2 wk. ago • 100%

PlayStation to Shut Down New Game ‘Concord’ Two Weeks After Launch, Will Refund Players

variety.com PlayStation to Shut Down New Game ‘Concord’ Two Weeks After Launch, Will Refund Players

PlayStation will be taking its new Firewalk-developed live services game "Concord" offline this Friday, two weeks after its Aug. 23 launch.

Hilarious, when will they learn you cannot sell a game that gamers do not want to play.

45 comments

I love watching live service games fail, it never gets old.

91
- it never get sold?
  
  46
I always feel bad for the devs with these situations. I'm sure there's so much art and effort put into this game even if it sucked, and those people who made it now don't even get to show it off in action. Even if the final result sucked, it still sucks for those people who worked hard on elements of it.

84
- Same. And especially for a live service game, it's just gone. If someone made some great 3D models and animations for an offline game, even if the game doesn't sell very well, their work is still out there. But with a live service game, that's just it. No one else gets to see it for more than a few days.
  
  I also hate the fact that the dev studio will face the consequences of this, while whatever braindead exec with a master's in bullshit administration will probably still be employed.
  
  But at the same time... I can't help but enjoy the spectacular failures of these anti-consumer products lately.
  
  70
  
  Absolutely. And I believe we can both laugh at the stupidity of the leadership while feeling sympathy for the devs who were just doing their job (likely thanklessly). It doesn't need to be picking a side.
  
  12
- I couldn't imagine putting 8 years of effort into a game only for it to bomb. But a least they got their paychecks.
  
  21
  
  There is a good chance if it is a badly managed project by the time it launches everyone working on it already resents the project anyway and will be glad that it is over.
  
  22
- And then there was a developer calling gamers talentless freaks for not enjoying the game so hard to sympathise with everyone.
  
  10
- Reception for the game is not even that bad, it was just handled so poorly that nobody wanted to play it.
  
  8
  
  I wonder how much of the problem is from people simply not knowing about it. It's always fascinating when I first hear about things when they are cancelled.
  
  13
- Technically they still have it in their portfolio when they apply to their next, likely more lucrative job. 3D artists, illustrators, animators, etc, can use assets in highlight reels (usually, especially after NDA is cleared after release).
  
  Also AAA titles are a collaborative effort. While it'll suck to see it panned, knowing you are just the guy who made the hands or something softens that blow.
  
  6
  
  If I worked on Concord, I probably wouldn't want to put whatever I did on it in my portfolio. Id just leave that one off and instead take whatever work I mighr have done, redesign it to be actually appealing, and then include that instead.
  
  2
I never heard of this game, except for how poorly it's performed. I didn't see any sneak peaks, or ads on the Playstation store. I didn't hear about it from friends or guildies.

I know that's a sample size of one, but no one I know or play games with had it in their radar at all. This game showed up one weekend with some drama over psn accounts or something, then flopped and I still know almost nothing about the actual game.

I saw more information on The Finals than I saw on this.

55
- I read an article the other day that said exactly this. It's not unique, it's too expensive, and they did zero promo and advertising.
  
  10
Two weeks? That's got to be a record for the shortest amount of time it took for a live service game to completely crash and burn.

39
- I thought this too initially, but sadly "The Day Before" has it beat
  
  21
- Fastest I've seen was a game called "Hyenas". It was an extraction shooter from Sega and right when it was going to launch they knew the juice wasn't worth the squeeze and cancelled a completely finished game weeks out from launch.
  
  12
Sony failing to get another live service game off the ground really highlights a few things.

How hard it is to launch something in this space. Not only has the market moved away, it was also saturated long before they dropped Condord.

Companies (still) fail to understand that a bad launch isn't exactly death. There are several ways they could of tried to salvage this instead of just Zaslav'ing it for a tax write off 2 weeks in. We've seen plenty of examples in the past 10 years of games that were able to turn themselves around and find success. No reason a company like Sony couldn't align resources to make it happen here.

This should of been on PS+ Day One... I get not putting your shorttail, singleplayer, prestige titles up there at launch. I also get not wanting to go completely F2P, a microtransaction enabled MP game though? Why the hell wouldn't you want the biggest audience possible out the gate? Halo Infinite was a shit show at launch but it was free and has maintained a pretty damn solid user base for years because of it. Hell, I've even picked up a few season passes and cosmetics despite never playing a Halo MP game in the past (outside of lan'ing up for Halo 1 waaaaay back).

Lots more thoughts, but the schadenfreude is just too much right now to avoid jumping on a still warm corpse.
29
- To point 2, I like to mention that Overwatch started off as a scraped game. MMO if I remember right. Oversaturated market, so they took the assets and jumped into hero shooters when the concept was fresh.
  
