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You really jumped over the DEI issue but it's much deeper than you let on. Large multinational companies are funding game studios and inserting this forceably into games which is the bigger issue that your "minor subset of players" is aware of. Quit avoiding the truth.
video came too soon cause it's confirmed to be 400mil that they lost.... which is what happens when devs/companies try to stay in their own little bubble and not take any criticism at all....
It will never stop being funny to me that Concord is getting so much attention and analysis in its death chiefly due to how little anyone cared about it when it was alive.
Thats actually a very important mantra. Everything costs more than a blockbuster movie of yester year and the hype and expectations for nearly every AAA is make it or break it. I miss the old days where a AAA studio would have theae big budget releases and maybe 2 other AA projects and new IPs that cost significantly less and provide the team with some revenue so their AAA would not be a death sentence if it flops. Now you can have a game sell 2 million copies and still be considerd a Comercial Failure.
@@DangerB0ne Plus taxes. So for me it would be $886.89 total.... and then I'll need a disc drive to play my physical games... and an extended hard drive to play the new COD without uninstalling half my games... hmmmm, it's a bargain
Im still surprised with that "8 years" I know making game is hard, but cmon 8 years for this, Its almost feels like starfield, where right now everything is seamless and put loading screen as little as possible, yet it released like we're still in 2016.
@@notbot5360 Cyberpunk2077 has or had a lot off issues, but no loading screens and it is a vast huge world with some massive complexes to enter. I cant remember seeing any besides when the game is booting up. Some are hidden behind elevators I believe, but while you are taking them you are able to watch tv news.
They based designs on 70s aesthetics? Honestly, I don't see it at all. Designs to me just seemed too bright, too colorful, just nauseating, incohesive even. They all look unappealing
Ironically enough, if they were more colorful and nauseating, they would be closer to the 70's 😂Coming from someone who loves 70's aesthetics. Purple hair alien girl clearly wears modern clothes, 2005-ish. There's nothing 70's about her, nothing.
For me it's as you said, while detailed, the game is utterly ugly. The maps are bland and forgettable and the heros look like weirdos who you'd see at walmart at 2am. Their personalities are just as cringe as their appearance. If they really wanted to copy guardians of the galaxy then they completely failed. All the guardians are likeable while no one in their game is.
Number 1 unwritten rule of game creation: NEVER look at a game that just came out and say "I want to do that." Chances are that 50 other game makers had that same idea at that same time.
You would think the industry would have learned that after the age of "WoW-killer" mmos failures.. but it seems the industry is resistant to lessons from history
And movie and tv show, and while we're at it that general line of thought is also good for the stock market. "If I've heard of this good tip so have others"
While i think "I want to do that." isn't really bad, but if they wanna do it then figure out how to be different/innovative AND DON'T BE OUTDATED WHEN YOU APPEAR!
As a once diehard Overwatch player turned scorned lover...i was praying for another developer to sweep me off my feet. The characters in Concord are so cringe that nothing this game could offer would make that problem go away. Looking at these models is shockingly bad. Vomit
You know, Astro Bot kicked off a discussion over whether dormant IPs should be revived, and one of the main arguments against it is that "mid-sized games just don't sell much anymore." Maybe they don't, but I think a new Ape Escape or Sly Cooper game would've sold more than Concord did. And then you have H̶y̶e̶n̶a̶s̶ Fairgame$ and Marathon...
Lots of "AA" games have seen success lately. It's more that people aren't willing to spend time or money on clearly uninspired titles without a sizeable amount of their friends also moving over.
We need more fun charming games like Astro Bot. I would love a new Sly, Jak and Dexter, Ape Escape, Gravity Rush, LocoRoco heck if you want to do shooters bring back Killzone and SOCOM, they would have done 100 times better than Concord ever did.
@@reallycool totally! notably Helldivers 2, stellar blades, Space Marine 2, Pacific Drive..etc i forgot to mention. it felt more like theyre replacing over what AAA arent able to accomplish nowadays. seeing AA being the middle child has both pros of being able to develop fresh indie concepts and the manpower and budget to accomplish that scale.
@@reallycool And even then, some of those friends can be 'paid'. Like the following for something like... I don't know... that black monkey game that the anti-woke crowd was buzzing over?
I think you’re wrong in that people wont feel nostalgic for 70s aesthetic. People wont feel nostalgic, but they will see a cool aesthetic they’ve never seen, and love it. The problem comes from the fact that who ever was in charge of art direction failed to do the 70s scifi designs justice, and instead tried to do a weird off putting hybrid of 70s Sci-Fi, and Mondern Brutalists Sci-Fi. It’s ugly to look at. Things have random puffy bits, or parts of clothes are made out of strips of harder materials. What would be a 60s style Space helmet is instead an awkward ball made up of metal plates with random oval holes in it. That isn’t “Future-Retro”.
Oh man, now I'm trying to remember the name of another team sci-fi shooter with a retro aesthetic. It didn't last long either. You fought hordes of monsters and it was mostly in a space hotel or resort, anyone know?
I don't understand how a game can suffer from 'feature creep' during its development and then still release without any features that make for a compelling USP. Truly a perfect storm of hubris.
Fat and ugly characters could be good when they're designed with that in mind. Think junkrat or The Heavy. Those are beloved characters who aren't conventionally attractive because they were designed with those features in mind and it was balanced well. These characters are flat and uninspiring. There's no reason why these characters are fat and ugly they just are. The Heavy is Heavy because he's an absolute tank, HE'S HEAVY and he's strong enough to carry these huge weapons. Junkrat is ugly because he lives in a junkyard and is dirty and slippery like a rat. The concord characters are fat and ugly because?? The studio demanded artists draw fat and ugly characters to fill a quota. Like someone went into the artist's room and said "we need all these body types or else we're not being inclusive".
A problem isn't the 70's design ( fashion trends in regular people showed it came back in the 2010's). Its how the designs were done, not one of the characters actually fit the aesthetic. Hi fi rush was a 90's to early 2000's Saturday morning cartoon like Megas XLR and the WB block shows, Mass Effect in the first game drew people in with 1980's and 90's style sci-fi. Designs were overcomplicated which didn't help with the character identities. Panzer Dragoon for example had it's art design done by Mobius of Valerian and Lauraline fame a series rooted in the 70's European comic scene and Heavy Metal. So i won't blame it on choice of style but execution.
@@reallycool And thanks for that u usually take your time with your videos! Instead of others who push 10, 10 minute videos every second day about Concord you took your sweet time, did your research and made a almost 1 hour documentary why Concord failed, thanks.
I find it insane that they so desperately wanted to copy Overwatch, even copying it down to a fault. No pve mode, a story trailer for a game without a story mode, and insisting theres a deeper lore and character development that will likely just be isolated to comics and reveal trailers on youtube. They could have planned to make a game that competed with overwatch by providing more than what the franchise offers now, but they decided to stop at the exact point Blizzard started 8 years ago.
@@samuelsolomon7330 It doesn't even compare to Overwatch properly gameplay-wise. Original Overwatch (Not Overwatch 2) had this very polished objective-oriented gameplay loop I can only compare to Tug of War. From what I've seen Concord is a chaotic team deathmatch with minimal support/tank/DPS interaction, akin to Team Fortress 2.
And Overwatch is running in circles. It's sad to see how Overwatch "represents" this genre, such a horrendous game that wasted infinite potential because of bad direction smh "hero shooters" are not supposed to be represented by this abomination, remember Team Fortress 2? That is the standard right there, they introduced the whole thing: game modes, defined classes who can't be customized, snarky trailers to present each class, etc.. Overwatch blatantly copied TF2 and Global Agenda. And here we are, Marvel Rivals only offers PvP and nothing else, it's poised to take over, straight up killing Paladins + snatch away half of the Overwatch playerbase (if not more). It's the same old TF formula, but Rivals is a fun game. Concord failed to be fun and engaging, simple as it is (and this game is not a TF, more like a mix of Halo + Destiny + TF "abilities". Overwatch "2", Paladins and Marvel Rivals are straight up TF)
Concord’s development is insane to me because they got *every resource that every developer would’ve begged for* especially in this day and age. Practically unlimited money and enough agency to only show off the game once they were confident opposed to something like anthem or andromeda where no one was ready. Yet Firewalk still completely fumbled it. They had one job for a *DECADE* and didn’t think to change anything from the start. Shockingly similar to Skull and Bones despite seemingly having none of the issues that game came across in development. FW just seemed far too confident due to the lack of interference or widespread testing until it was too late. Like surrounding yourself with a bunch of people who just say “yes” to all of your decisions despite how badly each one is being received elsewhere.
I think a campaign of pve would've justified the $40 cost. Even if it was only 10-12 hours of content, but high quality, the game could've survived at least twice as long Edit: just realized, that's still not even a month... not even a February month. Lol
Now apparently there's evidence they spent 400$ million because when it came time to test the alpha it needed serious reworking so they added 200 million more
@@skyair3444 According to reports, Firewalk Studios was purchased for 200 million, and then another 200 million was spent on the game's creation and advertisement over 8 years. Honestly, a game costing 200 million to make over 8 years isn't really surprising because that's a LONG time that requires employee paycheck costs during that entire time...but it turning 0 profit and incurring only losses with that development cost on top of the studio purchase cost with a reputation so tarnished that it will never recuperate those compounded losses is the real embarrassment.
