bright red baboon arse for face and still have it described as "drab" holy colour washout batman.

[@mrZanZibar777]

"Concord and E.T. had comparable sales" is flat-out not true. Concord sold about 25,000 copies. E.T. sold 1.5 million copies. The problem was that they printed 5 million cartridges and spent $20 million on the licensing fees.

[@Nighthawk20000]

@@mrZanZibar777 Imagine getting out sold 60x by a game that cost 1/1000th the price to make in a market 1/10th as big. And on top of that, it looked like complete shit.

[@DainRiffgin89]

@@mrZanZibar777 and to top it off, Sony issued full refunds for Concord, so ultimately they didn’t earn any money on it. At least Atari made some of their money back.

[@utility63]

Maybe they're comparable in terms of market percentage?

[@mrZanZibar777]

@@utility63 It's the exact opposite. The market was wayyyyyyyy smaller back when E.T released. E.T. sold a much higher number of copies compared to market size than Concord did.

[@HonkeyKongLive]

You're forgetting returns. The VAST majority of sold ET carts got taken back to the store.

[@Marbeary]

The fact that Gollum had more players than Concord is quite a feat on its own.

[@abigaillilac1370]

@@Marbeary Gollum let you pay extra to say "My precious" and Concord didn't. Coincidence?

[@TehNoobiness]

"Gollum won the argument" was ahead of its time

[@Flyon86]

Gollum was so bad people played it ironically to see the memes. Concord was so overwhelmingly bland it didn't even get the ironic market.

[@rikou1986]

Most flops suck but the concord development/time cost was insane in comparison with others.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

Outside of the cost, it isn't even really unique. Duke nuke'm forever and Too human were other games with decades in development to come out shitty. Or Daikatana.

[@MadWatcher]

​​@@crushycrawfishy1765Concord cost $400,000,000 to make, I want to know what Sony was smoking, and want every higher up to take a IQ test, because it sounds really low

[@Sorcerers_Apprentice]

Some idiot exec or other decision maker might have made it their pet project and insisted the studio keep throwing good money after bad/adding in more features/changing characters that force the devs, artists and programmers to go back, take apart and rebuild the game again and again.

[@GigasGMX]

Fun fact: E.T. didn't really *cause* the gaming crash of '83 (its' primary cause was arguably "there were too many consoles, they were all too crap, and PCs were too competitive"). Really, it's more of a demonstration of why the crash happened than a cause.

[@tjenadonn6158]

More a symptom of and a scapegoat for the crash, in that order.

[@mredbadger]

It’s kind of the same here. I’m sure there are worse games than Concord, but all of these live service junk games want you to treat then like full-time jobs, buying season passes and in-game currency, and playing when events are happening. And someone who’s already invested loads of time and money into one isn’t going to want to start from scratch on a different, blander looking one These games had already started failing before Concord came along, but it’s a great poster-child for corporate greed crashing an industry just like ET was

[@mestre12]

Indeed. Just one, of many crap games, that, had no regulation at the time.

[@starmaker75]

To paraphrase yatzhee himself: E.T was just the shiny turd hat that was part of the shit show that was the USA gaming industry of the early mid 1980s. While USA's console gaming industry wasn't doing well. PC gaming was doing alright, especially Europe. Meanwhile japan was just starting.

[@mestre12]

@@Texelion3Dprints because its a good story. One game crash the entire game industry. Kinda the same thing it was tulipmania for the dutchs, the real story is more complicated then we think.

[@malhavoc431]

Recent news came out that the actual cost of Concord was closer to $400 million. I am having trouble fathoming where and how that much money was spent on the game they made.

[@flamereaper7158]

@@malhavoc431 Excuse me for a moment. *Heads to kitchen to grab a massive bottle of water* *Returns with the water* *Takes a large sip* *Spits out all the water* 400 MILLION DOLLARS!

[@Prototype-357]

If I had to guess all that money went to Secret Level, they had to bribe the people running that show and Amazon into allowing an episode of their ugly ass game into the show.

[@Tuxfanturnip]

this wasn't just a game, this was a game tied to, effectively, a weekly TV show. you can see the conflicting needs of the projects come out in the character design, and the coordination and preparation to hit the ground running with high production value animation on a regular schedule probably consumed a huge amount of the budget.

[@ProgSys]

Plus the $400 million don't even include the price Sony paid to buy the studio.

[@Keithustus]

Year 1: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 2: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 3: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 4: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 5: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 6: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 7: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks. Delete. Year 8: spend $50 million to prototype a game and art. It sucks a tiny bit less. Print discs and and hope for the best.

[@Rhekke]

What blows my mind is Overwatch even gave a cheat sheet for anyone who wanted to build the next hero shooter - single player campaigns using the same movement and battle mechanics. That was the major selling point of Overwatch 2, and the single feature most people I knew were most excited about. Then they scrapped it. The player interest was demonstrated, and it's still there just waiting to be picked up. If Concord had just built a single player campaign of decent quality and packaged it with the multiplayer, they could of tapped into that market. And more, if they made a polished and fun single player campaign, they could of cultivated an entirely new audience of players loyal to their IP.

[@mikedawolf95]

Even after screwing over the gamers, somehow Overwatch 2 still has 30,000 daily players?

[@Katana314]

It's been extremely rare that someone successfully makes both a singleplayer and multiplayer game in the same launch. That was something everyone aimed for in the Xbox 360 era and 90% of the time one or both modes was worthless. There's really different balancing concerns for each mode.

[@christian5256]

May I direct your attention to Space Marine 2 (admittedly I haven't played it)

[@akl2k7]

"Could have" or "could've", not "could of".

[@neminemMaxime]

Exo primal got close. Excellent, wacky, 10 hour PvE campaign, weekly speedrun events for endgame. But it had trouble communicating what it was, and new modes weren't selectable up front or depended on other players progressing, and it lost momentum. Which is a shame, because it came out right when news of overwatch 2 canning its PvE offerings. They totally could have eaten Blizzard's lunch.

[@qwefg3]

It feels more like the compounding of every issue we didn't like. Poor art design for characters that nobody liked. The gameplay being another generic hero shooter. The inability to cut costs... and of course the trend chaser of mass editing. I mean Mass Effect Andromeda had a lot of time wasted on the procedurally generated level idea concept with lots of developers shifted over to other projects. This game is the combination of all the problems we hate.

