It just looks corporate and soulless, a victim of executive meddling. It's a Consumer Product. It was made to hit quotas, not to be fun. And very normal people are going to obsess about one specific quota that lets them indulge in their worst tendencies.
DEI or woke or anything you want to call it, was just one of the several ingredients inputted into the corporate slop machine, based on what executives thought people wanted. I hope I'm proved to have bought into a conspiracy theory, but that specific ingredient is being pushed by a trillion-dollar investment funds. My cynical explanation for this is that Larry Fink or whoever is the shadowy puppet master, does not actually care for any of the "tokens" but rather just wants to create a framework, that A) they control and B) basically everyone has to comply if they want to run a business. "ESG" was one attempt, "BRIDGE" is the next.
That maybe what happened in the end. It started as an indie. The studio was bought by Sony. They liked what they saw and then presumably had a load of money poured in. I don't know which bits are the original idea and which were mandated after. The scary thing is Sony has another ten of these to crap out and that's just what we know of. They dropped lucky with Helldivers, nearly managed to kill that and need to learn a bunch of lessons. In fact I'm not entirely sure they aren't just trying out a different model for each game and seeing what sticks.
The greatest flaw of these character designs is that they're not stylized in the slightest. A hero shooter needs stylized characters, so that they can stand apart from one-another. See Team Fortress 2 for the optimal example of this, where each character is wearing MOSTLY the same thing, except for pyro, yet their silhoutes immediatly tell you who is who. Overwatch does this well aswell, partially by having the characters be more Things, not Just people. This Game does not do that. This game has humans in aimless cosplays. That's not a hero shooter.
I agree. I don't think the characters in themselves are too bad, yes they are more "normal people" (some of them) than in other games, but that's a bit fun too. But the graphics have that plasticky "almost real" feel to it that I hate. Some stylization would be great.
i think they designed them that way because they want people to see themselves in those characters. If it's stylized then people can't relate (according to them).
@@ryuno2097 Could also be because generic characters are much easier to design interchangeable DLC skinpacks for, as the virtual dressup aspect is a prominent (read: highly profitable) part of these kind of games.
Good point, but also: when all characters in all games are stylized, none of them are. Personally I'm very tired of this design trope and it puts me off all these games at face value.
If the game was simply bad, people would've at least tried it then left. But people didn't even show up to try it during the free open beta. This does not say the game is bad, it says it is repulsive.
This. The First Descendant is a worse game than Concord based on limited gameplay alone, it's extremely boring and derivative. But it's making Nexon a ton of cash based on people buying skins for the hot characters.
Exactly, i was going to post something to this effect. No one showed up to the party meaning word got out that the party was going to be lame. This wasn't a realisation people came to playing the game because it peaked at less than 700 and was dead within a week XD Kira is dead wrong with this analysis.
We saw Soldier 76 in OW, and then this game have generic McShooter dude with salvaged Stormtrooper armor parts slapped on here and there holding a generic sci-fi bullpup rifle.
Yeah I mean even if it was free, do you honestly see more than even a handful of people being willing to spend money on cosmetics/skins and such for these characters? It's like people think hoyo is successful only cause of stellar gameplay xD
@@Talking_Ed I believe much of Overwatch's sales are due to mercy, dva, tracer and widowmaker. When it comes to any sort of fan engagement, be it social media, fanart, animations, videos, coversation, its largely those characters. And you know why. You know why.
@@Talking_Ed I mean character design and marketing goes hand to hand... There is reason why valorant and ow are successful.. And even tho its sad its the reality sexy sells... + The gameplay is better...
Man, I wished more people understood the reality you mentioned about the majority of gamers that are not terminally online... It's always these people that keep yelling in every post or comment how this time a game series will for sure be the last, failing to realize the reason the series keeps making more generic slop is because there's a huge audience that just comes from work, buys the game, plays it a few times maybe until they finish it and that's it.
Yea , I have to disagree on the whole character thing. Of course it's not the main reason the game is failing , but it's a contributing factor. Just look at something like the first descendant or even gacha games. Some gacha games have little to no gameplay and sell characters like hot cakes. Saying that bad looking characters (which imo were made with an agenda in mind) didn't contribute to the game's failure is completely false. I believe that an appealing cast of characters can compensate to an extent for bad gameplay.
Definitely. Personally I wouldn't have been interested in the game either way (at least with the price tag it has), but even if I were, the character designs would have made me not buy it. Almost none of the characters are the least bit interesting, and there's only a couple or so that I could ever see myself playing as. The characters definitely matter, and could have potentially drawn in a lot of people that chose not buy it.
@@DemoNova Even if it were free, and a different genre, and you change everything aside from the characters, the game would still fail I think. F2P still means you need to be spending money on the skins and cosmetics for them to be making money, and those things would have to apply to those characters, and I know I sure as hell wouldn't be spending money on a skin for "DAW" and I find it extremely hard to believe many would. I think in any scenario, with these characters, the game fails.
@@colwellalec your clearly forgot how much people would spend if they like a character enough, would that alone save the game? probably not but at least i would say it might get 1k people to actually try it if it had an iconic character like the first OW did.
Agree. I think Kira is thinking too much in black and white terms here: "game's bad and that's the only reason the game failed." Nah, that's perhaps the #1 reason but in reality there's a bunch of reasons that all contribute to the game's failure. And yes, woke is one reason. Ugly characters is another reason. People like looking at pretty / cool people, that's just how human brains work.
@@KPX01 Yeah so I think we're pretty much in agreement, which btw about 2k or 3k people did try it during the various betas, but I think even that isn't enough when we're talking about this game costing Sony like $200 million
I dont think it has anything to do with the price. Marketing was way off and gameplay looked horrible. If people liked the game on open beta this game could have done a lot better even with a higher price tag. But the game was shit.
More than that it has terrible mechanics Locking your hero if you win a round with them? Wow what a brilliant strategy of punishing a person for being good at the game. They asked for this and sony deserves the L
if the characters all looked really cool, with a nice art style they would get more sales initially just from how it looks. Then theyd also need to nail gameplay to keep those players. It seems like they failed on both fronts.
Gamers have been complaining about in-game purchases for years now. A shooter with an upfront price instead of endless pay to play scams would have been welcomed if it was good. Consumers have been willing to pay $70 or more for games that are actually good. Concord's problem is that it is complete trash. It was designed and coded by brainlets who put their political messaging above gameplay and above quality. Nobody would be playing this hunk of shit even if it was free.
You are wrong. If it was just the game not being good there would have been more players the first day. The aesthetic is too unappealing for people to give it a chance. the game could be good and no one would have bought it regardless.
@@kirareacts Why didn't more people play the beta when it was free then, or the first beta before anyone really knew how it played? If it's so bad then why did journalists praise it, with mostly positive reviews on steam from the people who have played it? If the characters aren't bad and that's not a selling point then why were the CGI trailers downvoted to oblivion before anyone saw a moment of gameplay? With the top comments basically all saying "trash, soulless characters, immediately turned me off to it?" Also just saying OW still gets like 55k concurrent players daily (just on steam), while being one of the worst rated games on the platform, so while past its peak I think its disingenuous to act like there aren't people that would want some kind of replacement that are still sticking around in OW2, in spite of apparently thinking its terrible, for whatever "mysterious" reason.
@@AnthraxGH You just proved the opposite of your own point. Everyone complained about OV2 being 'woke' because some of the characters are gay in the backstories they release as little anime's, and too many of them weren't white, but because it's a good game the right wingers make a loud noise about how woke it is, but then still play it. Concord is a terrible game, if every character was a butch straight white male, or a white stripper in a string bikini with a gatling gun and each of their tits had a 5ft circumference, it would still be a poorly put together, derivative, Overwatch 1 clone, for $40, when Overwatch 2, and the three similar yet better looking games to this announced by SONY in the same showcase, are all free. Good 'woke' game gets complained about but played, bad 'woke' games get complained about less because nobody plays it to care and it doesn't get your video pushed up the algorithm, then not played, and everyone says "get woke go broke" even though much more woke good games still make tons of money, and bad games would fail anyway without the 'wokeness.' Just a question, do you think that Ghostbuster remake failed because the director is terrible, the jokes weren't funny, the pacing was bad, and it ended with a god damn musical scene near enough, or do you think it failed JUST because people were angry there were women in it, and even more angry one of them was black, and they decided to "teach Hollywood a lesson" and not a watch an amazing movie in protest? Because Ben Shapiro, Midnight's Edge, and that guy who got his ass kicked by a trans-woman at a magic the gathering party, will tell you it's the second option, and that Concord is failing SOLELY in protest at 'woke' and it's failure shows how much they 'own the libs.'
Kira, one question, one opinion. 1) How does the color changing light not bother you? 2) I strongly disagree that the character design has only a slight impact on sales. Has nothing to do with woke or anti-woke. But in a hero shooter, the first thing people see are the heroes. Not the gameplay. Even marketing material for these kind of games are mainly character trailers or story bits that have nothing to do with gameplay. If your designs are not good, people won't even bother to stay to see the gameplay. If characters were nothing but hot chicks and cool guys, that 600 player peak would be 60000.
@yaldabaoth2 absolutely. The character designs and how marketable the game is goes hand in hand. Having these ugly character is like doing some sick form of negative marketing. they are just objectively ugly.
He obviously agrees with what they're doing, but wants to portray himself in a neutral light where he's better than people who disagree with him. He did the same for sweet baby and will probably run defense for dustborn next.
It’s confusing conceptually. It’s a shooter but it’s the safest shooter. Meticulously balanced but wants to be casual. Comes out with some of the sweatiest modes like kill confirmed instead of capture the flag or push casual mode
Demon's Souls and Bloodborne PC ports would (probably) get them record sales. Still nowhere to be found. Imagine being so out of touch with reality when your only focus is making money.
I dunno brother, I feel like the game itself is just pretty mediocre. The primary reason it failed is almost surely the character design being pure slop
It was never going to be the next overwatch or tf2, but it surely would have at least broken 1k players if the half characters weren't physically repulsive lol
Partially. But I also think the game is just too..."samey" compared to any other offerings in this genre out there as well. What does Concord realistically do that Overwatch, Apex, or Valorant doesn't? The crew-based character selection system? Like...awesome, I guess? Barely affects the core gameplay at the end of the day, which is just somewhat more protracted firefights that you'd see in overwatch or apex. In a world dominated by Pepsi and Coke, Sony decided to release the RC Cola of sci-fi hero shooters and somehow expected it to win big.
I was never going to play Concord. It just didn't look very fun, and I don't really do hero shooters anymore. Why would anyone pay for a Hero Shooter when all the others are free to play? Of course, this was never going to work! I do think the rocket launcher chick looked cool. The 3rd robot arm to help hold the weapon was neat.
@@mav9143 that charging $40 for a big budget overwatch-like game was standard. Usually they just go free to play after a year or two. So the price tag doesn't surprise me at all.
Price is a good point. Sure i understand exchange rates and such, but for me that $40 is $60... If you wont pay $40 for it, you think im gonna pay 60? Even if it is the same price after conversion, it still feels like an even worse rip-off
I disagree. Character designs are absolutely a huge part of a hero shooter. And these designs obviously are unappealing to majority of people . Overwatch has an arguably pretty woke cast but the designs are still attractive and hot enough to court the normal public while this game dives off the deep end. Especially for a competitive shooter, you would want to expand the game to a global market, and these designs just would not stand a chance in the Asian market.
Yup if I see an ad for basically any other hero based game on the market I will see at least one character I just need to play. In Concord I do not have that so I wouldn't even feel bother to not download it to try it even if it was free
I agree it looks cool IF the characters you're playing look appealing, edgy looks like a killer or something. These characters are all lame, they don't inspire much imagination. And it's a shooter it would be worse if it was an RPG too. None of them look like the hero or the villain or the nerd or the ALWAYS important in my book sexual appeal haha 😂😂
That's the thing. Even looking past the "inclusive" and "progressive" character designs, the game is less than mediocre and came out nearly a decade later than it should've to even have a chance.