It feels like Concord was taking a very big gamble that Hero Shooters would still be popular after 8 years and that they could slice out a market share of it. It almost feels like they saw TF2 retaining relevance after 9 years and believing that retention was due to the genre and not the game itself. In the 8 years, we spanned market trends of hero shooters, mobile gaming, battle royales, (to an extent) FPS resurgence, all of which had peaks of influence before dying out. That should've been the sign to Sony that Concord was more than likely going to die out of irrelevance before it even had the chance to take off because of the very principles it was founded on
$400 million for this game of all things is crazy to me. Like yeah, that's still pretty much chump change to Sony but I'll be surprised if people don't get getting fired at some point.
@coltonwilkie241 Sad thing is, the bigwigs aren't getting fired. It'll be the innocent designers who were told to make it like this that will get booted from the company. Keep in mind, it's the Sony Execs who make all the choices and create the deadlines. They'll find some way to fire the lesser employees and cover it up with corporate speak in a ChatGPT based apology
"Inspired in the 70s aesthetics, drawing inspiration from an era that predates most of its target audience" If done right it can work like Team Fortress 2 is based in 60s~70s aesthetics, however Concord characters color pallet and design was downright ugly.
It might be mean to say it but im glad concord flopped so hard. Hopefully this shows companies that dev resources put into massive live services is a big risk! They arent just free money machines, and those development hours could have been put into making something great (like astro bot)
But the line of thinking up until this point was "Green light like 4 of them, and if even one of them is a run away success, we can still use the other 3 as a tax write off". But its also worth noting the massive waves of lay offs, and canning of projects a couple years ago. This was forcing a lot of publishers to put all their eggs into one basket. The same thing they were doing just before the pivot to live services. Their strategy works when you've hedged your bets.... but they cut the hedge to cover up a half decade of failures, and now the last bush is so bad, it can't even catch fire.
As someone whose life could change with $2k-10k I actually find it nauseating to see that trash like Concord and the Borderlands film burn through hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now imagine how many indie games could've been made with a budget of $200M lol. Currently, Crab game on steam has over 50000 peak players. This was a game made by an indie developer in 2 weeks. If you are generous, let's say you hire senior indie developers and pay them 10k a month, you could have 20000 developers make 2 crab game like projects each IN A MONTH.
I like the woe is me social media posts and threads with tens of thousands of likes and updoots after this game was canned. Couldn't bother to buy and play the game.
I played it. I didn't even dislike it. But I saw the issues immediately, and was not surprised by its lack of stickiness. I did expect them to pivot to f2p instead of closing it entirely, though I still think they'll do that in a few months
This reminds me of Hyenas, the Creative Assembly looter shooter that had an abysmal beta test. Difference being that Sega decided to pull the plug on that after seeing the writing on the wall.
@@reallycoolGameplay-wise, an FPS with Zero-G elements could potentially be interesting. But in terms of overall aesthetics? Hyenas was complete garbage. Very "How do you do, fellow kids?" tiers of tone-deaf attempts to be relatable and failing miserably.
It's a huge failure all the same, Sega shouldn't be "praised" for that. Same goes if Sony cancel Fairgame$, they already wasted money and tarnished the image of the company
Yeop. And us Total War: Warhammer players have been paying for it ever since. Thanks CA. $100m could have brought us TW:WH40k, but yah just couldn’t stop drinking the “hey, we can do Overwatch but with an uno reverse card mechanic!” Kool Aid.
I think it’s a crime at around 16:57, you didn’t mention TF2, the character designs are so good and unique that if you were to assign a pose to each one and then ask a player to name each character only by their silhouettes, the player could guess each immediately
Obviously they're completely different genres but I just find it hilarious to see the difference in numbers: last year Capcom released a collection of 6 ~20 year old GBA games, it sold 1.4 million copies in two months and had a peak player count on Steam of over 7,000. Ports of Gameboy Advance games sold better than Concord by orders of magnitude and have a larger multiplayer community.
Man, it's kind of strange considering Capcom used to be in bottom, but they stopped and thought how to deal with it and realised they must gain people trust and put quality over quantity with their game
This alone explains why it was shut down so quickly. Sony was banking on immediate success in order to recoup their loss. They didn't try to salvage the game because they couldn't AFFORD to waste any more money on it.
The $400 mil does include the price Sony payed for the studio, Sony acquired them for $200 mil and both miscellaneous investors and Sony dumped $200 mil into the game. $400 million for this trash heap is insane though
The total was $400 million. Miscellaneous investors and also Sony dumped $200 million into this trash heap and Sony acquired Firewalk studios for another $200 million. $400 million is still insane for this piece of garbage.
Just started. Lets look at their early interviews about concord. "We really just want a strong foundation for concord. Something that players are familiar with" literally this is just a concept of a hero shooter pushed to release with a HUGE budget, for the foundation. The ground. Base level. Nothing innovative, nothing unique. Nothing standing. Its just a slab of "yep, this is a hero shooter."
Yep, some people take a blind eye for that. Recently I saw a indie rpg developed by former Bioware devs or something like that, many comments mentioning that is a good thing... but really, look at the state of Bioware, if these devs were not good enough to sustain their jobs at that environment, at those standards, imagine their real talent? Sometimes people are fired for a reason, they leave companies for a reason, etc.. it's not always the big scary capitalistic dog ruining the lives of innocent workers, blablabla real life is not a melodrama
If the CEO fails and mismanages a company, the competent people will leave first. Competent employees get lots of job offers or even have enough experience to create a startup. If a company is managed competently, then it's more likely that underperforming employees will be forced to leave. Failing CEOs seem to be the default at big video developers, but I'm not part of the game industry, so what do I know? Haha 🌈@@RRRRRRRRR33
...You guys know that when you're low on the ladder, nobody listens to you if you mention that what you're being told to make is bad, right? Like... The idea that every dev gets to decide what gets made is bull, it's not as simple as it being a group project when it involves over a thousand collaborators. If the lead designer has a terrible idea, that's it. You get paid to make a terrible game. Like, if my boss told me to build something incorrectly, I tell him it's wrong, and he says do it anyway... Like, my choice is to quit and let someone else get paid to do the same, or go along and do something badly but still get paid for it. And in this economy, that's not a hard choice to make!
@@TheRedstonian that line of reasoning only really works if the studio they left made garbage, but if its a studio that is lauded for making good games, it kinda only shows that the leads on those projects knew what they were doing and that there might be a valid reason those developers dont work there anymore
the entirety of the modern audience got into a car crash and is currently recovering, they'll be back and make the next game oriented at the modern audience a billion dollars
Don't forget PSN accounts are not available for over 100 countries, Sony games especially on PC are not an option for a lot of people. No one I know is risking spending on a Sony game then having their account banned.
@@lannobile7260 That is clear but that's just surface level. To get that money we need to think deeper. How do we get that money? What does the market want? Who are our competitors? What can we offer that they don't?
Deadlock sneaks in out of nowhere only available by friend invitations which pretty much required the community to interact with each other to spead the hype. The story telling through the environment doesn't get in the way of the gameplay and the setting exists outside that sci-fi futuristic setting almost every other hero shooter sank into more skin to something like Arkham Horror.
I think that really has very little to do with it, tbh. Most people aren't paying any attention to twitter drama and Saints Rowboot was an abysmal game in its own right.
I think the future is to go back to single and double-A games. These giant budgets and need for giant sales numbers have gotten too out of hand, and the drive to milk the market will only give us more Concords in the future. If there's one thing I expect no less out of big names in the video gaming, it's that they never read the room and double down hard when they mess up.
Thats completely wrong. I know countless pixel games on steam that fell flat. I know a bunch of actual 4/8bit era games that modern gamers would chew their hands off in frustration if they tried to play it. Same can be said for Cel Shading. The pixel games that survived the first pass, only did so due to great art direction. On the same side of that coin, I've also seen multiple UE5 game look absolutely horrid, despite how good the graphics are (Forspoken and that Sonic game comes to mind). Helldivers works because its lit like an action movie, as opposed to the drab blue/yellow tint of the MilSim era of shooters, or the simultaneous overdark/overlit look of a lot of modern action games.
@@freelancerthe2561 You're talking about the aesthetics rather than the graphics. Bad aesthetics are why games look bad even when they have high poly count and fancy postprocessing and stuff. Conversely, good aesthetics is why 2D pixel art games can still look really good and be popular, despite having technically bad graphics.
I think in their defense, they charged 40$ for a game was because Back in the day, it wasn't free 2 play to play overwatch 😂 But, the difference is Overwatch was a brand new idea toward a fps game. While Concord is the cheap copy of Overwatch
but even this defense shows how they never looked back at the market once they had chosen who they wanted to mimic. Yes Overwatch WAS $40 but the markets current buy in price is now free, the money coming after attachment has set it. I do find it annoying and strange that once games have earned enough money off the price of the game becoming free once enough secondary money stream have opened up (IE Overwatch with lootboxes and Sims 4 with expansions packs) but even that "precedent" requires a lot of good faith or a large audience, if not both. and Concord had neither.
