Marcus Persson: "The characters in Concord have been one of the most criticised aspects of the game. They have been accused of being everything from generic to advertisements for political correctness culture, which, according to one of the game's developers, Amanda Kiefer, is partly due to the lack of an overall design plan."
World's most expensive coaster
Pretty standard for pulled off products, collectors love useless but very limited things.
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what's so different between this and those useless NES cartridges or even supposedly "rare" pokemon cards? they are like NFT, just physical. Concord is an actual flop that has been pulled from stores, while Nintendo artificially limited their supply for artificial scarcity.
ehh... I'll stick with the controller. I got enough coasters, they are called xbox games (snickers)
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Concord is the biggest flop of all time... Sony could've saved 5 years by standing over the toilet and flushing 400 million. Remember, Concord is so bad that you cannot even play it anymore. It's vapor. You can't even have a retro review on it or pretend like "maybe there are a few people at home enjoying it". Lol, it was so so bad that it's been obliterated along with piles and piles of money.
The good news is all that failure leads to more pc ports of sonys better games. Sony is a good 3rd party publisher. I'll give them that!
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Sony Interactive Entertainment's recent cancellation of live service game projects is tied to the failure of Concord, based on a new report.
Good. Let it be a lesson.
I’m super curious about how they are going to go about Fairgame$. It’s a live service title which didn’t get a good reception with the announcement and it’s being made by a brand new studio they decided to buy straight away because of the live service title they were making. It’s super similar to Concord and Firewalk Studios.
Will they cancel it this far into development or release it with the high chance of it being another disappointment and making Sony the laughing stock.
It feels like that one is far enough along that they are going to go ahead and just push it out.
The Horizon live-service game is on the ... err horizon as well it seems, don't think that's getting cancelled.
Honestly if one modern Sony live-service game that I wish wasn't cancelled, that'd be the "Spider-Man: The Great Web". The leaked trailer looked cool and imho, it had potential. The timing was just not on its side.
With Avengers and Gotham Knights fumbling and Suicide Squad also not garnering much positivity at the time, Sony pulled the plug.
And 2 other I can also consider as well would be Factions 2.0 and Twisted Metal. Any form of a new Twisted Metal game is still fine for me than nothing.
Hope after all this, Marathin delivers. Oh, it better, especially after they changed such an amazing IP's genre.
I am really curious to see what they can pull-off.
Marathon is Sony's only real hope I think on the live service front, any live service game released before then will be going out to Freddie Mercury singing "another one bites the dust". They have to hope Bungie have some magic left in them and deliver a product worthy of the name. Live service games and Sony fans are like square pegs in a round hole. They need to really knock it out of the park to justify them and remove the negative stigma surrounding live service games.
I really don't know how seriously I would take that Herman has always just come off as a yes man. But I say I don't know because I really don't know it could be one way or the other
Sony's decision to cancel two more live-service games, one from Bluepoint Games and another from Bend Studio—neither of which have significant experience in live-service development—has raised serious concerns among fans. Many of us had been eagerly awaiting announcements about these studios' projects, believing they were nearing completion after years of development.
Now, it appears several first-party studios are being forced to start over, highlighting what feels like a pattern of mismanagement this generation. Sony's strategy seems to be floundering, leaving its first-party portfolio with a string of missteps.
This situation is eerily reminiscent of the "arrogant Sony" era leading up to the PS3's troubled launch. Unfortunately, unlike that time, there’s no strong competition from Xbox to compel Sony to course-correct and refocus on what made them successful in the first place.
Idk, I don't feel like they've learnt their lesson, in the case of Fairgame$, I suspect they'd release it if it's too far along to back out, at least try and make some money on it, if that's possible.
i still find it ridiculous that they had soo many, 12, in the pipeline. if they had like 3, sure, but 12 is a huge number for potential failure.
They were throwing stuff against the wall and praying something stuck... considering how poorly thought out the whole thing was they should be grateful they even got one win with Helldivers.
How the hell would that even work? Were they going to create 12 completely different games to try and cater to different audiences? Or would they expect some gamers to be juggling multiple ones and on top of whatever third party ones get created? I really hope someone high up at Sony has pressed the big red panic button because they're starting to look MS levels of incompetent.