Yeah but even before we saw a moment of gameplay the trailers and such were being downvoted to oblivion, people clearly didn't like this from the get-go and I do think its disingenuous to act like the characters have nothing to do with it, and even if it's because it's just bad, why did it turn out that way? Cause I'd argue DEI policies inherently will create something like this, because they care more about making things "diverse and inclusive" as opposed to making a product that will appeal to the audience that actually exists, not the one they wish existed. What you mentioned played a role for sure, but Concord isn't the only example of this happening, and I think if you remove the paywall, make it a f2p model with microtransactions (which I think they will do), make it a different genre even, it would still fail because only a handful of people would actually care to spend money on these characters, the people championing this stuff on social media are not the ones actually spending money on the products.
@@redchinhunt721Hmm The original overwatch roster was plenty diverse but sported a ton of great character designs.. The two can easily co-exist imo. I dont really care if characters have pronouns listed, or if they dont wanna include any sexy ladies... Just make actual memorable characters and we are good. Sadly, only about 2-3 or so of the concord characters really stand out to me.
@@MaMastoast people like kira and a lot other like you missed the point when people complaining about it being "woke". Games had diverse cast of character for a long time and had sold well. So why people hate concord and modern game that tout diversity then? To me at the very least the so called games are not games and just using diversity as a selling point. Most games that touting diversity often time comes out ugly af, and has to be fat and trying hard to justify something that isnt like the recent assasin creed. OW1 do not promote the game as being diverse what so ever at the start, and when they do try to pander later on it really reek of just have the check box done like now we have gay character like soldier 76 was.
@@KPX01the problem is these games only selling point is diversity and not liking them is obviously the person complaining not liking diversity, it has nothing to do with the fact we put no focus on creating a good game. They're essentially trying to guilt people into liking it. Idk how people haven't realised gamers honestly don't care who or what a character is as long as the games good. We happily play as any character regardless of race, religion, sexuality, conventional levels of attractiveness, heck they don't even have to be human. A good game is a good game. If you released an amazing title that happened to have a differently abled black lesbian woman as the lead as long as you don't go around shoving it down people's throats saying look how diverse we are 99% of people would just accept it without even thinking about it. Ultimately isn't that what we want? For everyone regardless of beliefs, shape and looks to be seen as accepted and normal
@@MaMastoast No one said anything about diversity in and of itself. I was very specific to say DEI policies, and I know so many people just hear that and think it solely means diversity but it doesn't, it's diversity for all the wrong reasons at a corporate level to rake in ESG grants and such, soulless pandering. I mean I just don't think it's a coincidence when it's like that, every time the characters are just stereotypically diverse, ugly, and bland, and DEI consultants like SBI exist purely for that, to solve a fake issue of representation that people like them created. Like the people above me said when you are focused on that and acting like it's a selling point, it shows me that the focus is not on the game, hence you will always get a bad one, and I'd also argue games were always "diverse" especially in what in my opinion is the most important way, which is diversity of thought. Also just wanted to come back here to say IGN even did a poll asking if Concord was f2p would people give it a shot, and even there on a pretty far left site 60% (which also makes it the most voted answer by far) of people said no, they have no interest whatsoever. Which was my original point, that I don't think the price or the genre were the biggest roadblocks, and that with these characters specifically the game will always fail. So yeah tbh you were arguing against a point I didn't make, of course good characters can be whatever, you guys always just wanna jump on people like me and basically play the racism card (which not saying you did specifically, but happens a lot) and put words in my mouth as if I'm saying it failed cause of black people or something, when again I said DEI which is basically a political agenda, there is a difference, just so sick of it when tbh from my perspective the people defending this stuff are doing more harm to the people they claim to represent by being diverse for pandering and monetary reasons, basically as a political chip, while always seeming to create the most stereotypical diversity possible. Like it just blows me away how hard some people are getting played by this stuff. All I'm advocating for at the end of the day is games made by and for gamers, the actual gaming audience not the pretend "modern audience" that showed up in the dozens for Concord or other DEI games like it.
I don't know man, reviewers praised the gameplay itself, but when your characters suck nobody wants to give it a shot, this had an open beta for a whole weekend and people still didn't play it. I don't even engage with this anti woke shit, I just think the characters are very soulless compared to overwatch and TF2, Apex also had this problem at the start but they did some pretty good ones with Watson and Loba.
This just isn't true for the overwhelming majority of players. Plenty of games have virtually no story and zero depth to any characters, and yet are some of the most popular games on Earth. I mean what depth is there to the character of Minecraft Steve? Absolutely none whatsoever, we hardly even know his name is Steve. Minecraft basically doesn't have a story. Doesn't stop Minecraft being massively popular even to this day, because people like the gameplay. For some games it's more of a story telling method for sure, and those games will fail if the story isn't up to scratch or the characters suck and nobody cares about them. But I'd say that is not at all the case for a looter shooter type game. Main thing is the game has to be fun.
practically nobody "praised" the gameplay though. "not THAT terrible" is pretty much the highest praise they´re gotten, which, unsurpringly isn´t enough for people
"the gameplay is not that bad" is not exactly a praise, most people that is not a game journalist say the gameplay is just not that bad. meaning it's not as bad what they think it would be. some say the gameplay is solid, but that's the extend of the praise. nobody i see ever say the gameplay are interesting or exciting, or adrenaline pumping, etc. i really don't care about the politics, but to me, concord is just a mediocre hero shooter, with no interesting character, that is also paywalled, why would i play this game? when i could play overwatch instead?
Really all gaming publications are massively untrustworthy at this point, but ign isn't even a gaming publication anymore. They don't care about actual gameplay and more trying to make diversity an issue. It's essentially a group of those 2010s memes of over the top rainbow hair Karen's getting offended over anything and everything masquerading as a gaming publication. Which given I'm part of two of the groups they're apparently championing I apologise they don't speak for the majority, just the close minded idiots who want to make problems out of nothing
Kits of characters, sure. Looks for some people. I couldn't personally care less what my first person shooter character looks like, because I don't see it. It's first person. If the game was competitively fun, competitive shooter players would play it. They don't. Characters are a small factor in that, looks wise.
@@kirareactsIf that were true, skin microtransactions and cosmetics wouldn’t sell anywhere near as much as they do. Looks absolutely matter, in games & IRL. Far more than most have the balls/are willing to admit. You may not like or agree with it, but it’s just a flat-out fact. People want to look cool in games because it feeds the power/cool factor fantasy. It’s that simple. No one wants to look like a bozo or some deliberate amalgamation of anti-appealing design. Doesn’t matter how shallow it is in one’s opinion, it’s just the cold-hard truth. Don’t appeal to it, it’ll reflect in the sales. It’s not rocket science.
I never said anything that you just said. And again, you seem to be ignoring that this is a first-person shooter. I'm unsure what you're even replying to or discussing by replying with that to my comment.
@@kirareacts Um, where did I say that you said anything I said...? It was a rebuttal to what you said before that... *I couldn't personally care less what my first person shooter character looks like, because I don't see it. It's first person.* *Characters are a small factor in that, looks wise.* Those are the statements I was referring to. Like, are you serious??? And you seem to be ignoring the fact that it being an FPS is irrelevant, because there are plenty of FPS's where players dump money, time, and/or effort into altering their character's appearance. So... what does that have to do with anything? That's not even an actual argument.
Kira talks the character designs around 14:50; he acknowledged the character designs as "not compelling" among other things. Most of what Kira focused on was the total experience of the game & the company decisions. Which is why I'm here; he's even-handed.
Yep, your points are reasonable. Here’s how the conversation should’ve gone: Firewalk Studio: “Can you give us $200 million to make a wannabe hero shooter where we literally copy paste features of all the other hero shooters and make it hardcore DEI including a green white guy, then work on it for 8 years to release it late to the party?” Sony: “You have Overwatch and Fortnite at home.”
Lol really? Being a bit wilfully ignorant I feel. The game had abysmal numbers. That goes beyond just being a bad game. Bad games release and still get thousands of players trying them out and even during Concord's free weekend, nobody was touching it. It should be very apparent that that speaks to something being fundamentally unappealing with the game before anyone even had played it. I assume this is alt-right crazy talk but, to me, it seems that with a HERO shooter, the HEROES do a lot of the heavy lifting. I could argue this little fact all day but the reality is the two most successful hero shooters of all time had put a lot of effort into their characters, character designs, and marketing prior to their release. Everybody knows who Tracer is, and Tracer + Widowmaker were immediately recognisable as being part of Overwatch prior to the game ever releasing. Same with TF2. The 'Meet the Team' videos highlighted each of the characters, playstyle and personality before the game released. They wouldn't put so much effort into marketing characters if they weren't relevant to the game's success. Now you can try and argue that the poor character designs have nothing to do with politics and this does come down to a more subjective, less evidence based argument but I would bet my left testicle that one of the main priorities for the design team was diversity. And I would bet my right testicle that that was not the main focus for the people behind Overwatch and TF2.
Overwatch has always been really concerned with diversity. It seems so strange people would give it as a counter-example of diversity in games. Give me one other game where one of the hero options is an elderly woman. Go on, I'll wait.
@@ladrok97 Yeah, and they used to actually play up how any given character provided representation to one group or another. "Wokeness" is not a barrier to having good art, and Concord doesn't lack good art because of it. Probably the art team just didn't have good talent or leadership.
@@mitrovarr If anything, I'd love to see more cool old grannies in video games kicking ass. It's such a hilarious concept that it circles back to actually being cool and fun. Take Ida Lennox from Evolve, for example: a granny that manages to be a great design by virtue of being a brilliant mechanical engineer that hunts giant monsters by jumping into a hulking mech suit she designed and called the "Thunderchild Armor" in reference to an ironclad warship from War of the Worlds, with a repurposed AA gun in one arm and an energy pilebunker in the other. The old lady in Concord could've been a cool design worth playing in a million different ways--all of the characters in the roster could have--but they're not because of terrible art direction.
@@mitrovarr Yes but Tracer has a good design, she stands out, she also has a real personality and her whole character does not hinge on her being gay. Concord on the other hand has a bland rubbish bin as character.
It's amazing how much Sony just doesn't understand how to handle a online focused game. Helldivers 2 they fumbled after a great start, canceled Spider-man multiplayer which honestly looked fun, canceled TLOU multiplayer, canceled a Twisted Metal multiplayer game, Bungie is on a constant downward spiral and both Destiny and the upcoming Marathon aren't looking good...and now Concord.
To be honest I want them to keep pumping shitty games like this, because people will realize that having this "AAA" in a game doesn't mean it's a good game.
Honestly, I don't think it would have done well even if it was good. The market for live services games is small in users and it's already severely over saturated as is. For a new one to succeed I feel it'd have to not only be good, but the single best live service available in whatever game type it'd fall into.
Yeah; this was DoA. I mean; actually charging for a game where every other game in the genre was free was basically setting yourself up for failure. This had to end up being the best game of that genre for it to even have a chance.
Concord is just a Stale White Bread Sandwich (no toppings, not even any meat), and I don't think it was interesting in any way from even the first showing. So from what I see, most people looked at it, said "No", and didn't want to engage with it. It happens. Any of the "DEI", "woke" talk around the game's failure is just noise, and people are getting too hung up on that from being online so much.
I'm sorry, I'm as tired of the whole EVERYTHING IS WOKE trend as anyone but those characters are fking uninteresting, except for how hideous they are, and that would ruin it for me.
@@vicc6790 To a degree, there is no doubt that there is a significant group of content creators who will freak out over anything remotely progressive or non-traditional.