The middle of the video also brought up a good point about expectations when playing as certain characters being missed. One Overwatch streamer gave Concord a go (he was paid for it) and noted that a character he picked looked and moved tanky, but had a low health pool and so lacked the survivability of a tank. It doesn't do a good job at making you play how the developers intended you to play.
By the point overwatch came out tf2 was free to play however, even overwatch went f2p with overwatch 2 and deadlocked is launching f2p, seems that pretty much everyone working in these kinda games agree that going f2p will lead to larger overall playerbase and maintaining the games monetization through cosmetics, even non hero shooters like counter strike 2 changed to be the same way.
For being in development for that long and costing that much I had not once heard of this game until videos started coming out about what a failure it was. I hadn’t heard a single peep, and I keep up with gaming news. The abysmal lack of marketing alone takes a sizable chunk of the blame for this games failure.
I disagree it had a lot of marketing here is a small list: the limited edition Concord controller, the very own CGI Amazon episode (that will air soon and definitely costed a lot of money), the merchandise yes Concord has merchandise like cups and t-shirts and so on. On PlayStation's own RUclips channel, I myself counted all the Concord trailers and the game had over 30 of them. I think marketing can push a great game but a bad game is still a bad game, doesn't matter how much you invest into marketing.
I forgot to mention Deadlock, Deadlock had literally ZERO marketing, it had a closed beta no one was supposed to talk about and it still blew up because of word of mouth. It was a good game people shared their experience even if they were supposed not to talk about it, here you have Concord with a HUGE marketing budget where most people didn't even know about is existence and then you have Deadlock a closed secret beta that no one should talk about and had no marketing (it was there to test the game) and the game blew up like crazy.
@@Official_RetroMania I found out about Deadlock after seeing someone talking about a certain "Spanish gargoyle girl" in a comment section of a video about Concord lol. Probably the best thing I have found from dumpster diving.
@@Official_RetroManiaExactly this, i don't think a lack of marketing was the downfall of Concord, In fact everyone could see that Sony DID put the game almost everywhere because they really believed this game was going to be a huge success, hell they were even referring to the game as "Sony's own Star wars IP" internally. Its just that everything they showed about the game just didn't had anything good or different/interesting enough to catch the players atenttion to begin with, so most just moved on
I’m usually dissatisfied with the description of “unnecessary” in terms of quality of media, but in this case, it’s clearly right. If so few people wanted it that they pulled the plug in 12 day, it was unnecessary to release it in the first place.
What's worse is that after the game shutdown no one really felt bad about it even the sympathetic ones because of the arrogance of the developers who believes we should play their games because they worked hard on it while calling out people criticism their game as talentless hacks and that they don't care what anyone says about the game
Good lord that darn game Concord, with all that money wasted it could have been used in better things in PlayStation, like: -Don't shutdown Japan Studios. -Don't shutdown London Studios. -Avoided the layoffs on Bend Studio and the cancellation of Days Gone 2. -Expanded more the PlayStation Classics porting departament team. -Developed small games or publish/help porting indie games for the PS4/5 (like they did in the PS3 days). But nope everything went to this "I wanna be" Overwatch with rejected and plagiarize designs from The Guardians of the Galaxy. The only good thing that Concord achieved was the fact that finally someone dethroned E.T. of Atari in failure aspects after 42 years. Well that and another "crazy surprise" that 2024 gave us, gosh... this year has been weirdly amazing and disturbing. 😂
Tbh the PS london studio spent years without making any meaningful product/game considering its overhead cost, and the higher up got first hand experience on the employee "vibing"
If they placed the money between the Japan and London studios we would’ve been having some amazing games out like a new LittleBigPlanet or Freedom Wars for PS5/4, both would’ve outclassed this. Now Sony has IPs missing their original creative teams who had vision. Concord is at best a game created by a committee check list.
@@TheMrJoltz Was never gonna happen, now that they're pivoting to a game pass model, and need multiplatform support. As usual, they're like 5 years too late to be starting that.
Ironically this game dying gives me hope for the future of games. Maybe such a failure is what is needed for priorities to shift back into gameplay first. May even incentivize a rise in double-A games
I didn’t think I’d encounter anyone to phrase my thoughts so well. 😆 I was expecting a rough launch where the game would either limp on until it was patched to working condition or it would putter out a few months before being axed. I would have never expected that Concord would fail so hard that servers were being shut down before I fully understood what was happening to it.
It's a shame, because I tried the beta and it actually wasn't that bad. The queue times were ok, and it was enjoyable once I got used to the controls. It had potential, but clearly they bet the house and it didn't pay off
I think the biggest contributor to Concord's downfall was Sony's acquisition of Firewalk Studios. Once big names appear, it's over. Biomutant. Was hyped up as hell. Until THQ Nordic stepped in. Price tag went up from 40 to 60 and it wasn't what fans anticipated. Respawn sold the rights to Titanfall to EA. While it did bring Apex Legends, Titanfall was buried 6 feet under. And, of course, the biggest failure: Duke Nukem Forever. Randy tried to salvage the game but he should've let it die. Now, he sits on Duke Nukem all day, doing squat, and asking money for the pre-build of DNF from 2009. Greasy bastard. I personally think, if Sony hadn't acquired Firewalk, maybe Concord wouldn't have died 2 weeks after release.
I'm not a huge gamer and just happened upon this video. I don't see why so many people are saying they find the characters cringey or dislike them, can you provide insight?? I went to watch the whole cast and the only cringey one imo is the green alien girl
@@lavenderlemons888 all the weird skin colours. One is green ffs., fat, ugly, old. skin colour is skin colour but there isnt a single white character in the game.
the stupid part is, the gameplay in this video, which i assume is concord's, Looks Good, the abilities seem fun and the maps are interesting to look at, i would probably at least have considered checking it out, BUT-- i didn't hear about it at all until the day it launched already dying and there were articles about THAT. and those articles, reasonably, used promotional screens of the characters, all of whom look vaguely offputting and derivative (discount thanos, we have ghostbusters at home, and "those me:andromeda aliens but make it a fungus" stand out particularly), so i just assumed there was nothing there worth caring about. art direction on this title was delusional.
@@reallycool it's the best thing that could've happened. Sony had 12 live-service projects as "the future of gaming" - and, except for Helldivers 2, every one of them died miserably, a lot of them in development. Great news for people who like single-player games.
I remember playing Apex on day one. I hopped in a call on Xbox with my friends and asked if they had seen the ad in the home screen, and they said it was similar to fortnite but in the Titanfall universe. We all downloaded it and hopped in. Awesome gameplay, and i really dislike battle Royale games. If it had a price tag, i wouldn't have touched it. I remember buying mirage somewhat close to launch as well, since he seemed fun and i enjoyed the game. It was like ten bucks, and i was satisfied with it. Dropping 40 on a game sight unseen in a genre where there's free alternatives sounds like a stupid idea. I'd just okay overwatch or valorant
this is ultimate proof that it isn't hate that kills a game. It is apathy. Concord's announcement was met with overwhelming... nothingness. No one had any opinion, good or bad, about this game. It was passable. It wasn't great, nor was it bad. And that apathy and mediocrity is far worse than if the game was just horrible.
I imagine it was probably just to avoid a lawsuit, even if they won it that is thousands of dollars down the drain for lawyers and other legal fees, better to give the few hundred people there money back in a already failure of a game.
@@brandonlyon730That’s probably a really good point. It could have also been a case of it being cheaper to refund the few people that bought it than to sink the time, resources, costs and effort needed to keep it going.
There's also the matter of the name for me. What is the Concord? Why is the Concord something we, and especially, the characters should care? Is this set in the same timeline as Flight of the Concords?
I quite enjoyed Concord, but GOD this game did almost everything wrong. From bad character design, to barely any content, to almost no focus on what made the game fun (the rivals playlist).
22:40 If Sony saiid, “We realized it was too much, too soon”, then they’re still lying to themselves about what the problem was. Which means we can expect more of the same. And it ain’t the 70s esthetic.
out of everything i've heard about the game, the MOST shocking thing was that they made a hero shooter without ultimate abilities. I cannot fathom why ANY game in this day and age with a focus on specialized characters DOESN'T HAVE ULTIMATE ABILITIES
@@olianims Funny enough Mecha Break is also a hero shooter with mechs as the “heroes” with no ultimate abilities or even human characters at all outside of your create a character and a couple NPCs as skins. That mostly twitch-drop-only for the first week beta test got over 50,000 players, almost 25 times the number of players as concord’s open beta running at the same time. A game that had barely anything other than a couple of trailers and a relatively new chinese studio. People like to try new things, concord just didn’t look interesting to anyone.
The game reeks of executive planning. People that don't make or play games just hear second-hand about what's popular and hire enough people to copy it.
The main problem: instead of looking for specific group of gamers the game companies pushing no-burger products to global market in blind hope it will stick somehow. And now PS5 Pro should pay for Concord disaster.
I would like to extend my most heartfelt gratitude to Sony for the work they have done in uplifting the state of Indie games. I know they are not alone that deserve such praise, Ubisoft is another key member in showing the customer, repeatedly, how they are better off spending their money anywhere else but on their games. I would like also to give a shoutout to EA and Blizzard, they are doing fantastic also on that front. Thanks to all of them, the economical paradigm of the video game industry is shifting from what it once was. Thanks for sharing, cheers!