[@JasoTheRed48F2]

Don't forget the insane push for political correctness elements, which alienated a lot of people right away.

[@Conejoazul2018]

Don't forget the paradox of the common joe. It's okay to make a game for a specific audience but at the same time you need the approval and profit return of people outside the audience you chose wich may end up causing an snowball effect of everyone thrashing you or abandoning you just because you were making something different/bad of what the common joe enjoys, whoever the common joe is at that time.

[@evanhariadi3241]

Concord is the ultimate example of how out of touch game excutives are. Chasing a trend 8 years late that is of worst quality and is priced. Concord died so quickly, its episode of Secret Level didn't even come out yet.

[@IllisiaAdams]

It's not dead. It's in a coma. They're reassessing it and hoping to re-release.

[@Veritas_Vincit]

​@IllisiaAdams the video clearly explains why it won't succeed even if they re-release it. Gamers don't want more hero shooters

[@kiteofdark]

If you watch the video the thing he was hinting at is that it probably wasn't just the executives but the lead devs in charge being out of touch. Sony only acquired Concord in the last 3 years.

[@zmeston]

@@IllisiaAdams It's dead. DEAD dead. The claim of "reassessment" was corpo-speak.

[@NomastiAfricanWarlord]

@@IllisiaAdams Nobody is gonna play it even if it does re-releases. They'd would have to completely design the characters, redesign the entire gameplay, etc,. Might as well just make a new game at that point. It's not the pricing structure that's the problem. Concord didn't piss off it's fanbase like Helldivers 2 or the Final Fantasy MMO. There literally isn't a fanbase to begin with. There is no audience for this game. Sony should just cut their losses and move on.

[@huzi990]

"What a load of wank" was definitely the reaction from the general audience when Concord's gameplay was shown.

[@bilateralrope8643]

It had some odd gameplay choices. Like that thing about making you change characters when you died, which I'm not sure I fully understood.

[@Abizinator]

@@bilateralrope8643 I suspect it was to try and avoid mono-pick players from sweating up the matches, can't spend an entire match as meta-characterA if you cant choose them 2 lives in a row.

[@thomasgiles2876]

Weekly ingame cutscenes. I hope some KZbin pirate saved BOTH cutscenes.

[@ARStudios2000]

Probably did. Or Sony left.them all online

[@djoakeydoakey1076]

Pirate or gaming historian?

[@alphabros5226]

I think I saw them, they are without being too unfair, not worth any sort of FOMO, and feel even more disjointed compared to how Overwatch's lore to gameplay dissonance is. The cutscenes kind of feel like watching a clip out of a much larger narrative game, which makes me wish that somehow Concord was more equivalent to like an actual singleplayer GOTG inspired game or like the RDR2 narrative stuff.

[@jeremygregorio7472]

ET actually sold really well the problem was Atari massively overestimated sales so they ended up with a bunch of unsold cartridges. But it's one of the top selling games on the console of all time and if Atari had just made the correct amount of cartridges it would have been very profitable

[@bannin2916]

Yeah, ET just ended up being the poster child of the problem, which was the oversaturation and overproduction in the market.

[@metazoxan2]

@@bannin2916 and the lack of regulation. Since anyone could post any crap they wanted on Atari without any attempt at ... making sure the damn thing was even playable.

[@Weazel1]

Yeah, it sold really well, and then was returned in record numbers. When word got out how bad a game it was, no one would touch it, thus the glut of unsold cartridges. Remember, it was the most anticipated game to the number one movie of 1982, so they had every right to think it would sell gangbusters and produced accordingly. And then Atari took a soaking on refunded money to retailers.

[@Simplebutsandy]

Didn't they spend a fortune on the license so they had to produce that many cartridges in order to break even? I also remember once hearing a rumour that at time of release every Atari owner would have to own two copies in order for Atari to make money, but I'm sure that bit is an exaggeration.

[@jeremygregorio7472]

@@Simplebutsandy they spent 25 million on the license and sold over 2 million cartridges. It was definitely too much to spend on the license but it did leave room for a profit margin. Remember it only took 5 weeks to develop the game. And this was pretty far into the 2600s life cycle so the cartridge is warrant that expensive to manufacture. They didn't really use that much money on ET even accounting for the 3 million cartridges they lost. Probably a few million dollars one all said is done in a multi-billion dollar industry.

[@lanzer22]

Hubris is what killed Concord. A game 8 years in development and they never once thought to share their heroes with the crowd to see if any of their designs are working.

[@chasiekcorb4209]

@@lanzer22 they did like 3 weeks before launch and it was received with thunderous laughter

[@mediumvillain]

sure they did, but they didnt take the hint. there were cinematic trailers years back with some of these characters. nobody cared. nobody even remembers them.

[@hefoxed]

The 8 year figure is sus. It's via someone that was there for 5 years. Firewalk studio was created in 2018, and from some comments online, may not have had a lot of funding till recently, so actual development 6+ years ago was probably more concepts and talk then anything else. If it was a single player game, I'd have considered playing it. The characters were bland but not that bad.

[@Keithustus]

*heroes Stop apostrophe abuse today. Hero's is when the hero possesses something, like the hero's sword.

[@inteligentidiot7233]

The first time I heard of Concord was when it was discontinued. I thought to myself, "Did I miss this in the wake of Battleborn dying and Overwatch being awesome?" Nope, just launched, and I've been fascinated ever since, so thank you for the video.

[@RoyaLotad]

It's hard to even say that Concord died. I don't think it ever lived.

[@w1nch3ster1]

One of the things Hero shooters live and die on are aesthetics, and in my opinion this game had next to zero appealing designs and art direction. I downloaded the beta and thought the gameplay was actually fine, but everything and everyone was just ugly.

[@Flyon86]

So bad nobody even made rule 34 art of the characters, lol

[@seanrshivers]

All the extra stuff is fascinating: dev team ego, unclear goals, long dev time, market misunderstanding... but i really wonder what their marketing budget was. People buy garbage all the time, with numbers this low i feel like marketing couldnt have possibly been high enough to ever ensure success.

[@Sniperbear13]

i only saw a handful of ads on Twitch, never saw people talking about it, never saw people even mention it. i wanna say i saw it at a Award show once and thought it was a Guardians of the Galaxy game, but i cant even remember that. methinks they didn't put really anything into advertisement.