@@MaMastoast But denying that wokeness is harming the gaming industry is just stupid... Like nobody has problem with diversity in games as long as it fits the story and lore and the game... But currently it is being forced... You either hire consultation firms like SBI or you dont get funding. AKA if you dont have huge amounts of money yourself to fund the game there is not gonna be any game... Developers are forced to include wokeness in their games.. That is a fact.. These people have said themselves they want to force it on to people.. This same shit is going on in the movie industry... We need to say NO to DEI shit... Forced inclusion helps no one and only harms those who it aims to help....
@@vicc6790 I concede that you're correct and there is truth to it and I probably chose my words poorly. I'm just tired of the culture wars in general. It would be great if the people making products would make products their customers actually want. Me being annoyed at the people who are tired of the sub-par product is probably the wrong take.
Apex legends - free Overwatch 2 - free Valorant - free Paladins - free Team fortress 2 - free Rainbow six siege - 19,99 (in my country) Charging 40 bucks was never gonna work. My guess is Concord did this because they knew it wouldn't do well enough to make lots of money as ftp with a cash shop.
Gotta disagree with ya on the characters, Kira. More than anything, character design, silhouettes and fantasy are the biggest draw for hero shooters, for the same reason as in Mobas or gacha games. People get invested in the characters, lore, mechanics and play styles. Concord, even ignoring the DEI/culture war shit, has bad character designs that most people won't be interested in. Id say after the $40 price tag, this is #2, probably tied with the awful gameplay.
I can understand wanting to have a different narrative for your video. But saying that these characters had nothing to do with the game failing is naive. But you seem to have a lot of odd takes lately.
@@gmonkman Im not the person you asked, but I'll answer :) I just think most of the characters are very difficult to remember, and therefore difficult to like. I have seen a fair bit of gameplay by now and I still only really remember a few of them. If you compare overwatch characters with concord characters you'll see a pretty big difference in how clearly defined each character is from a visual, thematic and naming perspective. Kenshi, for example, literally has a name that means "swordsman", it is also japanese which helps us remember that he is the ninja character. His visual is basically just a cyborg ninja, its a clear archetype and it helps us remember him. His role of "the ninja" is also supported by his mechanics, which has him jumping and dashing his way through the battlefield. McCree's name, paired with his design mirroring "the man with no name" helps us easily remember him as "The cowboy". His most distinctive ability is basically him going into an old-west duel with anyone who dares face him head on. Widowmaker is a clear Femme Fatale archetype, a sexy french lady who is emotionally cold and will kill you with no remorse, an archetypes further enhanced by her being a sniper, a playstyle literally removed from the conflict. She also uses poison, which further leans into the femme fatale idea. Meanwhile most of concord's characters are just funny looking people, there are a few exceptions, but they generally dont have anything memorable about them, and they rarely lean into pop culture archetypes. I like 1-off, the design is fairly memorable and the name fits pretty well... Meanwhile, who on earth is "Daw"?
Exactly, it’s not that the characters alone decided the fate, but when you’re memed to oblivion for having awful designed chars that look AI generated, it’ll probably hurt your image. People usually don’t care about boycotts and things like that and I agree that the game wasn’t boycotted, it was just ugly, uninspired, repetitive, non fun looking and with chars that are very bland.
I mean, it isn't bad, but like starfield, it just isn't good either. If you looked up "meh" in the dictionary, there would be a picture of concord next to it. There are other free to play games that do it way better, so why waste £40 on this one. Not to mention, every sentence is total cringe.
Agree. I think at this point "go woke go broke" is just the obvious truth, and those railing against it like Kira here are either "enlightened centrists, both sides are wrong and I'm the only one who is right" or, well, woke activists. I get that people are tired of people saying "this is woke" but it's still true, whether people are tired of that or not.
It really doesn't hold water when countless things people call "woke" made and make boatloads of money. It's bad character design and bad game design, their identities have nothing to do with it. Overwatch has a blatantly diverse cast and was still very successful despite Blizzard neckbeard blowback occasionally, it only started to fail when the game design became lame and samey and people got bored.
There were two hard no moments for me with Concord. The first was that it required me to sign in to PSN to play, and I don't buy games with that requirement any more. The second was the $40 price tag. I would pay that and more for a title that wasn't in the competitive hero shooter space, but I can't think of any of Concord's competitors that are still premium titles. Because of these, I never even got to the step of trying the game.
I would argue that the ugly-ass characters sunk this game, honestly. Look at First Descendant. 27,278 players right now, 24-hour peak of 38,137, and an all-time peak of 264,860. The First Descendant is also BORING AS HELL to play. Gameplay-wise, Concord runs laps around this game. But First Descendant has appealing characters that people have no problem grinding endlessly to unlock (or straight up pay for, because it's a Nexon game). Meanwhile Concord has only 189 players online right now, a 24-hour peak of 206, and an all-time peak of 697. As much as I like to laugh at Concord, I had more fun playing it during the beta than I did playing First Descendant. Yet it was obvious from the start that First Descendant would be a lot more successful than Concord, and it won't take me a half-hour video to explain why. If Concord released with hot characters, we wouldn't be dancing on it's grave right now. We'd all be playing it.
@@Talking_Ed Really? Maybe they just targeted them poorly. I saw a few ads for the game leading up to release, and around the time of the open beta (that's why I downloaded it to give it a shot). I thought it was going to be like Borderlands or Destiny, since all I saw was some sort of story trailer with no gameplay.
@@stizzo135 I'm playing and getting a lot of games and never heard of it which was weird, maybe they targeted the ads on some platform I don't use, who knows.
He was wrong to say character designs aren't a significant issue, but there are many significant issues, even bigger than that, the 3 main ones being that it's a $40 online only game in an almost entirely free to play genre, it's a game that doesn't make itself stand out in any way in a very very crowded market, and lastly being it's bad, even before the beta the gameplay we saw looked at best serviceable, and people who cared enough to play the beta confirmed as such, if the gameplay was very good and there was something that made the game stand out then it would be very popular regardless of character design, the terrible character design isn't why the game failed but did make what was obvious going to flop just flop harder than it would have
Also if the characters were hot we wouldn't all be playing it, people like good character design yes but the game still would be an expensive game in an overcrowded free to play genre that doesn't stand out in any way, first descendant had succes because it's free if it was even $10, it would have a small fraction of the players it has, it would definitely have way more success than Concord sure but that isn't saying much
Pricing probably a big issue when the rest is free 2 play, also marketing, I never heard of the game before, the only thing I heard is that no one plays it.
Shame about the designs because it's clear that the people who actually made the characters did a really skilled job. Well modeled, great materials, and good animations, all wasted because there's like 1.5 characters that don't look like side characters
@@lucasLSD Because Life is Strange was actually a good game and while it dealt with political idea it didn't actually do it in an insulting way like Dustborn. Honestly at first I barely noticed that Life is Strange was political at all
It's pretty clear they wanted to step on and steal Overwatch's players. They want to make WEEKLY cut scenes in a game with no interactive narrative. This on the surface sounds great everyone loves dope cut scenes but if you took off playing a season you would come back to DOZENS of cut scenes that you most certainly would not watch since these characters are actual randos with no marketed personality. Are resources being put towards a VIDEO GAME or a platform for an animated movie?
The devs reacting badly feels like an extension of the capital G gamer community. An IP being the center point of someone’s personality and if others attack/change/interact differently with that IP they feel they are being attacked personally.
No. First, it's "Concorde". Second, per the FAA, "At the time of the Air France accident in 2000, the Concorde had not experienced a single accident involving a fatality during its nearly 25 years of service." No other airplane can match that. Concorde flew dramatically fewer flights than other airplanes, so from a statistical perspective, with that single accident, it went from a perfect safety rating to an abysmal one. But no, Concorde did not "keep killing people". The Concorde failed mainly for business and economic reasons.
Even if the game got better and became amazing, people remember. Not how it was, but what was the outlook of the people behind it. Were they sorry it didn't meet expectations and promised to take people's feedback seriously? Or were they insulting their (potential) player base? Even for an ex-employee, what that animator said should warrant lawsuit from Sony, cuz it did damage their brand image.
I would of given it a try with my friends, but I would have to bought the game for them for 40 dollars each, since they are not paying 40 dollars when there are other great free games that we can play. If it was free we probably would of gotten online for a couple of hours and tried but with this pricing no way.
I think DEI hurt the game in a way not that people actively boycotted it. DEI leads to game design decision such as less sexy characters, less edgy content. Sex and edginess sale. It may not be the sole factor that kills the game, but it led to a decrease of initial appeal that attracts players.
I don't agree that character design is a non-factor, but at the same time, the only part of the argument people make about the character design that's true is that it's hot garbage and universally unappealing. The fact that people are chalking it up to "wokeness" makes no sense, because, by their own idea of what "woke" is, basically every Hero Shooter following (and including) Overwatch has been "woke", because they all use the exact same character archetypes as eachother. If "woke characters" were a deterrent to fans of the genre, Overwatch would've never taken off to begin with.
Lets be real, only reason why game journalists are being soft on this game is because it's Playstation/Sony. They're always known to handle them with kid gloves and let them get away with anything.
the funny thing is with poeple who hate the game case they see it as woke and people who hate the game cause it is bad, they both came to the same conclusion that the game is not good, they both just went through different paths and got to the same location regardless.
The game likely was in developer hell. It's original publisher almost immediately shoveled it off to Sony. It was in development under Sony for only 3 of those 8 years.
@@Talking_Ed 2 years of development, then the vision changes to keep up with current trends and you have to redesign everything. Then it changes again and you have to redesign everything a second, third, fourth time. Oops, new console generation, now get it working on PS5. Suddenly it's 8 years later and you've turned into Duke Nukem Forever.
The game is 8 years too late, the character design is awful that even r34 artist avoided like the plague and it is $40. That is its downfall and game devs here have no foresight.
Rare Kira L. Saying that character design doesn't matter in hero shooters is insane, both OW and TF show that's bs. That aside politics are the reason the characters look like "Base Californian Hair Model Nr 220002" and you get that instead of another DVA or Mercy .
If you want a really good comparison, compare how Concord is doing vs Deadlock. Another hero shooter that came out of nowhere, that is also a MOBA and it has around 100k players at peak currently
Also regarding the anti woke thing, again Deadlock exists and a lot of the characters are either not human or female. There's a few white guys but the majority are female or robots or something else. So its nothing to do with the character cast of concord, more so I think just the game marketing was very bland and the character designs come across as bland too. It felt like it was trying to be marvel with characters we knew nothing about and had no reason to care.
Number of reasons not to buy: 1) Competitor games are free to play 2) I highly dislike deliberately created DEI type games (I accept that others wont feel this way) 3) The characters look awful
I think most people agree with your 2) there, it's just that the ones who disagree are loud and the ones who agree don't want to speak up and get yelled at.
All I'm getting is that these devs should've been put to to make a cinematic heavy singleplayer game but were put to work on a multiplayer shooter instead.
It's wild. I just checked, 66 are playing currently, 198 is the 24hr peak. I would've thought, people would play it now more, just for the lols and memes alone.
I’m sorry but I’ve never even heard of this game, and by the looks of it not many other people have either, or not enough to actually give it a play. Meaning the people that did pay attention to it are a scant few (which is an assumption but from the lack of players it seems reasonable). Also let’s not pretend like the game being “woke” isn’t an issue or had nothing to do with its failure. It’s certainly not the driving factor but it’s still a factor, and pretending like it’s not is a bit disingenuous. AAA games these days have the burden of trying to cater to everyone, and while that’s a sound business decision in concept, in practice it stifles creativity. There’s a myriad of other issues too, but the biggest reason I and everyone I know has stopped playing almost anything made by AAA studios is because they all feel like the same game these days. It’s not that I’ve stopped playing video games, it’s that much smaller indie games, with well defined concepts, solid mechanics, and often unique styles and gameplay are a much more engaging experience.