  Obviously contemporary Blizzard still found a way to ruin it, but to be fair the genre more or less than it's course by then. Anyway, if Sony had an ounce of talent that old Blizzard had, they'd have done likewise.
  
  10
  
  Yeah! Project Titan or something, wasn't it?
  
  4
- “Zaslav’ing” lol
  
  7
- This should of been on PS+ Day One
  
  I'm not a gamer, but isn't a ps+ subscription mandatory for online gaming? If it was free for ps+ games, that meant it was f2p from the start
  
  4
  
  As a technicality you would be correct. Games can be removed from PS+ though and it also lauched day and date on Steam. So calling it F2P instead of a PS+ Day One would be a little harder for fans to swallow on PC where it would still have been $40. See also the aforementioned Halo Infinite which launched on Xbox first then PC but only the multiplayer component is F2P on both. You can play SP with Game Pass Ultimate but you need to purchase a license to do so on Steam.
  
  1
I'm shocked they didn't swap to free to play to at least see if that gate was the issue with player count.

26
- that's still probably the plan. you can't just do that. this game was supposed to have no battlepass and instead make money through sales of the game and future content in dlcs like in the old days. they can't just make it free and run the game for no money for the foreseeable future. I'm sure they're going to try to come up with a monetization plan to switch to free to play.
  
  5
So why was it shit?

23
- Was it even shit or just poorly marketed while also being just another copycat in a sea of copycats trying to be the next big thing? I didn't hear a single thing about this game until it came out, and not one thing I have heard was about the game itself, just how it basically was DOA and had less than 1000 players day 1.
  
  27
  
  I didn't hear a single thing about this game until literally right now.
  
  23
- It depends on who you ask. Some will say that it's an uninspired game with outdated and recycled mechanics that nobody wanted in 2024. Others have a much weirder take, and blame the game's failure on it being "woke".
  
  I think the real issue is that people are just tired of hero shooters, and Concord brought nothing new to the table for the genre.
  
  13
  
  Not sure on the reason for the downvotes here. My understanding is they marketed it very poorly and they brought a hero shooter to a saturated market without adding anything new
  
  2
  
  Lemmy users try to read the entire comment challenge (impossible)
  
  Its an Overwatch clone that released 10 years too late.
  
  The character designs are atrocious, some of which may possibly be due to "DEI consultancy firms" editing/changing/having the final say on character design (don't know what the firms did, so they could have done nothing or had draconian control over every detail), but ignoring that even just on a mechanical level the designs are bad. The silhouettes are hard to read, the color separation is bad, texture variety is bad, cohesion in design patterns is bad. Its like they were designed by people that know nothing about art or character design, IMO equally as bad as when some fanfic writers write about women in the most ridiculous ways possible.
  
  People aren't tired of Hero Shooters. Paladins is doing alright (shockingly), Valorant is still pulling in big player numbers, and Valve's Deadlock is proving MASSIVELY popular and that's not even released yet.
  
  Concord was just a bad game. It featured art nobody liked, characters that were both ugly and boring at the same time, and it demonstrated a profound lack of attention to detail. For example, Concords particles from bullet impacts practically don't exist and the sound does almost nothing to make the player feel like theyre actually shooting a gun.
  
  For $100+ milion and 8 years, where did all that money go? Because it obviously wasn't spent on the game.
  
  -4
- Nothing obvious; no game breaking bugs or unplayability. Just too little, too late. If it came out 5 years ago, it would have a chance, but that space is too crowded now with F2P offerings to tolerate a bland entry with high upfront cost. It sounds like they’ll retool it into F2P, hopefully add something unique, and relaunch.
  
  4
- I didn't play it, but who did?
  
  It was generic and sterilized apparently. It ran fine, had no mtx, but had a 40 dollar price tag, had no big issues.
  
  It just has no hook, no gimmick or anything. It was just boring.
  
  3
- I read its characters got woke designs and it cast a bad reputation on the game, like it was a game made for DEI pandering.
  
  But that's just part of it. I guess it's the Live Service Gaming fatigue, and this game didn't bring anything new to the table to set it apart from Overwatch.
  
  -12
I mean, hey, refunding is at least a cool thing to do. Should be the bare minimum, but tons of publishers seem to just take the money and run.

22
- I mean, they only need to give back like $200, so it really is the least they can do.
  
  3
I saw a bunch of comments about this game deriding it for looking like one of those fake video games you see kids playing in movies and commercials and stuff. So maybe they should sell it to studios for exactly that, like the deal Jack made with Spanish-language soap operas to use Liz Lemon's instantly cancelled Dealbreakers talk show as background on 30 rock

14
This announcement got me laughing like Mutahar:

11
Perfect, now they can focus on the Hogwarts Legacy 2 Live service they promised to pump out , right?

1
- What does Firewalk studios and PlayStation publishing have to do with Avalanche and WB?
  
  5

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