[@krazer9515]

I am amazed they have a marketing budget at all. Not that i doubt that it exists, but because i had never even heard of the game before i started seeing headlines of it being shutdown. I admittedly am not as exposed to most types of advertising, but i had zero idea that a game called Concord even existed, much less what it was about or what type of game it was, until after it was all over.

[@augustday9483]

Looking at the Internet being depicted as a mind-melting trip into the fourth dimension is perfect

[@LisaFenix]

The probablymonsters topic is a whole rabbit hole in itself.. back when I was still working in the seattle area a lot of my former teammates, and very talented industry folks, were going over to work there in droves, but I always felt skeptical because there's been some major red flags for years akin to the shit we see with tech startups and the unfathomably huge amounts of money wasted. Probablymonsters is more of a VC-funded incubator than an actual development studio and the fact that concord is the ONLY game of theirs to even be publicly announced let alone release since their inception speaks volumes. The only press they ever had been releasing was about how much money they've raised, how they have multiple physical offices, how great they are to work at, announcing new studios, and how they're "re-shaping how games are made"... never a single announced game until now. The absurd amount of money lost on this whole thing is just a clear example of the failure of VC tech startup culture

[@Flyon86]

When interest rates were basically zero a lot of money was being thrown around to ridiculous investments in tech in the hope that something eventually paid off.

[@BP-dn9nv]

I'd be happier about this if the people who actually deserved to lose their jobs, the executives who greenlit it, were the ones most likely to get fired.

[@michaelriverside1139]

Hard agree, the developers should be given another project, but executives like Hermen Hulst be shown the door, his salary could easily afford Firewalk Studios' continued existence!

[@Seoul_Soldier]

The developers got paid. So I'm not worried about them. It's probably in their best interest to leave this off of their resumes though.

[@DominickRoselli]

Nah, the devs got paid and were supremely proud of their game right up until it crashed and burned, defending the choices they made right up to the point doing so would make an impact on their careers. They DO NOT deserve another game.

[@RevolverRez]

Considering what the devs were saying on twitter/X before all this went down, I'd say they deserved to lose their jobs. Extreme arrogance in the face of criticism is not a good look.

[@RossOfRoni]

Colin Moriarty just released a video on Twitter stating he talked to a source inside development who put the total cost of Concord at $400 million. Four. Hundred. Million.

[@Brasswatchman]

Where the hell did all that money come from?

[@Sp1n1985]

​@@BrasswatchmanSony pony sales

[@estefencosta1835]

I watched that video and without any opinion about whether that makes any sense or not, he claims they'd sunk 200 million dollars into the game before Sony bought it at about the alpha stage, but the alpha was hilariously short of being a workable product so Sony spend a shitload on outsourced contract workers to try and get the game up to speed to be shipped. The only way I can see that figure making sense is if it includes literally everything, including things like the Secret Level episode and the evidently sizeable number of already filmed weekly live action cutscenes etc. Because I just don't see how you could get to 400 million without throwing in a lot of not just game dev shit, regardless of how confident Moriarty is in his source.

[@Brasswatchman]

@@Sp1n1985 It sounds like Sony didn't get really involved (or at least didn't take direct control) until later on in the dev process. So who was funding all this? Was it all VC capital?

[@kylebaryonyx9478]

The thing that blows my mind the most was that there was zero marketing leading up to launch. I never heard of this game before it was cancelled, the cancellation notice was the first time I learned of its existence. It baffles me that there are people working in the games industry who are so completely unaware of how games gain momentum. Even putting aside the old- worn-out trend chasing and the wasted development time and the overstimulating character designs, no one on the company's PR team thought to put out a teaser or trailer before 3 months ago? Wild.

[@wintertrooper7918]

I was hearing about it during the lead up and after release

[@gwen9939]

I think they knew what they had and that it wasn't going to make it. I saw some sponsored streams but handing a bag of money to an overwatch streamer to play the game for an hour instead of putting together an actual marketing campaign is obviously much cheaper.

[@krazer9515]

Same. I knew nothing about it.

[@lewa358]

It took up a sizable chunk of one of those Sony State of Play things. I always watch those and that's the only reason I knew of it. But I am bad at video games so I instinctively ignored it once I found it it was a PvP shooter. And I guess so did everyone else.

[@Flyon86]

I think they knew it wasn't going to do well, but they had spent too much to not release it. Nobody really expected it to flop as hard as it did though lol. Everyone made fun of redfall, but it still managed to get way more steam players despite being on gamepass even.

[@goeddy]

IMO one of the key factors to this trainwreck is also what might be behind suicide squads failure: toxic positivity. In the modern world of funding and inner corp evaluations you basically have to be drinking the cool aid all the way, all the time. any sign of minimal doubt and whatever you're working on will get axed, because of course everyone else is drinking their cool aid so now you look weak in comparisson if you don't. this completely destroys critical thinking, forces you to spin and tint data to make your project look good, all just to be able to keep riding the train to the end because the alternative would have been: concord axed, studio closed, everyone looses their jobs. instead people got to keep working, draw paychecks, and deliver a product that they probably had a lot of fun playtesting. If your 100 mil deep into it and there is the slighted sign of doubt, you don't get a second shot.

[@bigmclargehuge1170]

ET was in no way responsible for the 83 console game crash. If anything, it was both a symptom of why it happened and a victim of its early effects. In fact, the cause was similar to what we have now: gamers shifting from console to PC, trend chasing leading to a ton of games that feel the same to play, and huge monolithic first parties crowding out the diversity of third party devs. Maybe that's worth a video on its own.

[@NYKevin100]

I think there is one important difference between the '83 crash and today, and that's the fact that indie and AA development are both far, far more viable today than either was in '83. You do not have to press disks or burn cartridges, you do not have to twist a retailer's arm to get shelf space, and so on. A game made by two-ish people on a Kickstarter budget of ~$50k ended up becoming one of the landmark titles of the 2010s (Undertale), and that kind of Cinderella story was just not possible in '83 without the support of a publisher or some other kind of outside finance (i.e. it would have cost a lot more than the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $50k). So even if the AAA industry does succeed in recreating the conditions that led to the crash, I do not think they will actually cause another crash to happen. At most, we'll see a general reduction in AAA game budgets, probably some developers get laid off, and maybe one or two studios will fail. The indies will be unaffected, Valve probably still has a giant money pile (maybe it shrinks a bit), and the only people who might be in real trouble are the AA developers, if they end up getting the worst of both worlds (i.e. a reduction in outside investment, coupled with too tight of a budget to survive that reduction).