Cant help but feel for game developers, i know they poured endless hours and sleepless nights trying to make the game as perfect as they could all while deadlines and management breathing down their neck. All to just deflate out like an untied balloon. I imagine just the sheer disappointment, and then the blame from higher ups, and then just getting berated by the same community you try to please. I think the failure is also in part by the playerbase themselves. Im not saying force yourself to like it, but if everyone knew what it really was to make games, there would be at least be a shred of appreciation for any of them. I hope they all (devs) get the recognition they deserve for all their hardwork, even if it was a sinking ship.
The Star Citizen scope creep is so pervasive it's hitting its timeline too. Investors were not acquired until September 2012 and public funds were not taken until October that same year. Yes it has been a long, thought rapidly accelerating, ride. There is no need to creep the timeline with the scope.
"TF2, the grandfather of class based shooters-" Has yet to be matched in quality, community interaction, and feel. Despite bots, bugs, and lacking dev support it's honestly insane how good TF2 has held up. The community has only grown stronger to the point that I don't think Valve could even attempt to release TF3 because it would have to be of equal or greater quality. Which is wild considering the game's source code is a spaghetti monster that runs on a fucking .jpg of a coconut.
Now I'm upset I didn't have the bell ringed. It's a little late to the party, but since it's a Concord discussion there really isn't a time limit. This game belongs in a museum of "What NOT to do."
They said they spent 100 million on the game's development up to 200 million, but I believe it's way more than 200 million. For sure has to be a quarter of a billion if not a little more.
Maybe they were high on copium like "This is gonna fail. But we already spent to much time and specially money on it. Maybe it becomes a suprise hit and we make our money back!"
The thing about Corncord is: The game doesn't even look that bad, but when I saw the gameplay and the price tag I went to play Overwatch 2 instead, it's that simple 🤷♂️
The retro-70s sci fi asthetic was, IMO, the real nail in the coffin for concord's design. In a game that was cell shaded/animated it could have worked better, but in a game that focuses on hyper-realistic looks it just looks absolutely terrible.
Looking at the gameplay and cinematics, I'd honestly have been interested in playing this game if it was a FPS RPG like borderlands or destiny. It's a shame such a gorgeous game is going to waste.
Even the “crew bonus” is derivative of another game, technically; FFXIV has a 1% bonus to stats for each role you have in a party of 8 between a tank, healer, melee, physical ranged and magical ranged dps jobs, with the standard comp being 2 tanks/healers and 4 dps of varying in the above listed
@@RRRRRRRRR33of 20k indie games, 90% of them already have more players than concord. It isn't a herculean task. What is a herculean task is to manage to be a AAA game and STILL have worse player numbers then 90% of indie games
A good example I feel would be Warframe as someone who listened to their community and changed alongside them and generated a following because their community itself want them to do well and has trust that they can comeback if ever they missed something
Thanks for sharing this video on reddit, you can also retweet here x.com/MRIXRT/status/1836057531468439780
Special thanks to my podcast co-hosts for providing additional footage, check out youtube.com/@crubofficial
@@reallycool remember no first
You really jumped over the DEI issue but it's much deeper than you let on. Large multinational companies are funding game studios and inserting this forceably into games which is the bigger issue that your "minor subset of players" is aware of. Quit avoiding the truth.
$400 million now.
200 million? nah double it and give it to next guy LOL
video came too soon cause it's confirmed to be 400mil that they lost....
which is what happens when devs/companies try to stay in their own little bubble and not take any criticism at all....
It will never stop being funny to me that Concord is getting so much attention and analysis in its death chiefly due to how little anyone cared about it when it was alive.
It is remarkable how unremarkable it was😂
The milk toast man concord was isn't interesting
The corpse it became is
"The bigger they are, the louder they crash."
"alive"
because analyzing success does not translate to other success, but analyzing failure can prevent further failures.
Concord teaches an important lesson: games might be pay-to-win, but *game development* isn't.
Thats actually a very important mantra. Everything costs more than a blockbuster movie of yester year and the hype and expectations for nearly every AAA is make it or break it.
I miss the old days where a AAA studio would have theae big budget releases and maybe 2 other AA projects and new IPs that cost significantly less and provide the team with some revenue so their AAA would not be a death sentence if it flops. Now you can have a game sell 2 million copies and still be considerd a Comercial Failure.
it absolutely is p2w, the devs just bought a bunch of cosmetics instead of advertising and gameplay
Like many things in life, throwing more money at a problem stops working after a certain point (cough, Hyenas)
Poetry
@@volcanic_sloth and product research! They forgot that.
"Sony's reputation took a hit..."
And then Jim Ryan said, "Hold my beer!" and allowed them to announce the PS5 Pro for $800
Seven hundred ninety-nine dollars
@@DangerB0ne Plus taxes. So for me it would be $886.89 total.... and then I'll need a disc drive to play my physical games... and an extended hard drive to play the new COD without uninstalling half my games... hmmmm, it's a bargain
The xbox series x is 600$ no upgrades at all...........
@@beenjammin971 no upgrades compared to What?
Still 250€ less than ps5 pro, and it includes The disc drive @@beenjammin971
Ok but seriously losing 8 years of development and spending like 200M and failing is honestly one of the biggest failures in videogame history.
That’s why it’s causing such a splash with the scale of its failure.
@@mikoto7693 It is a great failure indeed, heard from around the world.
Who would have thought that "FAT: the video game" would have failed?" 😂
Im still surprised with that "8 years"
I know making game is hard, but cmon 8 years for this,
Its almost feels like starfield, where right now everything is seamless and put loading screen as little as possible, yet it released like we're still in 2016.
@@notbot5360 Cyberpunk2077 has or had a lot off issues, but no loading screens and it is a vast huge world with some massive complexes to enter. I cant remember seeing any besides when the game is booting up. Some are hidden behind elevators I believe, but while you are taking them you are able to watch tv news.
They based designs on 70s aesthetics? Honestly, I don't see it at all. Designs to me just seemed too bright, too colorful, just nauseating, incohesive even. They all look unappealing
@@Sizifus "Incohesive" is the single most apt way to describe this entire game's visuals.
Maybe they based their designs on what Fortnite thinks 70s aesthetics are?
It's so strange, the designs were very colorful but somehow incredibly drab and lifeless. I don't know how in the world they managed that "feat"
Ironically enough, if they were more colorful and nauseating, they would be closer to the 70's 😂Coming from someone who loves 70's aesthetics. Purple hair alien girl clearly wears modern clothes, 2005-ish. There's nothing 70's about her, nothing.
They're not based on a 70's aesthetic
They're based on what James Gunn and Jon Favreau convinced people was the 70's aesthetic
For me it's as you said, while detailed, the game is utterly ugly. The maps are bland and forgettable and the heros look like weirdos who you'd see at walmart at 2am. Their personalities are just as cringe as their appearance. If they really wanted to copy guardians of the galaxy then they completely failed. All the guardians are likeable while no one in their game is.
The maps are wildly bland. It's nearly impossible to describe them and have anyone know what you're talking about.
Number 1 unwritten rule of game creation: NEVER look at a game that just came out and say "I want to do that." Chances are that 50 other game makers had that same idea at that same time.
You would think the industry would have learned that after the age of "WoW-killer" mmos failures.. but it seems the industry is resistant to lessons from history
millions of shareholders had that idea all at the same time....
And movie and tv show, and while we're at it that general line of thought is also good for the stock market. "If I've heard of this good tip so have others"
While i think "I want to do that." isn't really bad, but if they wanna do it then figure out how to be different/innovative AND DON'T BE OUTDATED WHEN YOU APPEAR!
As a once diehard Overwatch player turned scorned lover...i was praying for another developer to sweep me off my feet. The characters in Concord are so cringe that nothing this game could offer would make that problem go away. Looking at these models is shockingly bad. Vomit
You know, Astro Bot kicked off a discussion over whether dormant IPs should be revived, and one of the main arguments against it is that "mid-sized games just don't sell much anymore." Maybe they don't, but I think a new Ape Escape or Sly Cooper game would've sold more than Concord did.
And then you have H̶y̶e̶n̶a̶s̶ Fairgame$ and Marathon...
Lots of "AA" games have seen success lately. It's more that people aren't willing to spend time or money on clearly uninspired titles without a sizeable amount of their friends also moving over.
that message seeing the contrast between Concord and Astro Bot👌
We need more fun charming games like Astro Bot. I would love a new Sly, Jak and Dexter, Ape Escape, Gravity Rush, LocoRoco heck if you want to do shooters bring back Killzone and SOCOM, they would have done 100 times better than Concord ever did.
@@reallycool totally! notably Helldivers 2, stellar blades, Space Marine 2, Pacific Drive..etc i forgot to mention. it felt more like theyre replacing over what AAA arent able to accomplish nowadays. seeing AA being the middle child has both pros of being able to develop fresh indie concepts and the manpower and budget to accomplish that scale.
@@reallycool And even then, some of those friends can be 'paid'. Like the following for something like... I don't know... that black monkey game that the anti-woke crowd was buzzing over?
A freaky latina gargoyle girl from a MOBA Hero-shooter hybrid that is currently in its Alpha phase has more fanart than any Concord character.