I find this game genuinely fascinating, there has never been a more obvious flop in the history of media yet Firewalk, Bungie and Sony had complete faith in it when everyone else knew this would fail for so many blatently obvious reasons
Oh man do I relate to the general frustration with things being dumbly labeled as "woke". It's such a copout way to critique something. Ask 5 different people what woke means and you'll get different answers. I'm quite sure that's deliberate, considering the way it's commonly used/the people it's used by, but it's a completely useless thing to bring into a discussion as a result. You can express what you don't like about these uninspired/ugly character designs in an infinitely more productive way by simply describing what aspects don't work. If "wokeness" really was as poisonous as people make it out to be then Overwatch 1, TLoU 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't have become as popular/acclaimed as they are. Concord failed because the people leading the project clearly don't understand the market it's trying to compete in. The priorities are all wrong.
I remember when Paragon was shut down mid development, and it was way more fun and playable than this. Let's just hope that whoever made executive decisions on Concord, would never be allowed near any other project.
Its kinda wild how any "normal" gamer could have told the devs at least two years ago how this is gonna go over at launch after seeing the game for 15 mins..
Imo the gameplay looks ok-ish, it suffers from a very bland character design and I'am not a fan of it's 0.75 speed compared to other hero shooters. Being bland overwatch for 40 dollars with just ok-ish gameplay kills it even before taking in any "culture war" stuff affecting sales.
Maybe its unfair because the history of Marvel Comics doing decades worth of story writing...but I genuinely struggle to have fun playing Overwatch with my friends, Marvel Rivals is legitimately so much fun though, to the point I am legit missing it after the beta test period a few months ago. If the gameplay of Concord was good enough to be mentioned once ever by anyone talking about the game, and the draw of the characters was there at all- like if they were JUUUST a bit more stylized I think Concord might have had a solid niche as a hero shooter. I will always say we need more body types represented in media, but faded out neon colors, baggy clothes, and generic sci-fi military fatigues w/ bulbous armor plates doesnt sell me on the characters at all. Even the robot is so bland while also being cute. I think the realism actually hurts the game a lot.
Concord is a Sony Exclusive. IGN would rather nuke what's left of their reputation as a games media outlet than criticize, call out, or otherwise actually critically evaluate a Sony Exclusive. It's pitiful, really, but nothing new in it.
Alright lets ignore the developers lashing out at people who didnt buy it, lets ignore character design, lets ignore the political pandering with SBI and ill give ya why it failed for just a moment. It was 40 dollars when your main competition is f2p(overwatch), followed by some other f2ps that actually have a sizeable audience like valorant, paladin, TF2, and others. On top of that, hero shooters have been on a major incline as well as the rest of the market, with some exceptions. On top of THAT, there is already a major anti live service sentiment being pushed by most gamers now a days because of companies like activision and ubisoft. Now for the thing that sealed its fate. It could be the most anti woke game in existence. It could have npc's screaming MAGA with fireworks going off in the background and the game would still be shlt. The developers (or whatever developer) deciding to call any critics talentless freaks, when they most likely have pronouns in their bios, just sealed their fate of most not wanting to give them a chance. You can only be arrogant when your shlt is good. y c Besides that, imagine being a part of the alphabet community and being told this game is a representation for you and your ideals, only to see intentionally ugly characters, with many of em being black or of some non white complexion. Is that how your allies see you? Of course they arent gonna flock to the game. In essence, this game was made for no one but the developers to feel better about themselves. This is why a rejection of this game is so personal to them because it is them being rejected(in their mind). They are so obsessed with """owning the chuds""", that they are literally insulting the very people they proclaim to champion. Remember folks when people think LGBTQ+ games now, it is games like this, and other failures, people will remember.
Nah, the gameplay is mid, character design is souless with negative hype leading up its release into a saturated market. Destined to fail. Anybody trying to drag politics into it is telling on themselves.
Saying this game didn’t fail because of character design in a hero shooter is completely disingenuous. Stop talking around the elephant and acknowledge it.
You’re missing a key factor with respect to the whole “get woke go broke” thing. Both developers/publishers and bootlicking journalists have used the following general response (whatever flavor of the day you want) as both a shield and a mace to defend a mechanically flawed and bad game while shifting the blame on players: “You don’t like the game? You must be a [insert -ist or -phobe word here], because look at how many diverse characters you’re not playing as by not liking and not playing the game.” It’s been used to both shield against valid criticism and beat the general public over the head so many times that anytime unappealing characters designs are shown, a lot of people immediately are expecting the game to have had care in its core development sacrificed on the alter of “diversity.” Frankly, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t played many games at all besides Fortnite, modded Minecraft and occasionally Volcanoids (waiting to try the new update, so haven’t in a while) whereas I used to play Overwatch all the time. In Concord’s case, I guarantee that the number one go-to defense against people saying the game is failing will forever be, “Oh, it’s all the -ists and -phobes.” Which is wholly wrong, as you’ve already addressed. But that kind of beating over the head does implicitly affect the success of future games, because the more that excuse gets used, the fewer people will buy even fewer games from the companies who directly engage in that kind of thing. Hell, even if the journalists are the ones doing it with respect to a company they’re after game keys from for reviews, it still is a gross taste left in the mouths of gamers.
And those people would be as dumb as the people who explicity write something off because it happens to try to be diverse, very few people bitched about Overwatch having diverse characters when compared to how many played overwatch and it made boatloads until Blizzard got lazy. Bad games are bad, period.
I would never have played Concord because I am not into Hero Shooters. I've never played Overwatch either. Part of the Concord Developers job was to create a game that would lure people in. They failed. There wasn't a Boycott. Everyone just predicted the game would fail. Like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did. Like Dustborn did. Like Star Wars Outlaws will... or will not.
If i were Sony, i would do a revenge return with "Concordia". I would make a badass version of the current characters and spice up the game. It would be the best option. To relaunch to redeem the game.
I have no interest in the game but I definitely find it weird that people were hating it as some bastion of "wokeness" rather than literally everything else wrong with it. Even if the designs were "good" it wouldn't negate the other downfalls. But I guess that's what happens when the loud minority opinions take hold.
Because he dismisses the point of the whole "woke" stuff as a non-matter when its clear that its at least part of why the game is simply not well recieved.
@@Gnarfendorf That explains it. I'm completely indifferent, but I think it's he's right in the fact that the people actually buying this stuff don't know or care. Players just want good games that people are playing. I find most of the characters just bland or non-distinctive.
@@rushnerd Im personally indifferent because i wouldnt have played the game anyways, hero shooters are not my cup of tea. But the saying "the customer is always right in what they want" applies heavily with this game. They did not want a p2p hero shooter with unatractive cookie cutter characters straight from the DEI playbook and mediocre gameplay. Dismissing the customers wishes does not play out well when it comes to a saturated market, that should be obvious to anybody.
@@Gnarfendorf I think it hardly matters since Deadlock (and less so Black Myth) dropped at the SAME time when it launched. Like you, I played Deadlock, not my thing, but it's a freakin' surprise Valve game and that has a stupid amount of power. No one is even going to pretend to care about this when Valve has the same thing but better in everyway for free.
I disagree 😑😑😑 where the swimwear skins brah. The lingerie set?? Not that I would want to see ANY of these characters in those things and im talking about the males too. They need to overhaul ALL the characters. AND Make the maps less seen it done it already. 😅😅
You can't blame the $40 price tag because the game had no players even during the free beta. You can't blame the "bad" gameplay because people refused to buy it even before the game's reviews came out. The only logical conclusion is that the game was rejected because of it's uglified woke character designs.
@@kirareacts The whole point of a beta is to iron out problems with the gameplay. The idea that people massively avoided a beta because of gameplay issues is just absurd. And the gameplay of Concord isn't "bad". Boring? Yes. Derivative? Yes. But the game is stable and well balanced. Genshin Impact has the most boring and derivative gameplay of any game out there yet it has 50 million players because the game's characters are actually nice to look at.
![YoungBoy Never Broke Again - Sneaking [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ILUps2zDFU/mqdefault.jpg)
I think Gollum had more players at once all time. Gollum.
Yes, it had!
Yea it had around 750 (single player game) Concord never beaten 700
Is that from the Lord of Ring franchise? 🤣🤣
@@mariusvanc Wish it wasn't, but yeah.
Gollum also has better character designs, which is saying something.
It just looks corporate and soulless, a victim of executive meddling. It's a Consumer Product. It was made to hit quotas, not to be fun.
And very normal people are going to obsess about one specific quota that lets them indulge in their worst tendencies.
DEI or woke or anything you want to call it, was just one of the several ingredients inputted into the corporate slop machine, based on what executives thought people wanted.
I hope I'm proved to have bought into a conspiracy theory, but that specific ingredient is being pushed by a trillion-dollar investment funds. My cynical explanation for this is that Larry Fink or whoever is the shadowy puppet master, does not actually care for any of the "tokens" but rather just wants to create a framework, that A) they control and B) basically everyone has to comply if they want to run a business. "ESG" was one attempt, "BRIDGE" is the next.
That maybe what happened in the end. It started as an indie. The studio was bought by Sony. They liked what they saw and then presumably had a load of money poured in. I don't know which bits are the original idea and which were mandated after.
The scary thing is Sony has another ten of these to crap out and that's just what we know of. They dropped lucky with Helldivers, nearly managed to kill that and need to learn a bunch of lessons. In fact I'm not entirely sure they aren't just trying out a different model for each game and seeing what sticks.
The greatest flaw of these character designs is that they're not stylized in the slightest.
A hero shooter needs stylized characters, so that they can stand apart from one-another. See Team Fortress 2 for the optimal example of this, where each character is wearing MOSTLY the same thing, except for pyro, yet their silhoutes immediatly tell you who is who.
Overwatch does this well aswell, partially by having the characters be more Things, not Just people.
This Game does not do that.
This game has humans in aimless cosplays.
That's not a hero shooter.
Hey the walking trashcan man has a pretty obvious silhouette 😂
I agree. I don't think the characters in themselves are too bad, yes they are more "normal people" (some of them) than in other games, but that's a bit fun too. But the graphics have that plasticky "almost real" feel to it that I hate. Some stylization would be great.
i think they designed them that way because they want people to see themselves in those characters. If it's stylized then people can't relate (according to them).
@@ryuno2097 Could also be because generic characters are much easier to design interchangeable DLC skinpacks for, as the virtual dressup aspect is a prominent (read: highly profitable) part of these kind of games.
Good point, but also: when all characters in all games are stylized, none of them are. Personally I'm very tired of this design trope and it puts me off all these games at face value.
Video games are a visual medium. If you purposefully make a visually unappealing game, that's called making your bed and, yes, sleeping in it.
If the game was simply bad, people would've at least tried it then left. But people didn't even show up to try it during the free open beta. This does not say the game is bad, it says it is repulsive.
This. The First Descendant is a worse game than Concord based on limited gameplay alone, it's extremely boring and derivative. But it's making Nexon a ton of cash based on people buying skins for the hot characters.
Exactly, i was going to post something to this effect. No one showed up to the party meaning word got out that the party was going to be lame. This wasn't a realisation people came to playing the game because it peaked at less than 700 and was dead within a week XD
Kira is dead wrong with this analysis.
Bro, none of the characters look cool. That was one of the main problems.
Thats not true, some of them do.
@@AvelierPlays name them
@@AvelierPlays Can I get an example because I don't like any of them
I just looked them up. I think three of them could look ok with some tweaking but the rest are pretty hopeless.
We saw Soldier 76 in OW, and then this game have generic McShooter dude with salvaged Stormtrooper armor parts slapped on here and there holding a generic sci-fi bullpup rifle.
I disagree on the heros not being why it flopped, there isnt a single hero they made that looks cool. None
Yeah I mean even if it was free, do you honestly see more than even a handful of people being willing to spend money on cosmetics/skins and such for these characters? It's like people think hoyo is successful only cause of stellar gameplay xD
To be fair characters in Overwatch and Valorant too look like generic trash yet those game succeeded.