[@tonysladky8925]

Poor Superman 64 has to settle for merely being infamously terrible rather than industry-ruiningly terrible...

[@ComradePenguinski]

Yeah but that was WB trying to screw over Titus Interactive so WB could get the rights back to sell them for a higher price.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

Concord isn't ruining the industry either. It was a bad game that flopped. It's not effecting the industry at all.

[@kirinoa]

@@crushycrawfishy1765 yeah, for the market to crash, we need the hardware guys to crash. It doesn't really matter if one of the big publishers go under. Their IPs get scooped up by the competition and it's back to a slightly more oligopolistic normal

[@Uniscorn123]

This is my first time seeing any footage of Concord and I'm just speechless. We have so many of these kinds of games that we can play for free. What on earth made Sony or anybody else think that anyone was going to want to pay to play this?

[@Flyon86]

I guess they were trying to copy Overwatch which initially wasn't f2p, when it was released 8 years ago.

[@BDCMatt]

Newest rumors are the budget was closer to 400 million.

[@DrNiradino]

For anyone who claim that live service game model or hero shooter genre was a problem, I would like to mention Marvel Rivals and Deadlock. Both are upcoming live service hero shooter, which generated fairly large interest despite being in a closed beta state.

[@PubstarHero]

Yeah, but they both actually innovated on the basic hero shooter concept and are free to play. They weren't a $40 bland overwatch clones.

[@Aryc11]

​​@@PubstarHero Which is the point. The live service model is not what killed Concord. Live service games are plenty effective at generating profit when they're actually able to attract a playerbase.

[@lewa358]

It's not that it was a live service game, it was a live service game with nothing that made it stand out against the competition...but which cost $40 more than the free-to-play competition. If it was single-player it would at least still be *playable*. Like, The Order 1886 was similarly kinda eh, but as a single-player game it could still *exist* after more than two weeks, and get sales beyond the game's launch.

[@DrNiradino]

@@PubstarHero even when Concord was in free open beta it couldn't pull more then 2k concurrent players, while Rivals in closed beta pulled 50k and Deadlock 180k. Main issue with the game wasn't the price, after all 40$ Overwatch became a dominant hero shooter despite existing alongside multiple free competitors, such as Paladins. It wasn't oversaturates market or "exhaustion" of genre, as Marvel Rivals and Deadlock shows. It wasn't even gameplay, since nobody got to it. Concord turned players around simply with it's character design. People saw a walking dustbin robot, a fattest man in Mexico and lime tank, and noped the hell away from this game.

[@numatruehome100]

Just learned, this lost over 400 MILLION, not including the hundreds of millions undisclosed to by firewalk studios, that’s theoretically half a billion to MAYBE EVEN 3\4 of a BILLION DOLLARS GONE

[@jakehr3]

It's funny to see how Concord just crashed and burned, and then you have Deadlock come out right around the same time, and is massively successfuly. 2 Hero Shooters, but one is just trend chasing and doesn't offer anything new, and the other is innovating by bringing in MOBA elements into the genre and leaning into an aspect the developer is familiar with (Valve being the dev team on DotA 2). I don't know why that contrast hasn't come up more. You can make a hero shooter in 2024. It just has to be good. It can't be an OW redux.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

Because it really isn't as interesting as you're making it it out to be. Two completely separate companies making two separate games that just happen to share the same genre. There really isn't that much to extrapolate from.

[@MrShikaga]

I mean, Deadlock is free. If Concorde had launched free, I might have given it a go (had I known it existed). But actually that last point is massively important. I am out of the news cycle, so I had no idea Deadlock was a thing until one of my friends was like “want an invite? It is like a mix of Dota and Overwatch”. If they had said “it is a mix of OW, Dota, sucks your dick and costs $40” I would have said “I dunno…”

[@wintertrooper7918]

Deadlock isn't out it's in closed beta

[@gwen9939]

Deadlock is way more of a moba than a hero shooter, and it's from the money printing company that already has 1 of the 2 biggest and longest running mobas on the market. Deadlock isn't directly competing with overwatch or the likes of Apex because FPS players are gonna get tripped up by how significant the moba mechanics are to playing the game. You have to lane, you have to jungle, you have to roam, track cooldowns in teamfights, farm and buy items. Deadlock is hitting at the just right time where it's both presenting a new kind of experience potentilally for new players while cashing in on possible fatigue from OW and MOBA players who're frustrated by how the developers of those games have been mishandling their games recently.

[@jakehr3]

@@crushycrawfishy1765 "Two completely separate companies making two separate games that just happen to share the same genre" That's kind of the point though. It is two companies making two games that share the same genre, and one is succeeding and getting a lot of positive PR and hype in a closed beta, while the other closed within 2 weeks of full release, cost $100+ million dollars to make and was in development for 8 years. It would be like saying that comparisons between Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring are completely pointless because they just happen to share a genre. It's interesting to compare the two because of the fact that they share a genre. Otherwise, yeah, it wouldn't be that interesting to talk about if the two games had nothing in common.

[@FeiFongWang]

"Nobody buys mid-sized games anymore" Yeah, it might be that smaller releases capture a lot less attention than the AAA cinematic slob that Sony releases, but I guarantee you that if the 100 million that this game cost was divided up into several smaller fan favorite titles like Sly Cooper, Jak and Daxter, and maybe even Ape Escape, those titles would have been FAR more successful than this garbage even individually.

[@KingOfDoma]

This tells me that film and video games have a similar problem - they need every single project to make All Of The Money to justify costs. The solution is similar, too - instead of making these overbloated "AAA" titles that have to become legendary victories to just break even, they need to make smaller projects with a tighter focus and spread out the risk. I think this is why barely anyone made it out of the mascot wars - unless you're pumping out Ratchet and Clank levels of video fidelity, execs don't want it. Absolutely infuriating.

[@fearlesswee5036]

Yeah, I'm surprised more big studios aren't picking up on the indie scene; a glorified YTP made by an Ex-Roblox developer, "Lethal Company", is making gangbusters while having a shoestring budget. If they were to just focus on making smaller, more focused, like $500,000 - $1M budget games, there's much, much, much less risk if they go under, and there's more opportunity for profit if one of them becomes successful. A game that cost $1M to make and costs $60 will only need to sell 17,000 copies to break even. But instead they're making gigantic games that cost the GDP of a small country to produce, and unless they sell 7,000,000 copies, they're at a financial loss. It's not sustainable. No wonder they're cramming microtransactions and battlepasses and crap into full-price games. They're banking on whale players carrying the poor sales figures by each spending $2,000 on the in-game shop.