What character from what game?
@@TheSonOfDumbthat gargoyle is Ivy, the game is Deadlock
@@TheSonOfDumbValve's latest alpha game
@@camaroneedsanewdesign4892 Shoulda figured, thanks
More than 10x of all of them combined according to the green website.
Not... not that Ive checked... or anything.
I think you’re wrong in that people wont feel nostalgic for 70s aesthetic.
People wont feel nostalgic, but they will see a cool aesthetic they’ve never seen, and love it.
The problem comes from the fact that who ever was in charge of art direction failed to do the 70s scifi designs justice, and instead tried to do a weird off putting hybrid of 70s Sci-Fi, and Mondern Brutalists Sci-Fi.
It’s ugly to look at.
Things have random puffy bits, or parts of clothes are made out of strips of harder materials. What would be a 60s style Space helmet is instead an awkward ball made up of metal plates with random oval holes in it.
That isn’t “Future-Retro”.
@@LinkiePup deadlock out there nailing the 1920's aesthetics and people loving it because the mix with occultism and robots makes it really compelling
In order to do a retro aesthetic, you have to be able to see outside of your personal bubble.
Oh man, now I'm trying to remember the name of another team sci-fi shooter with a retro aesthetic. It didn't last long either. You fought hordes of monsters and it was mostly in a space hotel or resort, anyone know?
The BioShock games did it well. Or even the Fallout games
@@ConfusedYharnamite Bioshock the GOAT 💪💪💪💪
I don't understand how a game can suffer from 'feature creep' during its development and then still release without any features that make for a compelling USP. Truly a perfect storm of hubris.
Things like graphical fidelity, animation quality, cutscenes, etc. are also features and you can sink gargantuan amounts of money into those.
For me it was 100% the characters. The gameplay looks good but they look too stupid to even want to try.
The characters could be better if they leaned on the concept art more and made the style more cartoonish
To think that it actually could've been worse bc the gunplay and abilities are only good bc they took Destiny devs to help make it
Agreed. Why would I want to play a game only featuring fat and ugly characters?
Fat and ugly characters could be good when they're designed with that in mind. Think junkrat or The Heavy. Those are beloved characters who aren't conventionally attractive because they were designed with those features in mind and it was balanced well. These characters are flat and uninspiring. There's no reason why these characters are fat and ugly they just are. The Heavy is Heavy because he's an absolute tank, HE'S HEAVY and he's strong enough to carry these huge weapons. Junkrat is ugly because he lives in a junkyard and is dirty and slippery like a rat. The concord characters are fat and ugly because?? The studio demanded artists draw fat and ugly characters to fill a quota. Like someone went into the artist's room and said "we need all these body types or else we're not being inclusive".
They were hard on the eyes. The colors clashed so hard, it was like an assault on my eyeballs
A problem isn't the 70's design ( fashion trends in regular people showed it came back in the 2010's). Its how the designs were done, not one of the characters actually fit the aesthetic. Hi fi rush was a 90's to early 2000's Saturday morning cartoon like Megas XLR and the WB block shows, Mass Effect in the first game drew people in with 1980's and 90's style sci-fi. Designs were overcomplicated which didn't help with the character identities. Panzer Dragoon for example had it's art design done by Mobius of Valerian and Lauraline fame a series rooted in the 70's European comic scene and Heavy Metal. So i won't blame it on choice of style but execution.
It’s insane to learn that concord was 400 million down the drain not 200 million
Concord the best example how to NOT make a video game. Devs around the world should study this game and avoid doing the same mistakes.
This video provides a list of all the major mistakes :)
@@reallycool And thanks for that u usually take your time with your videos! Instead of others who push 10, 10 minute videos every second day about Concord you took your sweet time, did your research and made a almost 1 hour documentary why Concord failed, thanks.
its rarely the devs making the mistakes in regards to triple a flops
@@buttermilkjudas well.... i can spot at least a dozen mistakes that the devs made without higher-up interference.....
Easy, reject Blackrock money and DEI checkboxes.
I find it insane that they so desperately wanted to copy Overwatch, even copying it down to a fault. No pve mode, a story trailer for a game without a story mode, and insisting theres a deeper lore and character development that will likely just be isolated to comics and reveal trailers on youtube. They could have planned to make a game that competed with overwatch by providing more than what the franchise offers now, but they decided to stop at the exact point Blizzard started 8 years ago.
"Stopped at the point blizzard started at 8 years ago" is a great way to put it, wish I'd said it
@@samuelsolomon7330 It doesn't even compare to Overwatch properly gameplay-wise. Original Overwatch (Not Overwatch 2) had this very polished objective-oriented gameplay loop I can only compare to Tug of War. From what I've seen Concord is a chaotic team deathmatch with minimal support/tank/DPS interaction, akin to Team Fortress 2.
@@Miraihigameplay in tf2 is still better
@@Mrhouse-k1x I dislike the gameplay of TF2, Overwatch 2 and Concord pretty equally.
And Overwatch is running in circles. It's sad to see how Overwatch "represents" this genre, such a horrendous game that wasted infinite potential because of bad direction smh "hero shooters" are not supposed to be represented by this abomination, remember Team Fortress 2? That is the standard right there, they introduced the whole thing: game modes, defined classes who can't be customized, snarky trailers to present each class, etc.. Overwatch blatantly copied TF2 and Global Agenda. And here we are, Marvel Rivals only offers PvP and nothing else, it's poised to take over, straight up killing Paladins + snatch away half of the Overwatch playerbase (if not more). It's the same old TF formula, but Rivals is a fun game. Concord failed to be fun and engaging, simple as it is (and this game is not a TF, more like a mix of Halo + Destiny + TF "abilities". Overwatch "2", Paladins and Marvel Rivals are straight up TF)
Concord’s development is insane to me because they got *every resource that every developer would’ve begged for* especially in this day and age. Practically unlimited money and enough agency to only show off the game once they were confident opposed to something like anthem or andromeda where no one was ready.
Yet Firewalk still completely fumbled it. They had one job for a *DECADE* and didn’t think to change anything from the start. Shockingly similar to Skull and Bones despite seemingly having none of the issues that game came across in development. FW just seemed far too confident due to the lack of interference or widespread testing until it was too late. Like surrounding yourself with a bunch of people who just say “yes” to all of your decisions despite how badly each one is being received elsewhere.
Imagine if Concord had the PvE coop mode that Overwatch 2 promised and failed to deliver.
Might have saved the franchise for at least another week.
@@SourRobo8364 Funny enough, there's a little cartoony Chinese game called "Gunfire reborn" that hits this spot for me for 4 years already.
I think a campaign of pve would've justified the $40 cost. Even if it was only 10-12 hours of content, but high quality, the game could've survived at least twice as long
Edit: just realized, that's still not even a month... not even a February month. Lol
@@S_raB They should have followed Halo Infinite route, free multiplayer but paid campaign.
@@EngieMak that's a good idea... if only you consulted with them 3-4 years ago.
@@SourRobo8364 That'd be another 8 years of development.
Now apparently there's evidence they spent 400$ million because when it came time to test the alpha it needed serious reworking so they added 200 million more
200 million dollars on what? This isn’t a AAA open world GTA experience, it’s a corny FPS.
@@skyair3444 you vastly underestimate the stupidity of Sony and the AAA development scene
@@skyair3444
According to reports, Firewalk Studios was purchased for 200 million, and then another 200 million was spent on the game's creation and advertisement over 8 years. Honestly, a game costing 200 million to make over 8 years isn't really surprising because that's a LONG time that requires employee paycheck costs during that entire time...but it turning 0 profit and incurring only losses with that development cost on top of the studio purchase cost with a reputation so tarnished that it will never recuperate those compounded losses is the real embarrassment.
It feels like Concord was taking a very big gamble that Hero Shooters would still be popular after 8 years and that they could slice out a market share of it. It almost feels like they saw TF2 retaining relevance after 9 years and believing that retention was due to the genre and not the game itself. In the 8 years, we spanned market trends of hero shooters, mobile gaming, battle royales, (to an extent) FPS resurgence, all of which had peaks of influence before dying out. That should've been the sign to Sony that Concord was more than likely going to die out of irrelevance before it even had the chance to take off because of the very principles it was founded on
Tf2 was Made by valve and in the source engine ofc it's still alive
Gotta change your title to 400 million now.
$400 million for this game of all things is crazy to me. Like yeah, that's still pretty much chump change to Sony but I'll be surprised if people don't get getting fired at some point.
@coltonwilkie241
Sad thing is, the bigwigs aren't getting fired. It'll be the innocent designers who were told to make it like this that will get booted from the company.
Keep in mind, it's the Sony Execs who make all the choices and create the deadlines. They'll find some way to fire the lesser employees and cover it up with corporate speak in a ChatGPT based apology
"Inspired in the 70s aesthetics, drawing inspiration from an era that predates most of its target audience"
If done right it can work like Team Fortress 2 is based in 60s~70s aesthetics, however Concord characters color pallet and design was downright ugly.
And Tf2 still did diversity better than Concord
@@Man77772 how? by casting some subsaharan silverback as "scottish"?
@@Man77772 no,,, literally everyone is European in 2fort
@@escapefr0mslenderAh yes, black people, famous for being of European descent. Americans and Australians too.