@@Talking_Ed I believe much of Overwatch's sales are due to mercy, dva, tracer and widowmaker.
When it comes to any sort of fan engagement, be it social media, fanart, animations, videos, coversation, its largely those characters.
And you know why.
You know why.
@@Talking_Ed I mean character design and marketing goes hand to hand... There is reason why valorant and ow are successful.. And even tho its sad its the reality sexy sells... + The gameplay is better...
I think the robot looks pretty cool, the rest of them, pretty bland.
Valve with Deadlock is the perfect example of winning by doing nothing
They must've thrown it out once rivals and deadlock were shown to be good. Nothing they did would ever have been good enough to compete
i still think deadlock is gonna flop as hard as artifact & ricochet when it actually comes out.
the market is way too oversaturated.
@@xsoultillerx I don't think it will fail but we'll see. I'd rather valve keep trying and it not work vs valve relying on steam exclusively
@@xsoultillerx artifact flopped largely down to the gameplay. Deadlock is not going to have that problem, it's already great.
The community coming together to invite each other is fantastic, too.
Got my invite from a random guy on twitter lol
Man, I wished more people understood the reality you mentioned about the majority of gamers that are not terminally online... It's always these people that keep yelling in every post or comment how this time a game series will for sure be the last, failing to realize the reason the series keeps making more generic slop is because there's a huge audience that just comes from work, buys the game, plays it a few times maybe until they finish it and that's it.
This, 100% this.
Yea , I have to disagree on the whole character thing. Of course it's not the main reason the game is failing , but it's a contributing factor. Just look at something like the first descendant or even gacha games. Some gacha games have little to no gameplay and sell characters like hot cakes. Saying that bad looking characters (which imo were made with an agenda in mind) didn't contribute to the game's failure is completely false. I believe that an appealing cast of characters can compensate to an extent for bad gameplay.
Definitely. Personally I wouldn't have been interested in the game either way (at least with the price tag it has), but even if I were, the character designs would have made me not buy it. Almost none of the characters are the least bit interesting, and there's only a couple or so that I could ever see myself playing as. The characters definitely matter, and could have potentially drawn in a lot of people that chose not buy it.
@@DemoNova Even if it were free, and a different genre, and you change everything aside from the characters, the game would still fail I think. F2P still means you need to be spending money on the skins and cosmetics for them to be making money, and those things would have to apply to those characters, and I know I sure as hell wouldn't be spending money on a skin for "DAW" and I find it extremely hard to believe many would. I think in any scenario, with these characters, the game fails.
@@colwellalec your clearly forgot how much people would spend if they like a character enough, would that alone save the game? probably not but at least i would say it might get 1k people to actually try it if it had an iconic character like the first OW did.
Agree. I think Kira is thinking too much in black and white terms here: "game's bad and that's the only reason the game failed."
Nah, that's perhaps the #1 reason but in reality there's a bunch of reasons that all contribute to the game's failure. And yes, woke is one reason. Ugly characters is another reason. People like looking at pretty / cool people, that's just how human brains work.
@@KPX01 Yeah so I think we're pretty much in agreement, which btw about 2k or 3k people did try it during the various betas, but I think even that isn't enough when we're talking about this game costing Sony like $200 million
the worst character designs I have ever seen in my life to the point where I'm almost wrapping around to ironically liking them
@@kirigherkins true.
the point he's arguing in the video is that the characters looking bad should not affect the success of a game
@@nyaggardlyno he’s not, you didn’t watch it 😂
You didnt watch it, thats exactly what he is saying@@laurelkeeper
@@user-bb1ti6ct7s ...lmao where
Asking $40 for a hero shooter when your competition is F2P secured this game’s fate as Dead on arrival.
I dont think it has anything to do with the price. Marketing was way off and gameplay looked horrible. If people liked the game on open beta this game could have done a lot better even with a higher price tag. But the game was shit.
More than that it has terrible mechanics
Locking your hero if you win a round with them? Wow what a brilliant strategy of punishing a person for being good at the game.
They asked for this and sony deserves the L
if the characters all looked really cool, with a nice art style they would get more sales initially just from how it looks. Then theyd also need to nail gameplay to keep those players. It seems like they failed on both fronts.
A F2P with massive established player base at that
Gamers have been complaining about in-game purchases for years now. A shooter with an upfront price instead of endless pay to play scams would have been welcomed if it was good. Consumers have been willing to pay $70 or more for games that are actually good. Concord's problem is that it is complete trash. It was designed and coded by brainlets who put their political messaging above gameplay and above quality. Nobody would be playing this hunk of shit even if it was free.
You are wrong. If it was just the game not being good there would have been more players the first day. The aesthetic is too unappealing for people to give it a chance. the game could be good and no one would have bought it regardless.
People already knew from the beta the game was bad, so why would they waste $40 on buying it for launch day?
@@kirareacts Why didn't more people play the beta when it was free then, or the first beta before anyone really knew how it played? If it's so bad then why did journalists praise it, with mostly positive reviews on steam from the people who have played it? If the characters aren't bad and that's not a selling point then why were the CGI trailers downvoted to oblivion before anyone saw a moment of gameplay? With the top comments basically all saying "trash, soulless characters, immediately turned me off to it?" Also just saying OW still gets like 55k concurrent players daily (just on steam), while being one of the worst rated games on the platform, so while past its peak I think its disingenuous to act like there aren't people that would want some kind of replacement that are still sticking around in OW2, in spite of apparently thinking its terrible, for whatever "mysterious" reason.
100% this. I don't wan't to play as McLard Fatface.
@@AnthraxGH You just proved the opposite of your own point.
Everyone complained about OV2 being 'woke' because some of the characters are gay in the backstories they release as little anime's, and too many of them weren't white, but because it's a good game the right wingers make a loud noise about how woke it is, but then still play it.
Concord is a terrible game, if every character was a butch straight white male, or a white stripper in a string bikini with a gatling gun and each of their tits had a 5ft circumference, it would still be a poorly put together, derivative, Overwatch 1 clone, for $40, when Overwatch 2, and the three similar yet better looking games to this announced by SONY in the same showcase, are all free.
Good 'woke' game gets complained about but played, bad 'woke' games get complained about less because nobody plays it to care and it doesn't get your video pushed up the algorithm, then not played, and everyone says "get woke go broke" even though much more woke good games still make tons of money, and bad games would fail anyway without the 'wokeness.'
Just a question, do you think that Ghostbuster remake failed because the director is terrible, the jokes weren't funny, the pacing was bad, and it ended with a god damn musical scene near enough, or do you think it failed JUST because people were angry there were women in it, and even more angry one of them was black, and they decided to "teach Hollywood a lesson" and not a watch an amazing movie in protest?
Because Ben Shapiro, Midnight's Edge, and that guy who got his ass kicked by a trans-woman at a magic the gathering party, will tell you it's the second option, and that Concord is failing SOLELY in protest at 'woke' and it's failure shows how much they 'own the libs.'
Kira, one question, one opinion.
1) How does the color changing light not bother you?
2) I strongly disagree that the character design has only a slight impact on sales. Has nothing to do with woke or anti-woke. But in a hero shooter, the first thing people see are the heroes. Not the gameplay. Even marketing material for these kind of games are mainly character trailers or story bits that have nothing to do with gameplay. If your designs are not good, people won't even bother to stay to see the gameplay. If characters were nothing but hot chicks and cool guys, that 600 player peak would be 60000.
@yaldabaoth2 absolutely. The character designs and how marketable the game is goes hand in hand. Having these ugly character is like doing some sick form of negative marketing. they are just objectively ugly.
He obviously agrees with what they're doing, but wants to portray himself in a neutral light where he's better than people who disagree with him. He did the same for sweet baby and will probably run defense for dustborn next.
@@PokeComm Used to respect this guy but he's hard left like nearly every other Brit that talks about video games save for Arch Cast
@@MrArgus11111 "hard left" as in "not turbo bigoted?" bro needs to learn political literacy
@@laurelkeeper I'm sorry but these characters are hideous. You can make queer characters that actually look nice
It’s confusing conceptually. It’s a shooter but it’s the safest shooter. Meticulously balanced but wants to be casual. Comes out with some of the sweatiest modes like kill confirmed instead of capture the flag or push casual mode
Why buck a trend. They're confused about their gender and sexuality. Why would it be any different for a creative project?
Sony wastes 200 million on Concord... Doesn't allow a sequel to Days Gone... Worthless.
Gruff white guy simulator...releasing DG2 would lead to the resurrection of the Confederacy /s
Can't have days gone. The guy is white
@@peterfyal4998 The leads in TLOU are white. Your snowflake complaining doesn't make sense.
@@peterfyal4998 given that some reviewer sites did actually complain about the mc being a white dude sounds about right.
Demon's Souls and Bloodborne PC ports would (probably) get them record sales.
Still nowhere to be found.
Imagine being so out of touch with reality when your only focus is making money.
Sony did a favor to half the world for blocking it on steam due to PSN.
I dunno brother, I feel like the game itself is just pretty mediocre. The primary reason it failed is almost surely the character design being pure slop
It was never going to be the next overwatch or tf2, but it surely would have at least broken 1k players if the half characters weren't physically repulsive lol
Partially. But I also think the game is just too..."samey" compared to any other offerings in this genre out there as well. What does Concord realistically do that Overwatch, Apex, or Valorant doesn't? The crew-based character selection system? Like...awesome, I guess? Barely affects the core gameplay at the end of the day, which is just somewhat more protracted firefights that you'd see in overwatch or apex.
In a world dominated by Pepsi and Coke, Sony decided to release the RC Cola of sci-fi hero shooters and somehow expected it to win big.
I was never going to play Concord. It just didn't look very fun, and I don't really do hero shooters anymore.
Why would anyone pay for a Hero Shooter when all the others are free to play? Of course, this was never going to work!
I do think the rocket launcher chick looked cool. The 3rd robot arm to help hold the weapon was neat.
The level of public humiliation is higher than its player count. So humiliating that even Rule 34 won't touch it with a 10ft pole.
Why would anyone pay $40 when Overwatch is free?
exactly - sonys hubris is coming home to roost, if concord still exists in 6 months, itll be free to play, calling it now
I wouldn't waste space on my PC for overwatch either
You realize Overwatch was $40 when it came out right?
@@mariestarlight what point are you making?
@@mav9143 that charging $40 for a big budget overwatch-like game was standard. Usually they just go free to play after a year or two. So the price tag doesn't surprise me at all.
Price is a good point. Sure i understand exchange rates and such, but for me that $40 is $60... If you wont pay $40 for it, you think im gonna pay 60? Even if it is the same price after conversion, it still feels like an even worse rip-off
I disagree. Character designs are absolutely a huge part of a hero shooter. And these designs obviously are unappealing to majority of people . Overwatch has an arguably pretty woke cast but the designs are still attractive and hot enough to court the normal public while this game dives off the deep end.
Especially for a competitive shooter, you would want to expand the game to a global market, and these designs just would not stand a chance in the Asian market.
Yes
Yup if I see an ad for basically any other hero based game on the market I will see at least one character I just need to play. In Concord I do not have that so I wouldn't even feel bother to not download it to try it even if it was free
I agree it looks cool IF the characters you're playing look appealing, edgy looks like a killer or something. These characters are all lame, they don't inspire much imagination. And it's a shooter it would be worse if it was an RPG too. None of them look like the hero or the villain or the nerd or the ALWAYS important in my book sexual appeal haha 😂😂
nowdays it feels like games/series creators see rule34 as a faillure for their characters
"hot" hehe, you can't find a woman to love you so you fantasize about game characters instead. That's quite funny my guy.
I know very little about this game. What I do know, is I looked it up, learned enough about it to know that it didn't interest me, and then moved on.
That's the thing. Even looking past the "inclusive" and "progressive" character designs, the game is less than mediocre and came out nearly a decade later than it should've to even have a chance.