[@Mercra]

Saddest part is that even success doesn't save the developers. Look at what happened to Hi-Fi Rush's studio. Big hit, critically loved, commercially viable, still got the doors shuttered. Big business isn't just choking the art out of the industry, it's suffocating the developers as its doing it.

[@jcace13]

This is what companies cannot and will not get through their heads: you don’t just have to convince people to play your game, you have to convince them to stop playing what they already playing. Following up with last week’s episode, what MMO could come out that would convince the WoW crowd to stop and move over? That game doesn’t and cannot exist, it’s too late.

[@carbonrick-roller7428]

I’ve seen a lot of people now try to unpack why concord failed at this point and it’s a fascinating topic because of how it sort of unmasks the problems of the gaming industry. A lot of different things came together to make concord fail but I think my biggest take away so far is no matter how skilled the developers are and how much money they get making a game is a collaborative effort. When the work environment doesn’t bread healthy collaboration it shows in the final product.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

Laura fryer talks about this phenomenon exactly in her video. Seriously, go check out her youtube, she's an industry veteran that's worked along side monolith games and bungies when they first were bought by microsoft. She said what you said, it was an internal culture problem within the company.

[@cathallynch8269]

The one question I'm not hearing asked enough is "how did they NOT see this coming?" when there are ample catastrophes to have learned from such as Anthem and Fallout 76. Thank God for indie gaming but I wish they could have even half the budget these idiots had.

[@Josep_Hernandez_Lujan]

ET did not collapse the entire industry. Japan and Europe were fine. Japan had Nintendo and Sega. Europa was ahead with computer gaming. Both also had the MSX

[@JandarLefey]

The choice of ET as a comparison point is an interesting one, because Atari did one more INCREDIBLY dumb thing on that game you didn’t mention. They printed more copies of it than there were Atari 2600s existing to play it on, anticipating it to be a giant blockbuster that would throw open markets for them to enter. This is ultimately what took it from being standard shovelware to being a true disaster for the industry

[@kjj26k]

"For their HUBRIS, in a single fortnight of misfortune, CONCORD was wiped from the face of the Earth." -Popsicles after eating an especially funky lookin' mushroom

[@OnyxAlchemyst]

And of course I get to watch this just after seeing Nick's retweet where a dev revealed Concord's budget was actually about *FOUR HUNDRED MILLION*. Good god.

[@subtlewhatssubtle]

That "peek into the Cosmos" joke at the beginning is spot on British absurdist humor, I love it.

[@EmberTheShark]

Slow gameplay, incredibly ugly character design, genre that most people stopped caring about 4 years ago, no roadmap apart from cinematics for characters nobody gives a damn about. how they didnt see this outcome coming is beyond me.

[@thatgreenfur6584]

At 100 million dollar budget, that makes it slightly more expensive than the canceled Batgirl movie.

[@BDCMatt]

Rumors are it was closer to 400 million😬

[@GreatWhiteWhale]

Did the entire gaming community forget about Hyenas? 6 years development, $70 million budget, cancelled weeks before release. Seems like a the most obvious comparison to concord yet I have not seen a single person bring it up.

[@Bakecrusto]

To answer all of your comment: yes. The entire gaming community did, in fact, forget about Hyenas.

[@GreatWhiteWhale]

@@Bakecrusto lmao I did set myself up for that with the way I worded it, didn't I? What I was trying to say is that Hyenas and Concord are very similar situations and no one seems to bring it up.

[@fluffywolfo3663]

People keep saying “one of the biggest failures,” but i have no idea what could possibly be a bigger failure than this.

[@atariboy9084]

Concord is the video gaming version of The 1963 film Cleopatra the film initially lost money because of its exorbitant production and marketing costs totaling $44 million ($438 million in 2023)

[@30dc]

Meanwhile Chris Sawyer makes Roller Coaster Tycoon single-handedly in a year

[@Bakecrusto]

Coding it all in Assembly, no less! (Because other languages weren't optimized enough for his needs of calculating all the guests' and rides' mechanics and physics; he needed as much control over the CPU and memory as possible to optimize every single operation performed by the computer, and it paid off)

[@Ceece20]

It just leaked that it actually lost $400M, fucking hell they burnt alot of money. And then game journalists say we need to get used to expensive cost for games.

[@logiju1]

16 maps on release is actually pretty big. Team Fortress 2 only had a handful of maps on release & so did Overwatch. There's lots of maps now because of updates.

[@logiju1]

I also remember Halo Reach invasion multiplayer gamemode having 2 or 3 maps... But not only was it 1 gamemode out of many, there were forge maps that followed & they took maps from the campaign ; Also maybe map balance wasn't prioritised as much (I have no idea if Concord's maps are balanced)

[@IllisiaAdams]

They had *so many* maps, game modes and characters! Such variety! I was really impressed when I read about it.

[@rawmaw]

TF2 had 6 maps, yes.

[@yet0another0account]

@logiju1 yeah but your game on day 1 has to compete with how your competitors are in the present day, not how they were on day 1...

[@lilaredden]

@@logiju1 Concord largely used symmetrical maps, though the point of symmetry might be circular or at an angle. Overall the map designs were pretty good, though the game had a sniper character with like 4 good sniper lines across all the maps.

[@RyanStewart-fn3nl]

You talk like this is a shocking unprecedented failure, but remember that Hyenas by Creative Assembly was a hero shooter cancelled last year during its beta phase that cost at least 70 Million.

[@strelet555]

Hyenas was more of an extraction shooter than a hero shooter

[@jordanhunter3375]

Who?

[@JachymorDota]

I still weep for Battleborn. It wasn't a failure, but I feel its demise prevented the rise of good PvE Hero Shooters and instead settled us with senseless Overwatch clones.