@@Duothimir I mean, the Demoman _is_ Scottish, so...
It might be mean to say it but im glad concord flopped so hard. Hopefully this shows companies that dev resources put into massive live services is a big risk! They arent just free money machines, and those development hours could have been put into making something great (like astro bot)
They could have made 3-4 AstroBots
In a way yes, because I found the beta mediocre and hopefully they can make something more interesting and unique (in a good way)
But the line of thinking up until this point was "Green light like 4 of them, and if even one of them is a run away success, we can still use the other 3 as a tax write off". But its also worth noting the massive waves of lay offs, and canning of projects a couple years ago. This was forcing a lot of publishers to put all their eggs into one basket. The same thing they were doing just before the pivot to live services. Their strategy works when you've hedged your bets.... but they cut the hedge to cover up a half decade of failures, and now the last bush is so bad, it can't even catch fire.
As someone whose life could change with $2k-10k I actually find it nauseating to see that trash like Concord and the Borderlands film burn through hundreds of millions of dollars.
Rule of a thumb, around half of a budget goes to marketing expenses
@@Romashka_Sov double the game cost if you're EA or Activision
Now imagine how many indie games could've been made with a budget of $200M lol.
Currently, Crab game on steam has over 50000 peak players. This was a game made by an indie developer in 2 weeks.
If you are generous, let's say you hire senior indie developers and pay them 10k a month, you could have 20000 developers make 2 crab game like projects each IN A MONTH.
@@joaquincortescasas8114 and flood the market with these games, which will dilute your audience by a lot, lol
@@joaquincortescasas8114 making money? in this economy!?
I like the woe is me social media posts and threads with tens of thousands of likes and updoots after this game was canned. Couldn't bother to buy and play the game.
I played it. I didn't even dislike it. But I saw the issues immediately, and was not surprised by its lack of stickiness. I did expect them to pivot to f2p instead of closing it entirely, though I still think they'll do that in a few months
@@reallycool There was a free beta. It got as few players as the paid beta. Going F2P wouldn't help.
They probably relaunch it as f2p around the time the Secret Level episode comes out and hope that brings enough attention to the game.
@@reallycooli never even heard about it but I definitely would've tried it tbh
This reminds me of Hyenas, the Creative Assembly looter shooter that had an abysmal beta test.
Difference being that Sega decided to pull the plug on that after seeing the writing on the wall.
Similar issues with Hyenas actually, an ultra colorful beginner friendly game charging too much for the market with abysmal marketing
@@reallycoolGameplay-wise, an FPS with Zero-G elements could potentially be interesting.
But in terms of overall aesthetics? Hyenas was complete garbage. Very "How do you do, fellow kids?" tiers of tone-deaf attempts to be relatable and failing miserably.
It's a huge failure all the same, Sega shouldn't be "praised" for that. Same goes if Sony cancel Fairgame$, they already wasted money and tarnished the image of the company
Yeop. And us Total War: Warhammer players have been paying for it ever since. Thanks CA. $100m could have brought us TW:WH40k, but yah just couldn’t stop drinking the “hey, we can do Overwatch but with an uno reverse card mechanic!” Kool Aid.
@@themugwump33 Historical fans: First time?
I think it’s a crime at around 16:57, you didn’t mention TF2, the character designs are so good and unique that if you were to assign a pose to each one and then ask a player to name each character only by their silhouettes, the player could guess each immediately
Obviously they're completely different genres but I just find it hilarious to see the difference in numbers: last year Capcom released a collection of 6 ~20 year old GBA games, it sold 1.4 million copies in two months and had a peak player count on Steam of over 7,000. Ports of Gameboy Advance games sold better than Concord by orders of magnitude and have a larger multiplayer community.
Man, it's kind of strange considering Capcom used to be in bottom, but they stopped and thought how to deal with it and realised they must gain people trust and put quality over quantity with their game
@@mitacestalia7532 capcom's redemption arc has been going strong for a few years now and it's really great
It's unreal that established companies like Sony and veterans like Bungie didn't do an ounce of market research in a overcrowded market.
Concord didn't lose $200 million
it lost $400 million XD
Even more, since that $400 million doens't include the price Sony paid for the studio.
@@СуренАдамян-ю6н also marketing and the episode in the Secret Level
This alone explains why it was shut down so quickly. Sony was banking on immediate success in order to recoup their loss. They didn't try to salvage the game because they couldn't AFFORD to waste any more money on it.
The $400 mil does include the price Sony payed for the studio, Sony acquired them for $200 mil and both miscellaneous investors and Sony dumped $200 mil into the game. $400 million for this trash heap is insane though
The total was $400 million. Miscellaneous investors and also Sony dumped $200 million into this trash heap and Sony acquired Firewalk studios for another $200 million. $400 million is still insane for this piece of garbage.
They will learn nothing, and this will continue.
We’ll see. This was such a massive flop that I’m sure they will learn something.
They will learn the exact wrong lessons.
Just started. Lets look at their early interviews about concord. "We really just want a strong foundation for concord. Something that players are familiar with" literally this is just a concept of a hero shooter pushed to release with a HUGE budget, for the foundation. The ground. Base level. Nothing innovative, nothing unique. Nothing standing. Its just a slab of "yep, this is a hero shooter."
That one character literally looks like my water boiler in my basement
Does it leak like the one in Walter White's house?
I enjoy how I know exactly who this is from the brief character description yet also don't know their name haha
Sad thing is if you mean the big barrel, still feels like one of more appealing designs, which just speaks of how rest of cast is
you see, there is a good REASON why these people were EX bungie developers, and not current ones.
Current bungie isn't doing so hot either
Yep, some people take a blind eye for that. Recently I saw a indie rpg developed by former Bioware devs or something like that, many comments mentioning that is a good thing... but really, look at the state of Bioware, if these devs were not good enough to sustain their jobs at that environment, at those standards, imagine their real talent? Sometimes people are fired for a reason, they leave companies for a reason, etc.. it's not always the big scary capitalistic dog ruining the lives of innocent workers, blablabla real life is not a melodrama
If the CEO fails and mismanages a company, the competent people will leave first. Competent employees get lots of job offers or even have enough experience to create a startup. If a company is managed competently, then it's more likely that underperforming employees will be forced to leave. Failing CEOs seem to be the default at big video developers, but I'm not part of the game industry, so what do I know? Haha 🌈@@RRRRRRRRR33
...You guys know that when you're low on the ladder, nobody listens to you if you mention that what you're being told to make is bad, right? Like... The idea that every dev gets to decide what gets made is bull, it's not as simple as it being a group project when it involves over a thousand collaborators. If the lead designer has a terrible idea, that's it. You get paid to make a terrible game.
Like, if my boss told me to build something incorrectly, I tell him it's wrong, and he says do it anyway... Like, my choice is to quit and let someone else get paid to do the same, or go along and do something badly but still get paid for it. And in this economy, that's not a hard choice to make!
@@TheRedstonian that line of reasoning only really works if the studio they left made garbage, but if its a studio that is lauded for making good games, it kinda only shows that the leads on those projects knew what they were doing and that there might be a valid reason those developers dont work there anymore
That dang modern audience not showing up again.
@@reallycoolModern Audience is an anti-woke thing
It's a conspiracy theory that black people, women and the LGBT crowd don't exist
@@reallycool But you don't understand the metrics say -
In all seriousness, if I could, I'd make the word 'metric' a dirty word.
the entirety of the modern audience got into a car crash and is currently recovering, they'll be back and make the next game oriented at the modern audience a billion dollars
But they did show up, all 680 of them
@@LimitedCheetah they were busy that week watching the latest capeshit movie
Don't forget PSN accounts are not available for over 100 countries, Sony games especially on PC are not an option for a lot of people. No one I know is risking spending on a Sony game then having their account banned.
funny how the Sony shills will try to defend this by saying "just break the terms and agreement by using VPN!".
@@thebighoney9034 nobody has ever said this lol
@@BeansWorld-v3e bullshit. Everytime people complain about sony account not in their country, ALWAYS there will be people who said 'just use VPN duh'
I wish they would ask if the game has a purpose to exist before making it.
Absolutely the key takeaway
The purpose is money.
@@lannobile7260Of course, but it has to have more than profit otherwise Concord is the result.
Not all art need an purpose
@@lannobile7260 That is clear but that's just surface level. To get that money we need to think deeper. How do we get that money?
What does the market want? Who are our competitors? What can we offer that they don't?
Deadlock sneaks in out of nowhere only available by friend invitations which pretty much required the community to interact with each other to spead the hype. The story telling through the environment doesn't get in the way of the gameplay and the setting exists outside that sci-fi futuristic setting almost every other hero shooter sank into more skin to something like Arkham Horror.
Everyone keeps using “catastrophic” to describe this when “cataclysmic” is way more fitting
Everyone keeps using catastrophic to describe this when my word is cooler.
@@Elijah42069yes
@@Elijah42069yes
There's also the "Game developers MUST not mock and insult gamers on Twitter" factor. Remember the Saints Row Reboot?
The funny thing is that @anim_xander is a contract developer, not a full employeed developer
I think that really has very little to do with it, tbh. Most people aren't paying any attention to twitter drama and Saints Rowboot was an abysmal game in its own right.