Yeah but even before we saw a moment of gameplay the trailers and such were being downvoted to oblivion, people clearly didn't like this from the get-go and I do think its disingenuous to act like the characters have nothing to do with it, and even if it's because it's just bad, why did it turn out that way? Cause I'd argue DEI policies inherently will create something like this, because they care more about making things "diverse and inclusive" as opposed to making a product that will appeal to the audience that actually exists, not the one they wish existed. What you mentioned played a role for sure, but Concord isn't the only example of this happening, and I think if you remove the paywall, make it a f2p model with microtransactions (which I think they will do), make it a different genre even, it would still fail because only a handful of people would actually care to spend money on these characters, the people championing this stuff on social media are not the ones actually spending money on the products.
@@redchinhunt721Hmm The original overwatch roster was plenty diverse but sported a ton of great character designs.. The two can easily co-exist imo. I dont really care if characters have pronouns listed, or if they dont wanna include any sexy ladies... Just make actual memorable characters and we are good. Sadly, only about 2-3 or so of the concord characters really stand out to me.
@@MaMastoast people like kira and a lot other like you missed the point when people complaining about it being "woke". Games had diverse cast of character for a long time and had sold well. So why people hate concord and modern game that tout diversity then? To me at the very least the so called games are not games and just using diversity as a selling point. Most games that touting diversity often time comes out ugly af, and has to be fat and trying hard to justify something that isnt like the recent assasin creed. OW1 do not promote the game as being diverse what so ever at the start, and when they do try to pander later on it really reek of just have the check box done like now we have gay character like soldier 76 was.
@@KPX01the problem is these games only selling point is diversity and not liking them is obviously the person complaining not liking diversity, it has nothing to do with the fact we put no focus on creating a good game. They're essentially trying to guilt people into liking it.
Idk how people haven't realised gamers honestly don't care who or what a character is as long as the games good. We happily play as any character regardless of race, religion, sexuality, conventional levels of attractiveness, heck they don't even have to be human. A good game is a good game. If you released an amazing title that happened to have a differently abled black lesbian woman as the lead as long as you don't go around shoving it down people's throats saying look how diverse we are 99% of people would just accept it without even thinking about it. Ultimately isn't that what we want? For everyone regardless of beliefs, shape and looks to be seen as accepted and normal
@@MaMastoast No one said anything about diversity in and of itself. I was very specific to say DEI policies, and I know so many people just hear that and think it solely means diversity but it doesn't, it's diversity for all the wrong reasons at a corporate level to rake in ESG grants and such, soulless pandering. I mean I just don't think it's a coincidence when it's like that, every time the characters are just stereotypically diverse, ugly, and bland, and DEI consultants like SBI exist purely for that, to solve a fake issue of representation that people like them created. Like the people above me said when you are focused on that and acting like it's a selling point, it shows me that the focus is not on the game, hence you will always get a bad one, and I'd also argue games were always "diverse" especially in what in my opinion is the most important way, which is diversity of thought.
Also just wanted to come back here to say IGN even did a poll asking if Concord was f2p would people give it a shot, and even there on a pretty far left site 60% (which also makes it the most voted answer by far) of people said no, they have no interest whatsoever. Which was my original point, that I don't think the price or the genre were the biggest roadblocks, and that with these characters specifically the game will always fail.
So yeah tbh you were arguing against a point I didn't make, of course good characters can be whatever, you guys always just wanna jump on people like me and basically play the racism card (which not saying you did specifically, but happens a lot) and put words in my mouth as if I'm saying it failed cause of black people or something, when again I said DEI which is basically a political agenda, there is a difference, just so sick of it when tbh from my perspective the people defending this stuff are doing more harm to the people they claim to represent by being diverse for pandering and monetary reasons, basically as a political chip, while always seeming to create the most stereotypical diversity possible. Like it just blows me away how hard some people are getting played by this stuff. All I'm advocating for at the end of the day is games made by and for gamers, the actual gaming audience not the pretend "modern audience" that showed up in the dozens for Concord or other DEI games like it.
I don't know man, reviewers praised the gameplay itself, but when your characters suck nobody wants to give it a shot, this had an open beta for a whole weekend and people still didn't play it.
I don't even engage with this anti woke shit, I just think the characters are very soulless compared to overwatch and TF2, Apex also had this problem at the start but they did some pretty good ones with Watson and Loba.
This just isn't true for the overwhelming majority of players. Plenty of games have virtually no story and zero depth to any characters, and yet are some of the most popular games on Earth. I mean what depth is there to the character of Minecraft Steve? Absolutely none whatsoever, we hardly even know his name is Steve. Minecraft basically doesn't have a story. Doesn't stop Minecraft being massively popular even to this day, because people like the gameplay. For some games it's more of a story telling method for sure, and those games will fail if the story isn't up to scratch or the characters suck and nobody cares about them. But I'd say that is not at all the case for a looter shooter type game. Main thing is the game has to be fun.
practically nobody "praised" the gameplay though. "not THAT terrible" is pretty much the highest praise they´re gotten, which, unsurpringly isn´t enough for people
"the gameplay is not that bad" is not exactly a praise, most people that is not a game journalist say the gameplay is just not that bad. meaning it's not as bad what they think it would be. some say the gameplay is solid, but that's the extend of the praise. nobody i see ever say the gameplay are interesting or exciting, or adrenaline pumping, etc. i really don't care about the politics, but to me, concord is just a mediocre hero shooter, with no interesting character, that is also paywalled, why would i play this game? when i could play overwatch instead?
@@lilia-ai Yeah I mean why would I pay to play a game that is not that bad if I can play a game with gameplay that is good for free
Imagine choosing to pay for Concord on IGN's poor recommendation when you can play the better versions of the game for free
Really all gaming publications are massively untrustworthy at this point, but ign isn't even a gaming publication anymore. They don't care about actual gameplay and more trying to make diversity an issue. It's essentially a group of those 2010s memes of over the top rainbow hair Karen's getting offended over anything and everything masquerading as a gaming publication.
Which given I'm part of two of the groups they're apparently championing I apologise they don't speak for the majority, just the close minded idiots who want to make problems out of nothing
Kira, It's a "hero" shooter.
Character design matters.
Kits of characters, sure. Looks for some people. I couldn't personally care less what my first person shooter character looks like, because I don't see it. It's first person. If the game was competitively fun, competitive shooter players would play it. They don't. Characters are a small factor in that, looks wise.
@@kirareactsIf that were true, skin microtransactions and cosmetics wouldn’t sell anywhere near as much as they do.
Looks absolutely matter, in games & IRL. Far more than most have the balls/are willing to admit. You may not like or agree with it, but it’s just a flat-out fact.
People want to look cool in games because it feeds the power/cool factor fantasy. It’s that simple. No one wants to look like a bozo or some deliberate amalgamation of anti-appealing design. Doesn’t matter how shallow it is in one’s opinion, it’s just the cold-hard truth. Don’t appeal to it, it’ll reflect in the sales. It’s not rocket science.
I never said anything that you just said. And again, you seem to be ignoring that this is a first-person shooter. I'm unsure what you're even replying to or discussing by replying with that to my comment.
@@kirareacts Um, where did I say that you said anything I said...? It was a rebuttal to what you said before that...
*I couldn't personally care less what my first person shooter character looks like, because I don't see it. It's first person.*
*Characters are a small factor in that, looks wise.*
Those are the statements I was referring to. Like, are you serious???
And you seem to be ignoring the fact that it being an FPS is irrelevant, because there are plenty of FPS's where players dump money, time, and/or effort into altering their character's appearance. So... what does that have to do with anything? That's not even an actual argument.
Kira talks the character designs around 14:50; he acknowledged the character designs as "not compelling" among other things. Most of what Kira focused on was the total experience of the game & the company decisions. Which is why I'm here; he's even-handed.
Yep, your points are reasonable. Here’s how the conversation should’ve gone:
Firewalk Studio: “Can you give us $200 million to make a wannabe hero shooter where we literally copy paste features of all the other hero shooters and make it hardcore DEI including a green white guy, then work on it for 8 years to release it late to the party?”
Sony: “You have Overwatch and Fortnite at home.”
"But Only Because It Isn't Good" Are they in the room with you?
Are they in the room with _you_?
Lol really? Being a bit wilfully ignorant I feel.
The game had abysmal numbers. That goes beyond just being a bad game. Bad games release and still get thousands of players trying them out and even during Concord's free weekend, nobody was touching it. It should be very apparent that that speaks to something being fundamentally unappealing with the game before anyone even had played it.
I assume this is alt-right crazy talk but, to me, it seems that with a HERO shooter, the HEROES do a lot of the heavy lifting. I could argue this little fact all day but the reality is the two most successful hero shooters of all time had put a lot of effort into their characters, character designs, and marketing prior to their release. Everybody knows who Tracer is, and Tracer + Widowmaker were immediately recognisable as being part of Overwatch prior to the game ever releasing. Same with TF2. The 'Meet the Team' videos highlighted each of the characters, playstyle and personality before the game released. They wouldn't put so much effort into marketing characters if they weren't relevant to the game's success.
Now you can try and argue that the poor character designs have nothing to do with politics and this does come down to a more subjective, less evidence based argument but I would bet my left testicle that one of the main priorities for the design team was diversity. And I would bet my right testicle that that was not the main focus for the people behind Overwatch and TF2.
Overwatch has always been really concerned with diversity. It seems so strange people would give it as a counter-example of diversity in games.
Give me one other game where one of the hero options is an elderly woman. Go on, I'll wait.
@@mitrovarr Overwatch at one point was even "we don't have enough diversity, quick alter backstory of some characters!"
@@ladrok97 Yeah, and they used to actually play up how any given character provided representation to one group or another. "Wokeness" is not a barrier to having good art, and Concord doesn't lack good art because of it. Probably the art team just didn't have good talent or leadership.
@@mitrovarr If anything, I'd love to see more cool old grannies in video games kicking ass. It's such a hilarious concept that it circles back to actually being cool and fun. Take Ida Lennox from Evolve, for example: a granny that manages to be a great design by virtue of being a brilliant mechanical engineer that hunts giant monsters by jumping into a hulking mech suit she designed and called the "Thunderchild Armor" in reference to an ironclad warship from War of the Worlds, with a repurposed AA gun in one arm and an energy pilebunker in the other.
The old lady in Concord could've been a cool design worth playing in a million different ways--all of the characters in the roster could have--but they're not because of terrible art direction.
@@mitrovarr Yes but Tracer has a good design, she stands out, she also has a real personality and her whole character does not hinge on her being gay.
Concord on the other hand has a bland rubbish bin as character.
Sony fumbles something catastrophically yet again
Sony can’t help themselves
It's amazing how much Sony just doesn't understand how to handle a online focused game.
Helldivers 2 they fumbled after a great start, canceled Spider-man multiplayer which honestly looked fun, canceled TLOU multiplayer, canceled a Twisted Metal multiplayer game, Bungie is on a constant downward spiral and both Destiny and the upcoming Marathon aren't looking good...and now Concord.
Concord failing was easy to predict.
A "mid" game being sold at 40$, while lacking any redeeming / differentiating features, is a recipe for disaster
Refunding the few people who bought it would probably be a better financial decision than supporting it long enough to keep those people happy
yup they ulitmately spend around 200k for each player 🤣
To be honest I want them to keep pumping shitty games like this, because people will realize that having this "AAA" in a game doesn't mean it's a good game.
Honestly, I don't think it would have done well even if it was good. The market for live services games is small in users and it's already severely over saturated as is. For a new one to succeed I feel it'd have to not only be good, but the single best live service available in whatever game type it'd fall into.
Yeah; this was DoA. I mean; actually charging for a game where every other game in the genre was free was basically setting yourself up for failure. This had to end up being the best game of that genre for it to even have a chance.