[@Marksman3434]

Unfortunately the game failed due to "too little, too late". They missed the hero shooter hype train by a mile. And didn't stand out and innovate enough in terms of the core gameplay for anyone to care. And the character designs were simply uninspiring, and that's one of the core factors that determines a hero shooter's appeal. If it had been instead a single-player action experience like what we got with the GotG game and with a more focused and refined art style, it probably would've had enough success, or at least more than the catastrophe that they ended up getting. It just sucks that big-budget games are taking so much freaking longer and so much money to make these days. Some of the big studios barely make just 1 game per console generation. Which essentially amounts to putting all eggs in one basket

[@IllisiaAdams]

Pst, there was a single player campaign.

[@IllisiaAdams]

One game per console generation? Don't be daft. Console gens are every 5-10 years.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

There's an excellent youtube channel by Laura Fryer (the channel is just her name again). She's worked in the industry for decades and worked along side and with big names in gaming like monolith and Bungee when they first joined microsoft and then some. She hypothesissed from her experience that Concord was a victim of it's own culture. Where feedback was never discussed or appreciated among other things to lead it to where it ended up. I'm not doing it justice. Go check out Laura Fryer, smart woman with a robust and active video games resume and experience.

[@NomastiAfricanWarlord]

I don't know if it would have succeeded even as a single player game. If the writing had the same quality as the character designs, then it would have likely ended up being a bland snoozefest and most people wouldn't have bothered to try it. Character design is such a major aspect of getting people interested in not just video games, but visual media in general. Even Guardians of the Galaxy had underperforming sales. What does Concord have that would have made it more interesting/appealing than Guardians of the Galaxy? I honestly can't think of anything.

[@jakie4444]

also a prototype infamous crossover game was canceled over this

[@eunoicgeniusloci]

Pretty sure the concord can cross the pond the fastest! Omg, is that jet still a thing?! I’m getting old…

[@joe23694]

@@eunoicgeniusloci Concord was retired in 2003 I'm afraid.

[@eunoicgeniusloci]

@@joe23694 😭 edit: thank you Joe. I will drink my Arnold Palmer in my rocking chair on the front porch, while remembering how good Casablanca was as I fade into the night 🫡

[@vanhala1547]

There is actually a fairly good argument to be made that concord is not only the worst video game failure, but rather the worst performing piece of entertainment ever.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

nah, that honor goes to Zyzzyx Road. A movie that made only 30 dollars. Granted it was a limited release, but still.....30 dollars.

[@vanhala1547]

​@@crushycrawfishy1765 I am talking about absolute amount of money lost. I am sure if you look deep enough you can find some low level projects that made absolute zero sales or profit. According to recent leaks concord was 400 million bucks and they made back basically nothing, considering digital sales were refunded. You literally can't find a piece of entertainment media that made a worse loss.

[@tipulsar85]

Here's the thing about E.T., it only crashed the NA Console Market. Europe and Japan were completely fine, while computers were barely scratched in North America. As for the NA arcade scene... it was already in a bit of a lull from the heights, but still pumping out good games. And E.T. was not the only stinker from Atari that year, the VCS/2600 version of Pac-man also has some of the blame. It was just as bad on the gameplay side, but also was going for a MUCH larger cart volume. Together, Pac-man and E.T. were trying to pull in 20 million in cart sales. In 1982-3, that's the equivalent to whatever numbers Square was excting worldwide for Marvel Avengers in 2020.

[@ChenAnPin]

It's like if a city took 8 years to build a bridge right next to and identical to other perfectly functional bridges and then putting a toll booth on it. And then demolishing the bridge right after finishing it.

[@Texelion3Dprints]

No, I didn't try Concord, because the moment that game was revealed I knew it would fail. And most people didn't give a shit. You can FEEL when a game is going to fail when nobody is excited about it. Which must be terrible for everybody involved, spending years on something and being ignored. Is there a solution to this ? Should they announce games sooner, see people's reaction and maybe cancel the project ? You never know if a few years later people would actually like it. What's funny is that these trend-chasing companies try to avoid risks at all cost. But by doing that they take the biggest risk of all : making something so bland that nobody wants it. That's not how art works.

[@TheLyricalCleric]

I believe that someone high up on the food chain at Firewalk wanted to make a tie-in movie, not a video game. Look at the rewards-weekly short films? Nobody wanted those except the guy in charge. So few heroes with bland looks? Exactly the kind of looks and ensemble cast that a real-life tie in movie would have to work with. This was never intended to be a game, it was intended to kick-start a franchise, three movies and a McDonald’s toy deal.

[@reahreic7698]

Agreed, when I saw they had a "Director of IP" it signaled a red flag. A lady who's job was to manage the IP of the franchise,. What IP? What franchise? Handle that shit after you have something people want/are interested in.

[@MrEffinBest]

I really hope the industry learns something from Concord's abysmal failure but Im not gonna hold my breath. And Im gonna disagree about this stemming from too much talent on the dev team. Ego, yes. Talent? I don't see it. The gameplay,, level design, character design, builds, even the graphics are unbelievably uninspired. This showcases hubris not talent.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

Because there's nothing new to really learn. The only special thing about concord was how much it cost. Everything else the industry has seen time and time and time again. From daikatana, to doom/wow/league killers, it's all happened before.

[@ultgamercw6759]

In a way I'd say Concord was much worse than ET because ET was made by one guy in five weeks. Despite the game being crap that's pretty impressive considering how little time he had and how little help game devs had from guide or user friendly software. Concord took 8 years to make with hundreds of devs. That's insane.

[@EROMJ]

Hero Shooters, Fighting Games, and MOBAs all live and die by their character design. The fact that, over 8 years, no one stopped and realized that these characters looked like stale ass is the biggest problem of all in the industry. It smacks of devs trying to force the population into liking something they feel we should love, instead of just giving us what we want.

[@Nightenstaff]

Concord is certainly among the worst launches in gaming history. The budget and timeline is mindboggling. ET is not even in the same ballpark. Rushed development, basically no development team, and it sold well at launch. The biggest issue with ET is they made upteen-billion carts expecting it would see success just based off the movie it was about. And, they weren't wrong. It sold well. It was also returned in mass. And ET didn't bring down the video game market in the early '80s. What ET did was represent what was wrong with the market. Low quality money grabs that everyone in the industry was producing. Also, the crash was not a global event -- it was a North America event. Japan and Europe kept chugging right along.

[@ZeProblematicz]

Correction, it's apparently over 400 million plus the cost to buy the studio according to Colin. That's absolutely absurd.