I think the future is to go back to single and double-A games. These giant budgets and need for giant sales numbers have gotten too out of hand, and the drive to milk the market will only give us more Concords in the future. If there's one thing I expect no less out of big names in the video gaming, it's that they never read the room and double down hard when they mess up.
The truth is that gamers don’t care about graphics anymore. The indie games market has proven that in spades.
@@dragonfire5568 I agree, but adding graphical filters to concords characters was like polishing a turd
I think it's more like our idea of good graphics has moved on from hyper realism.
@@dragonfire5568 it's not that players no longer care about graphics, it's that they no longer care about the amount of pixels on the screen
Thats completely wrong. I know countless pixel games on steam that fell flat. I know a bunch of actual 4/8bit era games that modern gamers would chew their hands off in frustration if they tried to play it. Same can be said for Cel Shading.
The pixel games that survived the first pass, only did so due to great art direction. On the same side of that coin, I've also seen multiple UE5 game look absolutely horrid, despite how good the graphics are (Forspoken and that Sonic game comes to mind).
Helldivers works because its lit like an action movie, as opposed to the drab blue/yellow tint of the MilSim era of shooters, or the simultaneous overdark/overlit look of a lot of modern action games.
@@freelancerthe2561 You're talking about the aesthetics rather than the graphics. Bad aesthetics are why games look bad even when they have high poly count and fancy postprocessing and stuff. Conversely, good aesthetics is why 2D pixel art games can still look really good and be popular, despite having technically bad graphics.
I think in their defense, they charged 40$ for a game was because Back in the day, it wasn't free 2 play to play overwatch 😂
But, the difference is Overwatch was a brand new idea toward a fps game. While Concord is the cheap copy of Overwatch
Overwatch wasn't even that new of an idea. But it did have decent gameplay and characters people liked
but even this defense shows how they never looked back at the market once they had chosen who they wanted to mimic. Yes Overwatch WAS $40 but the markets current buy in price is now free, the money coming after attachment has set it. I do find it annoying and strange that once games have earned enough money off the price of the game becoming free once enough secondary money stream have opened up (IE Overwatch with lootboxes and Sims 4 with expansions packs) but even that "precedent" requires a lot of good faith or a large audience, if not both. and Concord had neither.
The middle of the video also brought up a good point about expectations when playing as certain characters being missed. One Overwatch streamer gave Concord a go (he was paid for it) and noted that a character he picked looked and moved tanky, but had a low health pool and so lacked the survivability of a tank. It doesn't do a good job at making you play how the developers intended you to play.
By the point overwatch came out tf2 was free to play however, even overwatch went f2p with overwatch 2 and deadlocked is launching f2p, seems that pretty much everyone working in these kinda games agree that going f2p will lead to larger overall playerbase and maintaining the games monetization through cosmetics, even non hero shooters like counter strike 2 changed to be the same way.
They were trying for "Guardians of the Galaxy", but we got "Diabetics of the Walmart" instead.
I hate how accurate this is
This game costed more than an F-35.
@@youdonthavetocomment Amelia Earhart would be proud.
India's mission to mars costed less than Concord.
@@twicedeadmage Holy shit.
@@twicedeadmage Even worst...8 times more....and that's before inflation.
Even more than that its more like 3 F-35A considering that Lockheed mass-producing the thing lowered the cost
It is 6 days after this video released, and we now know Concord actually costed 400 million.
For being in development for that long and costing that much I had not once heard of this game until videos started coming out about what a failure it was. I hadn’t heard a single peep, and I keep up with gaming news. The abysmal lack of marketing alone takes a sizable chunk of the blame for this games failure.
Yes, the lack of marketing is a major component of its failure
I disagree it had a lot of marketing here is a small list: the limited edition Concord controller, the very own CGI Amazon episode (that will air soon and definitely costed a lot of money), the merchandise yes Concord has merchandise like cups and t-shirts and so on. On PlayStation's own RUclips channel, I myself counted all the Concord trailers and the game had over 30 of them.
I think marketing can push a great game but a bad game is still a bad game, doesn't matter how much you invest into marketing.
I forgot to mention Deadlock, Deadlock had literally ZERO marketing, it had a closed beta no one was supposed to talk about and it still blew up because of word of mouth. It was a good game people shared their experience even if they were supposed not to talk about it, here you have Concord with a HUGE marketing budget where most people didn't even know about is existence and then you have Deadlock a closed secret beta that no one should talk about and had no marketing (it was there to test the game) and the game blew up like crazy.
@@Official_RetroMania I found out about Deadlock after seeing someone talking about a certain "Spanish gargoyle girl" in a comment section of a video about Concord lol. Probably the best thing I have found from dumpster diving.
@@Official_RetroManiaExactly this, i don't think a lack of marketing was the downfall of Concord, In fact everyone could see that Sony DID put the game almost everywhere because they really believed this game was going to be a huge success, hell they were even referring to the game as "Sony's own Star wars IP" internally. Its just that everything they showed about the game just didn't had anything good or different/interesting enough to catch the players atenttion to begin with, so most just moved on
I see this after Concord was revealed to cost $400,000,000. Huh. Also, good video; man!
I’m usually dissatisfied with the description of “unnecessary” in terms of quality of media, but in this case, it’s clearly right.
If so few people wanted it that they pulled the plug in 12 day, it was unnecessary to release it in the first place.
What's worse is that after the game shutdown no one really felt bad about it even the sympathetic ones because of the arrogance of the developers who believes we should play their games because they worked hard on it while calling out people criticism their game as talentless hacks and that they don't care what anyone says about the game
Good lord that darn game Concord, with all that money wasted it could have been used in better things in PlayStation, like:
-Don't shutdown Japan Studios.
-Don't shutdown London Studios.
-Avoided the layoffs on Bend Studio and the cancellation of Days Gone 2.
-Expanded more the PlayStation Classics porting departament team.
-Developed small games or publish/help porting indie games for the PS4/5 (like they did in the PS3 days).
But nope everything went to this "I wanna be" Overwatch with rejected and plagiarize designs from The Guardians of the Galaxy.
The only good thing that Concord achieved was the fact that finally someone dethroned E.T. of Atari in failure aspects after 42 years.
Well that and another "crazy surprise" that 2024 gave us, gosh... this year has been weirdly amazing and disturbing. 😂
@@Totavier -BLOODBORNE REMASTER!!!!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!
E.t was more memorable atleast
Tbh the PS london studio spent years without making any meaningful product/game considering its overhead cost, and the higher up got first hand experience on the employee "vibing"
If they placed the money between the Japan and London studios we would’ve been having some amazing games out like a new LittleBigPlanet or Freedom Wars for PS5/4, both would’ve outclassed this.
Now Sony has IPs missing their original creative teams who had vision. Concord is at best a game created by a committee check list.
@@TheMrJoltz Was never gonna happen, now that they're pivoting to a game pass model, and need multiplatform support. As usual, they're like 5 years too late to be starting that.
Ironically this game dying gives me hope for the future of games. Maybe such a failure is what is needed for priorities to shift back into gameplay first. May even incentivize a rise in double-A games
Boiz, it's time to update this video title to "$400 million dollars" as leaked by internal Sony documents today. What a time to be alive.
Rumor says its actually $400 million
The mocap looks incredible though, I kept thinking the freegunner select screens were live footage lol
The animations overall are very high quality.
Concord *Has rough launch*
Me:Eh…expected
Concord *Friking dies within 2 weeks*
Me:WHAT, THE, ACTUAL, FUC@?
I didn’t think I’d encounter anyone to phrase my thoughts so well. 😆 I was expecting a rough launch where the game would either limp on until it was patched to working condition or it would putter out a few months before being axed.
I would have never expected that Concord would fail so hard that servers were being shut down before I fully understood what was happening to it.
It's a shame, because I tried the beta and it actually wasn't that bad. The queue times were ok, and it was enjoyable once I got used to the controls. It had potential, but clearly they bet the house and it didn't pay off
I think the biggest contributor to Concord's downfall was Sony's acquisition of Firewalk Studios. Once big names appear, it's over. Biomutant. Was hyped up as hell. Until THQ Nordic stepped in. Price tag went up from 40 to 60 and it wasn't what fans anticipated. Respawn sold the rights to Titanfall to EA. While it did bring Apex Legends, Titanfall was buried 6 feet under. And, of course, the biggest failure: Duke Nukem Forever. Randy tried to salvage the game but he should've let it die. Now, he sits on Duke Nukem all day, doing squat, and asking money for the pre-build of DNF from 2009. Greasy bastard. I personally think, if Sony hadn't acquired Firewalk, maybe Concord wouldn't have died 2 weeks after release.
That's one of the arguments I make yeah
I cringe every time I see concord hero's. It's straight cringe 🤢
@@theumtheum1357 Yea exactly, one reason why I didn’t want to play it
@@gunslinger2261 the main reason NOBODY wants to play concord is because it is full of "diversity" hired cultists.
I'm not a huge gamer and just happened upon this video. I don't see why so many people are saying they find the characters cringey or dislike them, can you provide insight?? I went to watch the whole cast and the only cringey one imo is the green alien girl
@@lavenderlemons888 all the weird skin colours. One is green ffs., fat, ugly, old. skin colour is skin colour but there isnt a single white character in the game.
