PlayStation’s ‘Concord’ Did Not Break 700 Players On Steam On Launch Day
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/24/playstations-concord-did-not-break-700-players-on-steam-on-launch-day/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works253
Comments86https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/24/playstations-concord-did-not-break-700-players-on-steam-on-launch-day/Open linkView original on sh.itjust.works
What's Concord? I've literally never heard of this before
Spoiler: if you don't advertise at all, people won't play your game
Also:
That right there is a giant NOPE for me.
Yeah you think they would have learned from Helldivers 2
They're going with the old double technique. Let's see how that works out for them.
Yeah that was my big "haha no" moment.
Even if it was on sale for like 95% off, I don't want that Sony spyware.
Its an enormously overproduced Overwatch clone with zany characters that seem to be going for Guardians of the Galaxy, an art style that is basically just bizarre, and gameplay from a decade ago.
Sony wanted their own Overwatch, after seeing its success, then spent a huge amount of time and money developing it, and this is what they came up with.
Oh, right, it isn't free to play, costs 40 bucks, and then also has an astounding amount of microtransactions.
EDIT: Based off of current active player count, Concord has cost approximately $200,000 dollars per active player to produce.
Better hope they are all omega class hyper whale spenders, I guess.
I just watched the trailer because I wanted to understand your comment. I definitely see the zaniness and Guardians of the Galaxy vibes. I always thought Overwatch was bizarre (but that's just me) but this is clearly more.
However, as someone that doesn't play shooters, could you develop more on what defines a gameplay from a decade ago? I wonder what can change that much in that kind of game.
I think they're just saying that hero shooters are a genre that saw a big boom around when overwatch came out but are now no longer trending.
It’s a new game in which you play two folk musicians from New Zealand. You start off in a small NY apartment trying to get gigs and establish a relationship with an official at the local New Zealand consulate who later becomes your band manager.
It cost $4-billion dollars to develop, utilizes the F-14 Tomcat game engine from GameBoy Advance, and is expected to generate tens of dollars of revenue for Sony Corp.
Are any flights involved? I feel some flights should be involved in this setup...
It might be a different game, but I thought there would be flights too! Especially when they fight against the robot uprising of the year 2000.
I'm a hiphopopotamus main btw.
Top notch engine for that Gameboy. It'll do great on itch.io lol
Yeah, hadn't heard about it until today either. But Steam also kind of torpedoed their launch by lifting their NDA for Deadlock on the same day. Not sure how similar they are, but that'll grab most of the attention from gamers right now.
Both have heroes and are shooters, but the similarities end here, but you're overall right. From what I've seen of concord, it's just valorant with a mediocre twist, whereas deadlock has been my go-to game for the last week.
Concord is nothing like Valorant. The gameplay isn't even remotely similar.
Yeah valorant is basically counterstrike with heroes, concord is overwatch but somehow even more boring.
I've seen ads on random apps. But the logo looks like a '90s PC software logo. And nothing showed what the game actually looked like.
The clips they've shown look like the fake video games that you see in an advertisement for a specialized university.
The marketing has been appalling. They've mainly focussed their intentions on PS5, but why release a game on a platform but not advertise it for that platform?
Maybe word-of-mouth about the game and some discounts might improve things over the coming months, but Sony have made a bit of a mess with the PC side of this.
Yep, first I’ve heard of it
I think Valve would disagree.
~60k players on Deadlock yesterday, ~100k today. Probably more tomorrow. It's still in playtest.
Is it any good? I heard the concept was going nowhere
It's really good if you are into moba-type gameplay.
Some people will compare it to something like overwatch, but it's really closer to Dota 2 with shooter combat. It's a cool mix of map-control/strategic elements of Dota with more twitchy aspects of arena-ish shooters.
I've really enjoyed it, but then again my two most played games of all time are dota and tf2.
As someone who's enjoyed league and Overwatch for years, I like it.
I mean, the inherent annoying thing in moba is the farming, but aside from that.
Smite 1 I used to play a bit and it's reminiscent, but much better. The movement feels good.