[@pauldaulby260]

It seems like a flawed argument to say they failed due to trend chasing when you can look over your shoulder and see deadlock suceeding, its about the same level of trend chase, with the same amount of dev time. The difference is that its really good, free and had a huge word of mouth secret feeling marketing

[@Keithustus]

*is* Deadlock succeeding? People are playing it, sure, but...is it even generating revenue yet?

[@CoolKiller28]

The funneist thing is that Deadlock had more players than Concord, a game that hasnt even released outperformed Concord on PC and both of them are Hero based shooters

[@FFSamurai]

Biggest gaming failure is anyone playing MVC Collection and hoping not to get bodied by Justin Wong.

[@theoldfashionedgamerguy665]

We're all being welcomed to the real world.

[@SongOfTheCrane]

The idea of several different departments effectively pursuing their own ideas makes me think of the initial development of FF14. That was apparently a huge issue for them- they had FF11 veterans that tried to just continue what worked before and created their systems largely in isolation. It wasn't until everything was put together toward the end of development that they realized how big of a problem there was.

[@RevolverRez]

It was a hero shooter in an age where hero shooters aren't popular anymore AND the characters all looked utterly disgusting at worst and unappealing at best. Oh, and they refused to listen to any actual criticism. It was an earned failure.

[@mr.cheese1865]

The sad part is I had no idea what Concord was until Sony took it down lol

[@l0stndamned]

This game managed to have the screw-ups of both Duke Nukem Forever (development dragged out by constant hype-chasing and developer ego) and Suicide Squad (live service nonsense and mechanics customers don't want) without having the IP recognition of either to draw in players. Plus the marketing sucked.

[@erejnion]

Seems like rather than infighting and needless iteration, the problem was toxic positivity. No criticism was allowed at all. So the rank and file devs may know it's a dumpster fire but they can't do anything about it, not even complain. This is equally time-wasting.

[@hourglass1988]

Remember in netflix's early days of original content they'd basically green light literally any project. They wouldn't give them much of a budget but they figured throw enough darts you'll hit a bullseye, and they did, a few times. Now they have these bigger more expensive flops. The games industry is doing the same thing. Putting all their eggs in one basket. The greatest tragedy here is what we could have gotten if they split them into ten teams and gave them 10 million each. Heck i'd argue take it even further. 100 random wanna be developers and give each a million dollars and a dead line and see what they make.

[@ZombieApocalypse09]

Everything about Concord shows a lack of mastery and understanding of what makes games compelling or fun. From the top Concord is a terrible name for a game. The character designs are both unoriginal and not ripped off enough to be fun. Take their soldier 76 looking guy, he just looks like Johnny Cage but wearing this weird senseless outfit. They have the green Yondu looking dude that again just feels like a bad knockoff in a weird outfit. The art style is awful but they've clearly invested heavily in high tech facial rigs, animation, and voice acting. They really put the cart before the horse there. Who cares about awesome faces and animations for the faces when you're playing an FPS? You never see your own characters face and enemy faces are not going to be close enough and still enough for long enough to appreciate it. Concord is a game made by the people who were on teams that made better games but didn't understand why those games were fun releasing to an oversaturated market. A market that is rejecting live services because nobody has the time or disposable income to play every single game forever all the time. If anyone with authority in that team had any sense for games and the gaming market they would have pulled the plug 4 years ago. Maybe SEGA were geniuses for canning Hyenas after all.

[@GrayMatter337]

you just know theres some blockhead in a boardroom somewhere watching concord burn to the ground going "hmmm yes... well i guess nobody wants original ips for less than 70 dollars..." I swear in 5 years we're gonna find out about a bunch of promising games that got axed to keep this project alive, or got thrown onto the pyre when it died. The list is already forming here and there. And theyll learn all the wrong lessons as to why

[@digitalbadger89]

I'm reminded of Duke Nukem Forever's horrendous development process, where the game coulda been cranked out in 2 years, but devs were told by execs to constantly change the direction of the project to add and change things (often forcing the project to start from scratch) that were hot in the industry at the time. The final result was the whole project falling apart and being bought by Gearbox, who cleaned up what they had and shoved it out the door, proving that it was just a mediocre shooter that had no reason to have taken that much time and money (and ironically missed the trends that made Duke Nukem popular in the first place)

[@corintibbetts-harlow8021]

The part about Concord that is insane to me is the budget. The reality of the modern AAA gaming industry is that a handful of mega profitable live service games make INSANE amounts of money that completely dwarfs the profit of everything else. This makes operating one of these games the holy grail, golden ticket to all of the big publishers, and getting one is the number 1 priority, even despite how difficult it is to do given the incredible amount of competition from the entrenched incumbents. I may not like this state of affairs but that's the reality. Now the mistake here is putting all your money into one spin of the roulette wheel with a 100m game that really is not much more likely to be a hit than something a fraction the cost. The smart play is to make at least ten ~$10m games, where if one (or even 8 or 9) are huge flops it doesn't matter because 1 hit. After all, many of the current kings of the live service genre had a fraction of the budget, see Fortnite and PUBG. That or you realise that the most surefire way to make a monster hit like this is to be the first to do it, and make something that is genuinely new, unique and good enough to create it's own market rather than chasing decade old industry trends to fight over scraps. But that would require putting trust in creatives and can't be sold in an elevator pitch on the quarterly investor call to people with no knowledge of the industry who do the equivalent of astrology with P&L forecasts professionally.

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

Unfortunately, it's not really enough to make a unique product, even a good one. Gamers are fickle. As easy as it is to ay "make a good product and the gamers will buy it" the reality is much colder. A lot of good games with unique designs and gameplay go unnoticed in todays market. Games like Slay the spire or Hollownight got lucky through word of mouth and streams. There's a great game called Inkbound on steam by theguys who made monster train. They even ditched their Battle pass idea they had made to make the game more player friendly, but nobody I know plays it nor wants too. Game development is incredibly hard and just making a good product isn't good enough.

[@mullerpotgieter]

Can we all admit that the horrifically ugly characters were a major part of it? These games live and die by the characters. As crass as it is, the sheer amount of porn Overwatch got helped its popularity

[@RougeMephilesClone]

With the alleged update on Concord's budget from earlier today, I think it's locked in as the game industry's biggest failure. I want to say that this will cause a culture shift, but the truth is that shift may have already started once Jim Ryan left, with Fairgame$ and the next few PS4 remasters for PS5 being the dying gasps of that regime. Microsoft and Sony have proven that they are so unimaginably wealthy that they can tank doing the dumbest things imaginable with their money (at employees' expense), so I don't feel as confident as I should in predicting a major shift before even greater disaster strikes.