@@lavenderlemons888 it was also 8 years and "200,000,000" dollars or pounds they might aswell have just dumped in a bin or burnt.
Apparently it's far worse than we thought, it's at least +400Mil and was called "the future of Playstation"
Nintendo naming the location of their new game Concordia right after this is such a power move.
the stupid part is, the gameplay in this video, which i assume is concord's, Looks Good, the abilities seem fun and the maps are interesting to look at, i would probably at least have considered checking it out, BUT-- i didn't hear about it at all until the day it launched already dying and there were articles about THAT. and those articles, reasonably, used promotional screens of the characters, all of whom look vaguely offputting and derivative (discount thanos, we have ghostbusters at home, and "those me:andromeda aliens but make it a fungus" stand out particularly), so i just assumed there was nothing there worth caring about. art direction on this title was delusional.
It's a shame
@@reallycool it's the best thing that could've happened. Sony had 12 live-service projects as "the future of gaming" - and, except for Helldivers 2, every one of them died miserably, a lot of them in development.
Great news for people who like single-player games.
Maps are so bland. The art style makes me want to throw up. It looks so painfully mediocre
Wasn’t it just revealed that it was $400 mill now
How funny to click on this vid and getting an ad saying “Ready to tackle your debt?” lol
That is very funny 😂
Boardrooms full of people who don't play video games trying to guess what gamers want
@@tanaka1477 "a plan so stupid it might just work!" They thought
"Design by committee" has never, will never, and can never, work for anything.
I remember playing Apex on day one. I hopped in a call on Xbox with my friends and asked if they had seen the ad in the home screen, and they said it was similar to fortnite but in the Titanfall universe. We all downloaded it and hopped in. Awesome gameplay, and i really dislike battle Royale games. If it had a price tag, i wouldn't have touched it. I remember buying mirage somewhat close to launch as well, since he seemed fun and i enjoyed the game. It was like ten bucks, and i was satisfied with it. Dropping 40 on a game sight unseen in a genre where there's free alternatives sounds like a stupid idea. I'd just okay overwatch or valorant
this is ultimate proof that it isn't hate that kills a game. It is apathy. Concord's announcement was met with overwhelming... nothingness. No one had any opinion, good or bad, about this game. It was passable. It wasn't great, nor was it bad. And that apathy and mediocrity is far worse than if the game was just horrible.
I like how AMD came out with a software patch for concord two days after it was canceled. Lol
AMD coming in with the pizza to find the place burning down
Sony forgot the Ferengi rule of acquisition #1.
Once you have their money, you never give it back.
I imagine it was probably just to avoid a lawsuit, even if they won it that is thousands of dollars down the drain for lawyers and other legal fees, better to give the few hundred people there money back in a already failure of a game.
@@brandonlyon730That’s probably a really good point. It could have also been a case of it being cheaper to refund the few people that bought it than to sink the time, resources, costs and effort needed to keep it going.
There's also the matter of the name for me. What is the Concord? Why is the Concord something we, and especially, the characters should care? Is this set in the same timeline as Flight of the Concords?
To be fair, Overwatch's name doesn't make much sense either for what the game is.
At least overwatch is a cool sounding word. Concord sounds like a company that makes airplane parts or something.
I quite enjoyed Concord, but GOD this game did almost everything wrong. From bad character design, to barely any content, to almost no focus on what made the game fun (the rivals playlist).
the character designs make me laugh every time
22:40 If Sony saiid, “We realized it was too much, too soon”, then they’re still lying to themselves about what the problem was. Which means we can expect more of the same. And it ain’t the 70s esthetic.
out of everything i've heard about the game, the MOST shocking thing was that they made a hero shooter without ultimate abilities. I cannot fathom why ANY game in this day and age with a focus on specialized characters DOESN'T HAVE ULTIMATE ABILITIES
@@olianims Funny enough Mecha Break is also a hero shooter with mechs as the “heroes” with no ultimate abilities or even human characters at all outside of your create a character and a couple NPCs as skins. That mostly twitch-drop-only for the first week beta test got over 50,000 players, almost 25 times the number of players as concord’s open beta running at the same time. A game that had barely anything other than a couple of trailers and a relatively new chinese studio. People like to try new things, concord just didn’t look interesting to anyone.
The game reeks of executive planning. People that don't make or play games just hear second-hand about what's popular and hire enough people to copy it.
Just the perfect amount to write off for tax breaks one can assume
The main problem: instead of looking for specific group of gamers the game companies pushing no-burger products to global market in blind hope it will stick somehow. And now PS5 Pro should pay for Concord disaster.
All involved KNEW what the game was like before it was shipped, If I had worked there I would have been looking for a job months before release
I would like to extend my most heartfelt gratitude to Sony for the work they have done in uplifting the state of Indie games. I know they are not alone that deserve such praise, Ubisoft is another key member in showing the customer, repeatedly, how they are better off spending their money anywhere else but on their games. I would like also to give a shoutout to EA and Blizzard, they are doing fantastic also on that front. Thanks to all of them, the economical paradigm of the video game industry is shifting from what it once was. Thanks for sharing, cheers!
Cant help but feel for game developers, i know they poured endless hours and sleepless nights trying to make the game as perfect as they could all while deadlines and management breathing down their neck. All to just deflate out like an untied balloon. I imagine just the sheer disappointment, and then the blame from higher ups, and then just getting berated by the same community you try to please. I think the failure is also in part by the playerbase themselves. Im not saying force yourself to like it, but if everyone knew what it really was to make games, there would be at least be a shred of appreciation for any of them. I hope they all (devs) get the recognition they deserve for all their hardwork, even if it was a sinking ship.
@Mrfallouthero nah devs get no credit when they spent 8 years on garbage lol. This type of situation is the exact reason you have executives
The Star Citizen scope creep is so pervasive it's hitting its timeline too. Investors were not acquired until September 2012 and public funds were not taken until October that same year.
Yes it has been a long, thought rapidly accelerating, ride. There is no need to creep the timeline with the scope.
Every time people laugh at Concord's failure, Sony raises the price of the PS5 Pro by one dollar.
"TF2, the grandfather of class based shooters-"
Has yet to be matched in quality, community interaction, and feel.
Despite bots, bugs, and lacking dev support it's honestly insane how good TF2 has held up.
The community has only grown stronger to the point that I don't think Valve could even attempt to release TF3 because it would have to be of equal or greater quality.
Which is wild considering the game's source code is a spaghetti monster that runs on a fucking .jpg of a coconut.
Wildly good game
Now I'm upset I didn't have the bell ringed. It's a little late to the party, but since it's a Concord discussion there really isn't a time limit.
This game belongs in a museum of "What NOT to do."
They made a staggering number of mistakes
It's worse. It cost $400 million
I loved Brink. Played the hell out of it but it never caught on.
As a business student, this video was very well-articulated. This goes to show how a good game is at the mercy of business principles.
They said they spent 100 million on the game's development up to 200 million, but I believe it's way more than 200 million. For sure has to be a quarter of a billion if not a little more.
the 200 mill is just a guess, even the biggest insiders were discussing about it being either between 80 or 300 mill, but nobody is sure..
@@raafmaat Well, whatever amount it was they were clearly okay with wasting it.
@@computersandgaming6664 thats very true! haha
Maybe they were high on copium like
"This is gonna fail. But we already spent to much time and specially money on it. Maybe it becomes a suprise hit and we make our money back!"
The thing about Corncord is: The game doesn't even look that bad, but when I saw the gameplay and the price tag I went to play Overwatch 2 instead, it's that simple 🤷♂️
The retro-70s sci fi asthetic was, IMO, the real nail in the coffin for concord's design. In a game that was cell shaded/animated it could have worked better, but in a game that focuses on hyper-realistic looks it just looks absolutely terrible.
Yes, I said the same thing. I mocked up a cel shaded version and it was way better
Looking at the gameplay and cinematics, I'd honestly have been interested in playing this game if it was a FPS RPG like borderlands or destiny. It's a shame such a gorgeous game is going to waste.
Even the “crew bonus” is derivative of another game, technically; FFXIV has a 1% bonus to stats for each role you have in a party of 8 between a tank, healer, melee, physical ranged and magical ranged dps jobs, with the standard comp being 2 tanks/healers and 4 dps of varying in the above listed
I like how standing out is a herculean task for big games but indie games do it all the time
Last year there was like 20 thousand games launched on Steam, for a indie to stand out among this tsunami of "content", that is way more impressive
I'm curious how much of the blandness was a result of design-by-committee.
@@Laekith plane riddled with bullets on certain parts png:
@@RRRRRRRRR33of 20k indie games, 90% of them already have more players than concord. It isn't a herculean task. What is a herculean task is to manage to be a AAA game and STILL have worse player numbers then 90% of indie games
I feel like it was mostly Sony giving up of the game faster than Google did on Stadi
Im sure the "Modern Audience" will purchase the next game.... 😂
I will if it's good!
You have a typo in your title. They lost 400 million
A good example I feel would be Warframe as someone who listened to their community and changed alongside them and generated a following because their community itself want them to do well and has trust that they can comeback if ever they missed something
One source reported Sony actually spent 400M on it 😮
Apparently it's 400 million now