Concord is just a Stale White Bread Sandwich (no toppings, not even any meat), and I don't think it was interesting in any way from even the first showing. So from what I see, most people looked at it, said "No", and didn't want to engage with it. It happens. Any of the "DEI", "woke" talk around the game's failure is just noise, and people are getting too hung up on that from being online so much.
To be fair people complaining about games being woke and DEI have a very important role: helping you understand they're idiots 😂
If you're a board member rn, what's that like? 50mil or 100 it's still a major loss. All that time....
I'm sorry, I'm as tired of the whole EVERYTHING IS WOKE trend as anyone but those characters are fking uninteresting, except for how hideous they are, and that would ruin it for me.
Some of them look fine, people just want a bunch of chads and bimbos I guess
The truth is the truth whether you call it a "trend" or not.
@@vicc6790 To a degree, there is no doubt that there is a significant group of content creators who will freak out over anything remotely progressive or non-traditional.
@@MaMastoast But denying that wokeness is harming the gaming industry is just stupid... Like nobody has problem with diversity in games as long as it fits the story and lore and the game... But currently it is being forced... You either hire consultation firms like SBI or you dont get funding. AKA if you dont have huge amounts of money yourself to fund the game there is not gonna be any game... Developers are forced to include wokeness in their games.. That is a fact.. These people have said themselves they want to force it on to people.. This same shit is going on in the movie industry... We need to say NO to DEI shit... Forced inclusion helps no one and only harms those who it aims to help....
@@vicc6790 I concede that you're correct and there is truth to it and I probably chose my words poorly. I'm just tired of the culture wars in general. It would be great if the people making products would make products their customers actually want. Me being annoyed at the people who are tired of the sub-par product is probably the wrong take.
Apex legends - free
Overwatch 2 - free
Valorant - free
Paladins - free
Team fortress 2 - free
Rainbow six siege - 19,99 (in my country)
Charging 40 bucks was never gonna work. My guess is Concord did this because they knew it wouldn't do well enough to make lots of money as ftp with a cash shop.
Gotta disagree with ya on the characters, Kira. More than anything, character design, silhouettes and fantasy are the biggest draw for hero shooters, for the same reason as in Mobas or gacha games. People get invested in the characters, lore, mechanics and play styles. Concord, even ignoring the DEI/culture war shit, has bad character designs that most people won't be interested in. Id say after the $40 price tag, this is #2, probably tied with the awful gameplay.
It's a first person shooter. You don't even see your character while you're playing.
People are sick and tired of multiplayer/monetization games that all behave the same. Single player games is where it’s at.
I can understand wanting to have a different narrative for your video. But saying that these characters had nothing to do with the game failing is naive.
But you seem to have a lot of odd takes lately.
Trans lights lol
What is wrong with the characters from your pov?
@@gmonkman Im not the person you asked, but I'll answer :)
I just think most of the characters are very difficult to remember, and therefore difficult to like. I have seen a fair bit of gameplay by now and I still only really remember a few of them.
If you compare overwatch characters with concord characters you'll see a pretty big difference in how clearly defined each character is from a visual, thematic and naming perspective.
Kenshi, for example, literally has a name that means "swordsman", it is also japanese which helps us remember that he is the ninja character. His visual is basically just a cyborg ninja, its a clear archetype and it helps us remember him. His role of "the ninja" is also supported by his mechanics, which has him jumping and dashing his way through the battlefield.
McCree's name, paired with his design mirroring "the man with no name" helps us easily remember him as "The cowboy". His most distinctive ability is basically him going into an old-west duel with anyone who dares face him head on.
Widowmaker is a clear Femme Fatale archetype, a sexy french lady who is emotionally cold and will kill you with no remorse, an archetypes further enhanced by her being a sniper, a playstyle literally removed from the conflict. She also uses poison, which further leans into the femme fatale idea.
Meanwhile most of concord's characters are just funny looking people, there are a few exceptions, but they generally dont have anything memorable about them, and they rarely lean into pop culture archetypes. I like 1-off, the design is fairly memorable and the name fits pretty well... Meanwhile, who on earth is "Daw"?
Exactly, it’s not that the characters alone decided the fate, but when you’re memed to oblivion for having awful designed chars that look AI generated, it’ll probably hurt your image.
People usually don’t care about boycotts and things like that and I agree that the game wasn’t boycotted, it was just ugly, uninspired, repetitive, non fun looking and with chars that are very bland.
@@gmonkman Not a single character made me feel like I wanted to try them... And they just feel too forced...
I mean, it isn't bad, but like starfield, it just isn't good either. If you looked up "meh" in the dictionary, there would be a picture of concord next to it. There are other free to play games that do it way better, so why waste £40 on this one. Not to mention, every sentence is total cringe.
The 'get woke go broke' argument is lazy but also true. A lot of people were instantly turned off when they saw the character designs.
Agree. I think at this point "go woke go broke" is just the obvious truth, and those railing against it like Kira here are either "enlightened centrists, both sides are wrong and I'm the only one who is right" or, well, woke activists.
I get that people are tired of people saying "this is woke" but it's still true, whether people are tired of that or not.
No one wants to play as a R2-D2 rip off when you got Overwatches more creative characters.
It really doesn't hold water when countless things people call "woke" made and make boatloads of money. It's bad character design and bad game design, their identities have nothing to do with it. Overwatch has a blatantly diverse cast and was still very successful despite Blizzard neckbeard blowback occasionally, it only started to fail when the game design became lame and samey and people got bored.
There were two hard no moments for me with Concord. The first was that it required me to sign in to PSN to play, and I don't buy games with that requirement any more. The second was the $40 price tag. I would pay that and more for a title that wasn't in the competitive hero shooter space, but I can't think of any of Concord's competitors that are still premium titles. Because of these, I never even got to the step of trying the game.
I would argue that the ugly-ass characters sunk this game, honestly. Look at First Descendant. 27,278 players right now, 24-hour peak of 38,137, and an all-time peak of 264,860. The First Descendant is also BORING AS HELL to play. Gameplay-wise, Concord runs laps around this game. But First Descendant has appealing characters that people have no problem grinding endlessly to unlock (or straight up pay for, because it's a Nexon game).
Meanwhile Concord has only 189 players online right now, a 24-hour peak of 206, and an all-time peak of 697. As much as I like to laugh at Concord, I had more fun playing it during the beta than I did playing First Descendant. Yet it was obvious from the start that First Descendant would be a lot more successful than Concord, and it won't take me a half-hour video to explain why.
If Concord released with hot characters, we wouldn't be dancing on it's grave right now. We'd all be playing it.
I also didn't hear anything about Concord until it released I think they forgot to pay for marketing lmao
@@Talking_Ed Really? Maybe they just targeted them poorly. I saw a few ads for the game leading up to release, and around the time of the open beta (that's why I downloaded it to give it a shot). I thought it was going to be like Borderlands or Destiny, since all I saw was some sort of story trailer with no gameplay.
@@stizzo135 I'm playing and getting a lot of games and never heard of it which was weird, maybe they targeted the ads on some platform I don't use, who knows.
He was wrong to say character designs aren't a significant issue, but there are many significant issues, even bigger than that, the 3 main ones being that it's a $40 online only game in an almost entirely free to play genre, it's a game that doesn't make itself stand out in any way in a very very crowded market, and lastly being it's bad, even before the beta the gameplay we saw looked at best serviceable, and people who cared enough to play the beta confirmed as such, if the gameplay was very good and there was something that made the game stand out then it would be very popular regardless of character design, the terrible character design isn't why the game failed but did make what was obvious going to flop just flop harder than it would have
Also if the characters were hot we wouldn't all be playing it, people like good character design yes but the game still would be an expensive game in an overcrowded free to play genre that doesn't stand out in any way, first descendant had succes because it's free if it was even $10, it would have a small fraction of the players it has, it would definitely have way more success than Concord sure but that isn't saying much
Pricing probably a big issue when the rest is free 2 play, also marketing, I never heard of the game before, the only thing I heard is that no one plays it.
And the competition already have a big fan base with many who do not wish to change the game they have invested many many hours into it
Shame about the designs because it's clear that the people who actually made the characters did a really skilled job. Well modeled, great materials, and good animations, all wasted because there's like 1.5 characters that don't look like side characters
They should bundle up with Dustborn and fail together so that every reason for failure is now valid
Why didn't life is strange flop them? The hype for the new one is huge, shouldn't it be woke shit too and fail according to you?
@@lucasLSD Because Life is Strange was actually a good game and while it dealt with political idea it didn't actually do it in an insulting way like Dustborn. Honestly at first I barely noticed that Life is Strange was political at all
Put aside politics and designs, we already have good f2p shooter
It's pretty clear they wanted to step on and steal Overwatch's players. They want to make WEEKLY cut scenes in a game with no interactive narrative. This on the surface sounds great everyone loves dope cut scenes but if you took off playing a season you would come back to DOZENS of cut scenes that you most certainly would not watch since these characters are actual randos with no marketed personality. Are resources being put towards a VIDEO GAME or a platform for an animated movie?
The devs reacting badly feels like an extension of the capital G gamer community. An IP being the center point of someone’s personality and if others attack/change/interact differently with that IP they feel they are being attacked personally.
Another thing why in all creation would you call your game concord?? Isn't that the name of those planes that kept killing people 😢
No. First, it's "Concorde". Second, per the FAA, "At the time of the Air France accident in 2000, the Concorde had not experienced a single accident involving a fatality during its nearly 25 years of service." No other airplane can match that. Concorde flew dramatically fewer flights than other airplanes, so from a statistical perspective, with that single accident, it went from a perfect safety rating to an abysmal one. But no, Concorde did not "keep killing people". The Concorde failed mainly for business and economic reasons.
player count is rapidly falling below assault cube (CSGO but you can play on a toaster)
Even if the game got better and became amazing, people remember. Not how it was, but what was the outlook of the people behind it. Were they sorry it didn't meet expectations and promised to take people's feedback seriously? Or were they insulting their (potential) player base? Even for an ex-employee, what that animator said should warrant lawsuit from Sony, cuz it did damage their brand image.
I think it made it worse knowing they spent 8 years! On it bruh what
A game that pushes diversity that hard probably had diversity-based hiring rather than meritocratic-based hiring. And that's why it took 8 years.
Me, watching a video on a game I've never heard of: "interesting"
Me, seeing the player numbers: "that's why I've never heard of it"
I would of given it a try with my friends, but I would have to bought the game for them for 40 dollars each, since they are not paying 40 dollars when there are other great free games that we can play. If it was free we probably would of gotten online for a couple of hours and tried but with this pricing no way.
I think DEI hurt the game in a way not that people actively boycotted it. DEI leads to game design decision such as less sexy characters, less edgy content. Sex and edginess sale. It may not be the sole factor that kills the game, but it led to a decrease of initial appeal that attracts players.
This. “Safe edgy” has to fucking stop. It’s boring to hear the same shit over and over and over again.
@@bbsonjohn I agree it's obvious to me personally.
I don't agree that character design is a non-factor, but at the same time, the only part of the argument people make about the character design that's true is that it's hot garbage and universally unappealing.
The fact that people are chalking it up to "wokeness" makes no sense, because, by their own idea of what "woke" is, basically every Hero Shooter following (and including) Overwatch has been "woke", because they all use the exact same character archetypes as eachother.
If "woke characters" were a deterrent to fans of the genre, Overwatch would've never taken off to begin with.
Lets be real, only reason why game journalists are being soft on this game is because it's Playstation/Sony. They're always known to handle them with kid gloves and let them get away with anything.
IGN couldn’t make it any more obvious where their money comes from if they tried
it feels like game/holywood creators see rule34 for their characters as a faillure
the funny thing is with poeple who hate the game case they see it as woke and people who hate the game cause it is bad, they both came to the same conclusion that the game is not good, they both just went through different paths and got to the same location regardless.
The game likely was in developer hell. It's original publisher almost immediately shoveled it off to Sony. It was in development under Sony for only 3 of those 8 years.