Honestly I think the strategy was to have one of them be a huge success (billions in revenue) and have that pay for all the other games and devs they'd shut down from the failures. One Fortnite-level success would double the brand's profit, so it makes sense why they'd take a flier on it, even if the odds were terrible and in practice has so far been about worst case scenario.
I think they expected multiple failures, they only needed a few to succeed to rake in the big bucks. But there are already a lot of these games out there to the point of saturation, and trying to pull people away from other, popular GaaS games was going to be a big challenge.
They need to wake up. A God of War live service game... what a joke
A God of War live service game doesn't even make sense no matter how you spin it. What a dumb idea.
I’m a huge God of War fan and this had me scratching my head like ‘huh?’ Stop trying to add GaaS to every IP. It just doesn’t work that way.
Focus on quality singleplayer like you had with the ps4 and 3 that made you so well loved. 3rd party will do all the live servicing.
You need some multiplayer titles as well ... not unlike olden days ... but just not so many of 'em that you lose the quality over quantity.
And plus, experimental smaller projects to keep things interesting.
They closed all of their ‘small’ game studios though for the GAAS focus. They shot themselves in the foot. PixelOpus, Japan, London (Psygnosis) closed
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "In a year that was to a large extent carried by the game developers of Japan (and to some extent China), western games can rejoice that there was at least one category they managed to dominate: that of Most Disappointing. Sometimes disappointment comes from high expectations met with something middling, other times it comes from middling expectations met with something terrible. This year managed to deliver a bit of both, so either way there was enough disappointment to go around."
Why not mention the 19,000 Steam games of which 80% weren't good enough to merit "success" on the platform?
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Because the very *definition* of disappointment requires one has some kind of expectation for it. Concord was hoping to find its own niche in the crowded 'hero shooter' market, with ~8 years of development, $100 million+ funding, and marketable talent behind it, and went belly up in 2 lousy weeks. That's historical for a live-service game.
It's become a drinking game at this point. Disappointing games? It's the same games in every article with a similar title. Does no one have an original thought anymore?
@thorstein
**It's the same games in every article with a similar title.**
Because it's the same year? The games that got launched is a constant fact for everyone. And if the game was universally disappointing, then obviously everyone would echo the same thing.
Do you want for originality some writer would write up that instead of Concord and Outlaws, Silent Hills 2 was the most disappointing game, right? Coz, that'd be considered a click-bait article then.
And emphasis on the word "disappointing" games, not general bad games.
Veilguard was easily the most disappointing game of the year.
Highest expectation with Highest disappointment
Concord was just the biggest failure.
In fact it was not very disappointing.
Almost as expected.
@LordoftheCritics I disagree about Vailguard being the most disappointing game of the year. Going into the launch of that game, 90% of the comments I was seeing from this community were negative. Many also wanted the game to fail.
In my opinion, for a game to be disappointing, it would mean the game was highly anticipated for success going into the launch of the game only to bomb in the reviews and fail commercially.
I would say Hellblade 2 claims this title. I haven't played any of the games in the series as yet, however, the hate that game received was on another level. I am not sure if it was fanboys that felt threatened by it being the best-looking console game on the market or if the criticisms about it being a boring game were valid. I haven't played these walking games before so put it off since it doesn't seem to be my cup of tea.
Those 19,000 games have 80%. Dragon age is sitting at 70%, Star wars is at 75% and falling, Lego Horizon adventures is at 56%, Skull and Bones 65% and Concord was DOA. This would mean these games didn't even crack the top 19,000.
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Characters were terrible looking but the gameplay was nothing to write home about either as for that price tag when every other one was f2p didn't help either.
Lack of an overall design plan?
Girl…you had 8 years.
For real though I guess we will never know what truly went on because on one hand it sounds like a very typical thing for executives within a studio to be tone deaf while on the other it could be seen as employees throwing the studio under the bus so they can try and salvage their reputation within the industry to get hired somewhere else.
I hope Jason Schreier does one of his investigations into this, it would be a good read.
You know when you look at the roster of characters in a game you're playing for the first time and you're like: "Oh that character looks sick or badass i wanna play as them!"
Yeah, that doesn't happen in Concord. The character designs are absolutely awful and boring/generic. I don't know how these character designs got approved.
Something really needs to be done to put power back in the hands of the developers & artists and not in the hands of shareholders and investors.