[@lowkeyarki7091]

what were they thinking, trying to bank on a genre that depended on an existing massive player count while banning the game from multiple countries with characters so bland looking rule 34 didnt even touch it and on top of that placing a price tag while every other hero shooter is for free. its like they wanted this to fail, like whoever was in charge hated Sony and made sure 8 years and 100 million dollars would be flushed immediately

[@armelior4610]

Is it worse to be cancelled after 2 weeks, or to never ever been released despite being the most expensive game of the publisher ? That's Hyenas : supposedly the biggest budget game of SEGA, developped by Creative Assembly who make Total War, not exactly a live service shooter series... I wonder what went wrong there 🙄

[@darchensol5112]

hyenas as a thing confused the heck out of me. CA have zero experience in that genre, which is amongst the most competitive. who thought that was going to end well? so many better options for that company. go with something they actually have experience with gameplay wise. or go super safe with an established ip. another alien game with the new film(s)? why not focus back on the larger total wars (or tie-ins like warhammer)? or a return to the halo stuff?

[@crushycrawfishy1765]

If you're one of the devs, it's better to actually ship and release a bad game then to never release at all. It looks a lot better n your resume if you want to jump ship elsewhere. A games success, failure, or popularity doesn't reflect poorly on the people who actually build the game.

[@YawaruSan]

Your video is already out of date, new information from former devs indicates Concord cost over 400 million, and half of that was spent from 2023 on to outsource a bunch of the game, so it had a long development cycle AND it was rushed out at the end. The story sounds like a legendary tale of hubris.

[@acf2802]

Ahem. It was actually $400,000,000.

[@richarddakazo2878]

The biggest failure in gaming is starting to let CEOs of fast food companies become CEOs of videogame companies. Game companies used to be run by nerds who wanted to share their passions and creativity with the world, then some businessmen butted in and replaced them, looking to multiply their millions. THAT'S how the greed started.

[@whitemagegoose]

Let me just CASUALLY PEAK INTO THE COSMOS?! LOL

[@GodofGHz]

ET did not cause the video game crash of 83, it was just a symptom of the entire industry.

[@mredbadger]

*in America

[@ByMonitorLight]

I think the full scope of the failure of Anthem is POTENTIALLY yet to be seen. BioWare had their main studio working on an ill-conceived, unfocused, live-service dud, while a smaller, secondary studio was tasked with following up a beloved franchise with something epic in scope and meagre in resources. Anthem was a critical and commercial failure and Mass Effect Andromeda was almost the final nail in a series that had already marred its ample goodwill with a not-well-received finale (personally love ME3, but can't deny the pre-Extended Edition ending was garbage). The only reason BioWare wasn't victim to the usual EA cull is because even EA had to admit they'd been a bit trigger-happy and were running low on big studios at the time, but if the new Dragon Age doesn't remind everyone of what BioWare used to be (minus the crunch- I mean "magic") and swell EA's wallets till the lining splits, BioWare is dead.

[@GrimnirsGrudge]

Oh man, I think the new Dragon Age game is going to curdle. It's gonna have more pull that Concord for sure, but it's lookin' real bad so far.

[@ByMonitorLight]

@@GrimnirsGrudge I've completed Origins and Inquisition, but I'm not a huge Dragon Age fan. I just hope it does well enough to make way for the next Mass Effect. Though with so much of that hinting at a direct sequel that contrives to bring Shepard back, I worry it'll be a lazy, risk-free narrative. Weak though the game was, I thought ME:A's ending set the scene for something (potentially) special in the sequel.

[@atticlion7648]

Don't forget to mention SWTOR. I remember when people recoiled in horror at learning it had a $200m+ budget.

[@geoffreyprecht2410]

"Yeah, it's Macbeth. I can be cultured, you... tit..." Amazing delivery, J! Even more entertaining than Ludo's ad segue!

[@BlueAizu_]

I always thought the way Atari crashed and burned their console business was gaming's biggest failure which took years to recover from, but Concord is definitely giving that a run for its money. At least the Atari 2600 and copies of ET still exist and it actually is based on a beloved property. It was also only made by one guy in five weeks with a shoestring budget, plus it actually sold fairly well for the time. They spent _eight long years_ of hard work with hundreds if not thousands of developers pouring millions of dollars into Concord, a soulless and ugly trend-chasing Overwatch wannabe with Guardians of the Galaxy reject characters that _no one_ wanted, and it didn't even last two weeks. Not a single person seemed to objectively look at it and ask, "would people actually _want_ to play this?" Or maybe they did look it over but had giant cartoon dollar signs replacing their eyes so they couldn't see it. I almost feel bad for them, but they were practically asking to have it blow up in their faces.

[@B.J.Camire]

JM8: "So for anyone as in the dark as I was..." Everyone: Nope, it's obvious from your previous statement that we all know more about E.T. and the crash of '83 than you do 🤣

[@Klishar122]

Another thing to consider: part of the game’s development time was during Covid. When the world was effectively shut down.

[@blahblahblah118]

This game was clearly developed in response to a request for proposal that Sony did. They wanted a Hero Shooter to have one in their portfolio. Exactly why Fairgame$ exists as well, because they want a heist shooter. So the impetus to make it a Hero Shooter came first, the job of Firewalk was to create a compelling one while not cannibalizing sales from any other Sony francises. Also remember that these games take years in development. So it may seem like "trend chasing" now but it could have been leading edge when it was initially proposed, they just took too long for it to come out.

[@AnAngelineer]

People wildly overestimate how much the "bland character designs" are responsible for this game's demise, IMHO. While they certainly didn't help, they can't explain a failure of this magnitude by themselves.

[@user-xsn5ozskwg]

What's even more bizarre to me is the people claiming the reason people don't like the designs is because of diversity. That's a literal staple of hero shooters, especially Overwatch. No one was gonna get the game if suddenly the fat character was skinny or the black woman was a white man instead.

[@polker8380]

​@@user-xsn5ozskwg The funny thing is, I see no diversity in Concord's characters. Most of them are just Americans in cheap cosplay. What a waste of space sci fi setting...

[@lizard81288]

ET was made only in 5 weeks!? That's impressive!