8 years of development is insane this game would take like 2. The real problem is that it's Destiny devs lmao no wonder the game sucks
@@Talking_Ed 2 years of development, then the vision changes to keep up with current trends and you have to redesign everything. Then it changes again and you have to redesign everything a second, third, fourth time. Oops, new console generation, now get it working on PS5. Suddenly it's 8 years later and you've turned into Duke Nukem Forever.
@@RolandTHX Oh yeah just saying for how simple the gameplay is they could have made this in 2 years.
The game is 8 years too late, the character design is awful that even r34 artist avoided like the plague and it is $40. That is its downfall and game devs here have no foresight.
Rare Kira L.
Saying that character design doesn't matter in hero shooters is insane, both OW and TF show that's bs.
That aside politics are the reason the characters look like "Base Californian Hair Model Nr 220002" and you get that instead of another DVA or Mercy .
Why should I even pay 40 for Concord? I wouldn't even play it for free
If you want a really good comparison, compare how Concord is doing vs Deadlock. Another hero shooter that came out of nowhere, that is also a MOBA and it has around 100k players at peak currently
Also regarding the anti woke thing, again Deadlock exists and a lot of the characters are either not human or female. There's a few white guys but the majority are female or robots or something else. So its nothing to do with the character cast of concord, more so I think just the game marketing was very bland and the character designs come across as bland too. It felt like it was trying to be marvel with characters we knew nothing about and had no reason to care.
Have you watched the video? He makes this comparison.
@@laurelkeeper No I commented this before starting the video
Number of reasons not to buy:
1) Competitor games are free to play
2) I highly dislike deliberately created DEI type games (I accept that others wont feel this way)
3) The characters look awful
I think most people agree with your 2) there, it's just that the ones who disagree are loud and the ones who agree don't want to speak up and get yelled at.
All I'm getting is that these devs should've been put to to make a cinematic heavy singleplayer game but were put to work on a multiplayer shooter instead.
It's wild. I just checked, 66 are playing currently, 198 is the 24hr peak.
I would've thought, people would play it now more, just for the lols and memes alone.
I’m sorry but I’ve never even heard of this game, and by the looks of it not many other people have either, or not enough to actually give it a play. Meaning the people that did pay attention to it are a scant few (which is an assumption but from the lack of players it seems reasonable). Also let’s not pretend like the game being “woke” isn’t an issue or had nothing to do with its failure. It’s certainly not the driving factor but it’s still a factor, and pretending like it’s not is a bit disingenuous.
AAA games these days have the burden of trying to cater to everyone, and while that’s a sound business decision in concept, in practice it stifles creativity. There’s a myriad of other issues too, but the biggest reason I and everyone I know has stopped playing almost anything made by AAA studios is because they all feel like the same game these days. It’s not that I’ve stopped playing video games, it’s that much smaller indie games, with well defined concepts, solid mechanics, and often unique styles and gameplay are a much more engaging experience.
This video is how i learned of this game. Somebody in marketing messed up too
IGN says the game isn't very "content-heavy"? Have they seen the characters? Definately very heavy
I find this game genuinely fascinating, there has never been a more obvious flop in the history of media yet Firewalk, Bungie and Sony had complete faith in it when everyone else knew this would fail for so many blatently obvious reasons
Oh man do I relate to the general frustration with things being dumbly labeled as "woke". It's such a copout way to critique something. Ask 5 different people what woke means and you'll get different answers. I'm quite sure that's deliberate, considering the way it's commonly used/the people it's used by, but it's a completely useless thing to bring into a discussion as a result. You can express what you don't like about these uninspired/ugly character designs in an infinitely more productive way by simply describing what aspects don't work.
If "wokeness" really was as poisonous as people make it out to be then Overwatch 1, TLoU 2 and Baldur's Gate 3 wouldn't have become as popular/acclaimed as they are. Concord failed because the people leading the project clearly don't understand the market it's trying to compete in. The priorities are all wrong.
I remember when Paragon was shut down mid development, and it was way more fun and playable than this.
Let's just hope that whoever made executive decisions on Concord, would never be allowed near any other project.
Its kinda wild how any "normal" gamer could have told the devs at least two years ago how this is gonna go over at launch after seeing the game for 15 mins..
Imo the gameplay looks ok-ish, it suffers from a very bland character design and I'am not a fan of it's 0.75 speed compared to other hero shooters. Being bland overwatch for 40 dollars with just ok-ish gameplay kills it even before taking in any "culture war" stuff affecting sales.
I guess, for me the "Go woke, go broke" is more about focusing too much on other things than "making it good".
Maybe its unfair because the history of Marvel Comics doing decades worth of story writing...but I genuinely struggle to have fun playing Overwatch with my friends, Marvel Rivals is legitimately so much fun though, to the point I am legit missing it after the beta test period a few months ago.
If the gameplay of Concord was good enough to be mentioned once ever by anyone talking about the game, and the draw of the characters was there at all- like if they were JUUUST a bit more stylized I think Concord might have had a solid niche as a hero shooter.
I will always say we need more body types represented in media, but faded out neon colors, baggy clothes, and generic sci-fi military fatigues w/ bulbous armor plates doesnt sell me on the characters at all. Even the robot is so bland while also being cute. I think the realism actually hurts the game a lot.
Concord is a Sony Exclusive.
IGN would rather nuke what's left of their reputation as a games media outlet than criticize, call out, or otherwise actually critically evaluate a Sony Exclusive. It's pitiful, really, but nothing new in it.
Alright lets ignore the developers lashing out at people who didnt buy it, lets ignore character design, lets ignore the political pandering with SBI and ill give ya why it failed for just a moment. It was 40 dollars when your main competition is f2p(overwatch), followed by some other f2ps that actually have a sizeable audience like valorant, paladin, TF2, and others. On top of that, hero shooters have been on a major incline as well as the rest of the market, with some exceptions. On top of THAT, there is already a major anti live service sentiment being pushed by most gamers now a days because of companies like activision and ubisoft. Now for the thing that sealed its fate.
It could be the most anti woke game in existence. It could have npc's screaming MAGA with fireworks going off in the background and the game would still be shlt. The developers (or whatever developer) deciding to call any critics talentless freaks, when they most likely have pronouns in their bios, just sealed their fate of most not wanting to give them a chance. You can only be arrogant when your shlt is good.
y c
Besides that, imagine being a part of the alphabet community and being told this game is a representation for you and your ideals, only to see intentionally ugly characters, with many of em being black or of some non white complexion. Is that how your allies see you? Of course they arent gonna flock to the game. In essence, this game was made for no one but the developers to feel better about themselves. This is why a rejection of this game is so personal to them because it is them being rejected(in their mind).
They are so obsessed with """owning the chuds""", that they are literally insulting the very people they proclaim to champion. Remember folks when people think LGBTQ+ games now, it is games like this, and other failures, people will remember.
Nah, the gameplay is mid, character design is souless with negative hype leading up its release into a saturated market.
Destined to fail. Anybody trying to drag politics into it is telling on themselves.
Saying this game didn’t fail because of character design in a hero shooter is completely disingenuous. Stop talking around the elephant and acknowledge it.
The racist tweets for the lead dev show what types of people they are.
You’re making an assumption about a whole team based on 1 person’s comment/opinion?
You’re missing a key factor with respect to the whole “get woke go broke” thing. Both developers/publishers and bootlicking journalists have used the following general response (whatever flavor of the day you want) as both a shield and a mace to defend a mechanically flawed and bad game while shifting the blame on players: “You don’t like the game? You must be a [insert -ist or -phobe word here], because look at how many diverse characters you’re not playing as by not liking and not playing the game.” It’s been used to both shield against valid criticism and beat the general public over the head so many times that anytime unappealing characters designs are shown, a lot of people immediately are expecting the game to have had care in its core development sacrificed on the alter of “diversity.” Frankly, that’s one of the reasons I haven’t played many games at all besides Fortnite, modded Minecraft and occasionally Volcanoids (waiting to try the new update, so haven’t in a while) whereas I used to play Overwatch all the time.
In Concord’s case, I guarantee that the number one go-to defense against people saying the game is failing will forever be, “Oh, it’s all the -ists and -phobes.” Which is wholly wrong, as you’ve already addressed. But that kind of beating over the head does implicitly affect the success of future games, because the more that excuse gets used, the fewer people will buy even fewer games from the companies who directly engage in that kind of thing. Hell, even if the journalists are the ones doing it with respect to a company they’re after game keys from for reviews, it still is a gross taste left in the mouths of gamers.
And those people would be as dumb as the people who explicity write something off because it happens to try to be diverse, very few people bitched about Overwatch having diverse characters when compared to how many played overwatch and it made boatloads until Blizzard got lazy. Bad games are bad, period.
I would never have played Concord because I am not into Hero Shooters. I've never played Overwatch either.
Part of the Concord Developers job was to create a game that would lure people in. They failed. There wasn't a Boycott. Everyone just predicted the game would fail. Like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did. Like Dustborn did. Like Star Wars Outlaws will... or will not.
If i were Sony, i would do a revenge return with "Concordia". I would make a badass version of the current characters and spice up the game. It would be the best option. To relaunch to redeem the game.
I have no interest in the game but I definitely find it weird that people were hating it as some bastion of "wokeness" rather than literally everything else wrong with it. Even if the designs were "good" it wouldn't negate the other downfalls. But I guess that's what happens when the loud minority opinions take hold.
Concord looked literally like Paladin - Free-to-play MOBA that was a clone of overwatch
This. How a professional vg journalist can easily present an excellent report without any in-game video.
Why does this have so many dislikes? Maybe the title I assume which is harsh, but the facts are right here.
Because he dismisses the point of the whole "woke" stuff as a non-matter when its clear that its at least part of why the game is simply not well recieved.
@@Gnarfendorf That explains it. I'm completely indifferent, but I think it's he's right in the fact that the people actually buying this stuff don't know or care.
Players just want good games that people are playing. I find most of the characters just bland or non-distinctive.
@@rushnerd Im personally indifferent because i wouldnt have played the game anyways, hero shooters are not my cup of tea. But the saying "the customer is always right in what they want" applies heavily with this game. They did not want a p2p hero shooter with unatractive cookie cutter characters straight from the DEI playbook and mediocre gameplay.
Dismissing the customers wishes does not play out well when it comes to a saturated market, that should be obvious to anybody.
@@Gnarfendorf I think it hardly matters since Deadlock (and less so Black Myth) dropped at the SAME time when it launched. Like you, I played Deadlock, not my thing, but it's a freakin' surprise Valve game and that has a stupid amount of power. No one is even going to pretend to care about this when Valve has the same thing but better in everyway for free.
all AAA games nowadays are trash regardless, Sony, Square, Blizz all of them suck. The era of TA is over.
I disagree 😑😑😑 where the swimwear skins brah. The lingerie set?? Not that I would want to see ANY of these characters in those things and im talking about the males too. They need to overhaul ALL the characters. AND Make the maps less seen it done it already. 😅😅
I personally believe it's just a casualty of time. It's come out at a time when the trend has been and gone. It's no longer a game anyone wants.
You can't blame the $40 price tag because the game had no players even during the free beta.
You can't blame the "bad" gameplay because people refused to buy it even before the game's reviews came out.
The only logical conclusion is that the game was rejected because of it's uglified woke character designs.
By the time the free beta happened, people had already played a paid beta and decided the game sucked. So, I can.
@@kirareacts The whole point of a beta is to iron out problems with the gameplay. The idea that people massively avoided a beta because of gameplay issues is just absurd.
And the gameplay of Concord isn't "bad". Boring? Yes. Derivative? Yes. But the game is stable and well balanced.
Genshin Impact has the most boring and derivative gameplay of any game out there yet it has 50 million players because the game's characters are actually nice to look at.
Video and audio sync issue, again. Mainly listen to these so doesn't really matter.