There are threads which are sharing game invites to the playtest. And technically I can invite people too
It's a more MOBA-y Overwatch. If you like Overwatch, you will probably enjoy it. If you don't, there's still a chance but it's not super likely.
they showed it off at the May 30th state of play, and thats about it for advertising. if you were a pc player and didnt watch sonys presentation, you likely would have never known
What is a "state of play"? When googling a 2009 movie of that name seems to feature prominently on the results page.
state of play is sony's counterpart to "Nintendo Direct". With the death of E3, all major companies have their own showcase of shows digitally, while some of them will just announce it in the general show (Geoff's Summer Game fest, the "generic e3 show")
basically Sony if showing off their own games, has 2 shows:
State of Play is sonys version of, includes 3rd party companies producing content on playstation
Sony also has a different showcase called "Playstation Showcase" thats directed specifically to 1st party stuff
just for completion sake, Microsoft's game info show is called "Xbox Game Showcase"
I only ever saw one ad for the game, on my PlayStation, the day before it came out and even then I couldn't tell what it was. Is this a game? A movie? A TV show? The trailer fucking sucked at actually advertising what it was. No gameplay, no mention that it even was a game. It just seemed like a scene from an animated show for tweens.
I have, but only from this.
https://www.eurogamer.net/spare-a-thought-for-poor-concord-a-kind-and-earnest-shooter-sent-out-to-die
I saw a few adverts for it on Facebook sp they definitely did advertise but people where turned off as soon as they found put it was a FPS
This is one of the problems of growing up in a different age. This was advertised, but are you any of the places they promoted it? It was the main game in a state of play, they bought ad space on steam, and I assume it was advertised elsewhere where I wouldn't have seen it. But not everybody is watching TV anymore, and we are on Lemmy. Probably not the best place to judge what's being advertised to the masses lol.
I watch plenty of streamers (about half of which play shooters), my primary gaming platform is Steam, and I do watch a small amount of TV, where other games have been advertised during this time. If they used those platforms for advertising, they didn't do it well. You got me on the State of Play tho
I was watching a livestream of this game's reveal trailer. The chat was excited at first during the cinematic trailer. Sure, it looked like a Malt-O-Meal Guardians of the Galaxy, but it still looked like it could be fun. Then as soon as they said "5 v 5 live service game" there was a giant, collective "oh nevermind lol" from the chat.
here's Jesse Cox going through the exact process except he predicts it too: https://youtube.com/shorts/l8kq4rIc10g
From what i saw from the game it just looked super bland and boring. No one looked interesting at all, it didn't pop, if someone told me it was a passion project from a 3 man dev team i would've totally believed it.
the live service model will literally never leave gaming no matter how much people hate and avoid products because of it.
Mainly due to the fact that MBA's response to consumer rejection is to go twice as hard.
This is why we are in the golden age of the indie game
Why should it leave? The most successful games are all live service. No matter how many people buy a single-player game, the total lifetime revenue of love service dwarfs other models in comparison.
If by 'successful' you mean 'makes as much money as possible for its shareholders' sure.
That's not how I measure success.
I mean most installed, most played hours, highest grossing. You lnow, all the ways success is measured in games.
There is a direct conflict of interests between gamers and producers. Producers want as much sales for as little time and money and they will damage games if it feels it makes them more money.
There are a ton of gacha games if released as a standard 1 time pay model would have been very profitable, but 'very' isn't profitable enough. Some of those games are ridiculously high grossing, have a shitton of played hours, yet STILL would be better games without predatory monetization.
I measure the success of a game by how respectful they are to their customers. Anti-consumer behavior is rotting AAA game houses from within.
There are too many games of this sort. Nobody wants to play them because you have to devote your life to grinding and getting good if you want to be play well.
We need some new ideas and you don't need to bet the company on every game. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into a clone of existing games, develop several smaller more innovative games and see which ones succeed. For every Concord there is a Stardew Valley, Vampire Survivors, or Among Us.
Innovation is risky, MBAs don't care about anything but next quarters profits.
That's why so much of hollywood is just sequels and re-releases. No one wants to take the risk on something amazing and would rather have guaranteed profits.
Can’t imagine convincing a group of c suite folks of that.
I never heard of it and searching for it on Steam doesn't give any results so I'm guessing it's not even available here.
Did you try using the search term "concord"? It's the first game to pop up when you do.
Yea, that's what I did and mean by searching Steam. It's probably not available in Estonia like every other Sony game.
I'm not gonna do work to buy their games, I'll just pirate them if they make it more annoying than buying.
That's the spirit we like to see! Sail on, ye hearty.
The only ads I saw suggested it was PS5 exclusive lmao. amazing job Sony
Like the Borderlands movie I'm not really sure who this game is for with the price tag they are asking for it with the f2p options available.
The price tag is likely to try to slow the bleeding when the writing was on the wall.
I don't know why they keep insisting on live service with an upfront cost. The only way these games are successful is by having a fuckton of teenagers with no money to fill the lobbies and make it feel lively and worthwhile. The minute you add an initial cost, there's just not enough of a player base to support a game with microtransactions.
I'm not a business genius, but they don't have to learn from me. There is the very clear precedent of Kill the justice league that they're choosing to ignore!
the MBAs running the gaming industry now are so out of touch
Kill the Justice League is playable solo and debuted at a peak concurrent user count that was higher than Concord's by two orders of magnitude.
never heard of it. also I don't have a PlayStation account and I'm not willing to make one to play one game.
PlayStation what? Did they announce this thing at the last state of play?
I always watch those, but I'm pretty sure I've never heard of this...
It's dead, Jim.
As expected. The fact that this game wasn't marketed well or even that it is a hero shooter are not its only problems. Game has other issues and that's why people don't play it.
It looks like its simply a bad game.
https://opencritic.com/game/17198/concord/charts
As I said, lack of marketing and genre are not the only reasons this is failing.
It also doesn't help when its developers call people who criticize/don't buy the game "talentless freaks." Like, maybe don't do that? Have some class?
looks it up They want you to pay to play a hero shooter?
Well Overwatch was a paid game for a long time It's not unheard of
When was that game released?
Hehehe
I mean, they literally didn't even seem to want it to appeal to anyone.
I've been playing on PS5, getting games quickly and having a lot of fun with it.
If it doesn't last long, I'll still get my £35 worth.
It’s well ranked on steam too, that said I learned of it YESTERDAY.
Sony's executives thought it was a great idea to buy this studio when they first saw the game as it was reported last year. I don't know if the character designs were mandated to be this way because Sony executives demanded it, or if the devs designed them the way they are. Did they want to chase the blue hair vocal minority on xitter that complain about games not being diverse enough, then don't buy the games with these incredibly diverse, brave and quirky character designs anyway? On top of that a $40 price tag is enough to make a dead on arrival game among other issues like a forced PSN account and no Steam Deck support.
Yeah, the "diversity" (aliens and shit, really? You want to tell me they're targeting the "diversity" crowd with non-humans?) is not the reason for this failing. It's a generic $40 live-service game. That market is far too over saturated. Plenty of people like and buy games with diversity, although they have to be good games first and foremost. It's just a way to help your game appeal to a larger audience, but it has to appeal to anyone first. This doesn't.
I just don't understand the insistence on targeting the woke demographic instead of core gamers. They've repeatedly shown that they are masters in the complaining department, but when it comes to buying diversity-infused games, they are a no-show.
In what way are they targeting the woke demographic? Is it because aliens?
Who the fuck is avoiding buying games because they aren't "woke" or "diverse" enough?
Buying forced diversity bug studio shlop you mean. Plenty of tiny diverse indie games that do well for themselves out there.
I'm seeing all of these down votes but no one has been able to refute this point.
There has to be a point, first. It's just the old "go woke, go broke" nonsense. It's the recycled conservative pearl clutching that has always come in when society starts to include those 'nasty outsiders'. (Minorities.)
Let's say I entertain the possibility that there is a point.
->Baldur's Gate 3. . Very 'woke'. Amazing game.
->Concord Arguably 'woke'. Crappy game.
Let's go with a game that flopped and wasn't advertised as 'inclusive' Anthem.
Let's entertain this further to /really/ drive some nails into the coffin of this 'point'.
Celeste, a game heavy with queer tones to tell the story. Great game, very popular.
So, that is why most people are walking by this with just a down vote. It's all it really deserves, but I needed an easy win today. ^~^
Hope life treats you well, Peace
The 3 main females are attractive and have super model bodies.
EA live service garbage that launched at full price, destined to fail no matter what.
The pride pin was added in an update and the pride allegory or whatever was confirmed post-launch. Plus it is not in your face and main character does not have an ugly design.
Baldur's Gate 3 lets you choose body type, genitalia, and voice all separately, and everyone in the game is pansexual and DTF. It's as woke as anything else that the conservative crowd complains about. You need to have enormous blinders on to things like BG3, Barbie, etc. being massive successes to think that "go woke, go broke" makes any sense. You don't have to make it to a screen that displays pronouns to see that this game was going to flop.
You. Are. Delusional.
Cause your comment is blindingly stupid.
It's really hard to refute willful stupidity. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Plenty of people have refuted the point.
But please, keep embarrassing yourself, incel.
Spend enough time on Lemmy and you'll see this is not unusual or uncommon.
I down voted you, and that doesn't make you right. It's because you are annoying, and moronic.