Concord - PlayStation's biggest flop?

[weirdfeline]

This game launched today. Under 700 players on Steam. PS5 numbers are likely not much better. The top posts on the game's subreddit on launch day are just mocking the player count. On the game's first evening it is outside of the top 100 Twitch games being streamed and the top two streams making up most of the viewers are both sponsored by the game. OpenCritic is a 63 or "Weak". Metacritic is a 69 which is marked by yellow.

This is a FIRST PARTY game from PlayStation which means they own the developer. On PlayStation Store, where I'm pretty sure you need to own a game to be able to rate it, it has a rating of 2.76 out of 5 with 43% being 1 star.

This game is $40 for the standard edition or $60 for deluxe. It seems like Sony will easily lose $100 million on this if not way more. Keep in mind Steam users can easily refund a game if they play for less than two hours.

I doubt Fairgame$ (from another FIRST PARTY) will fare much better. If you don't remember what this is it's a game that looked exactly like SEGA's Hyenas which was cancelled right before release because they knew it would be a flop.

Concord does have a physical release though! Check it out this Black Friday for $10!

I'm not sure what Sony is thinking or how they thought this was a good idea. I don't know why Sony thought people would buy this game when there's an endless amount of similar games that are completely free to play.

Update: Checking out some promotional videos and they're already announcing a cometic store. So they can't even use the "no microtransactions" line. No battle pass though which is somehow touted as a good thing? I get they can be overwhelming for some but unless you absolutely love a game you can simply just not grind a battle pass and still get early rewards from early tiers from playing however much you want.

[kamikazekeeg]

It's going to be a very big flop.  Pretty wild honestly, like there's very little that is wrong with the game from what I've seen, it has good gameplay and visuals, there's just so little of an audience for it due to the kind of game it is and they character style they went with, that not even the full backing of Sony itself, could get people to want it.  Like it might be doing worse than the new Suicide Squad game, and that game was an absolute mess.

They could try and take it F2P to try and salvage things, but this game is going to be a massive loss for them.  Really don't get why Sony thought this game was going to be such a winner for them.  It apparently started production back when Overwatch was fairly new, but hero shooters have been floundering for a few years now and the only one that has had any major hype and a positive response lately, has been Marvel Rivals, and that's primarily because it's Marvel.  I know I'll be playing that when it releases.

[weirdfeline]

It's going to be a very big flop.  Pretty wild honestly, like there's very little that is wrong with the game from what I've seen, it has good gameplay and visuals, there's just so little of an audience for it due to the kind of game it is and they character style they went with, that not even the full backing of Sony itself, could get people to want it.  Like it might be doing worse than the new Suicide Squad game, and that game was an absolute mess.

They could try and take it F2P to try and salvage things, but this game is going to be a massive loss for them.  Really don't get why Sony thought this game was going to be such a winner for them.  It apparently started production back when Overwatch was fairly new, but hero shooters have been floundering for a few years now and the only one that has had any major hype and a positive response lately, has been Marvel Rivals, and that's primarily because it's Marvel.  I know I'll be playing that when it releases.

Marvel Rivals looks great but there's also Deadlock from Valve which was officially announced today and has a lot of Overwatch similarities.

From the beta (or whatever it was) I heard a lot of complaints about the movement being abnormally slow. That sounds pretty bad, maybe an easy fix though.

[bikingjahuty]

Concord and its ilk aren't my cup of tea, but even from the trailers I saw, it looked like shit. It looked very generic and soulless, and seemed to be chasing a gaming trend that hit its peak several years ago.

[weirdfeline]

Concord and its ilk aren't my cup of tea, but even from the trailers I saw, it looked like shit. It looked very generic and soulless, and seemed to be chasing a gaming trend that hit its peak several years ago.

It's going around that it started development eight years ago. Not sure why it wasn't canned four years ago.

[kamikazekeeg]

Marvel Rivals looks great but there's also Deadlock from Valve which was officially announced today and has a lot of Overwatch similarities.

I don't know much about Deadlock other than it's Valve, and it seems to be a long ways off, compared to Marvel Rivals, which is out in a few months.  I'll probably never play Deadlock unless something about is off the charts nuts, I'm not even huge on hero shooters anymore, Marvel Rivals is just working right for me because of it being Marvel, it has a killer art style, and it's F2P, so I don't have to put any money into it.  Getting into games was fast, everything was snappy, it brought me back to those launch Overwatch days when I was playing that and enjoying that.

I just don't get why they bought the studio behind Concord.  Like I'm sure they saw it was more than just Concord itself, they seem like a studio that can do good stuff, but to throw that first party weight behind a game that was bound to fail...baffling.

[weirdfeline]

Marvel Rivals looks great but there's also Deadlock from Valve which was officially announced today and has a lot of Overwatch similarities.

I don't know much about Deadlock other than it's Valve, and it seems to be a long ways off, compared to Marvel Rivals, which is out in a few months.  I'll probably never play Deadlock unless something about is off the charts nuts, I'm not even huge on hero shooters anymore, Marvel Rivals is just working right for me because of it being Marvel, it has a killer art style, and it's F2P, so I don't have to put any money into it.  Getting into games was fast, everything was snappy, it brought me back to those launch Overwatch days when I was playing that and enjoying that.

I just don't get why they bought the studio behind Concord.  Like I'm sure they saw it was more than just Concord itself, they seem like a studio that can do good stuff, but to throw that first party weight behind a game that was bound to fail...baffling.

From official release maybe but tens of thousands of people had access to it before the announcement and now even more people have access to it. It's a mix of hero shooter and MOBA but it's not like Smite.

Same can be said for Haven the developer of Fairgame$. Jade Raymond has done almost nothing the last decade after bouncing around from EA to Stadia and now to Sony. Game industry isn't like the film industry where names can just carry weight forever based on noting. David Jaffe literally created both Twisted Metal and God of War and now he's just a commentary YouTuber because Drawn to Death was ripped apart by critics.

[kamikazekeeg]

Ah, saw some gameplay for it, definitely a big no for me with Deadlock.  The whole MOBA thing added to a hero shooter doesn't do much for me, so Marvel Rivals will probably be my hero shooter of choice when that releases.  It certainly won't be Concord lol

[weirdfeline]

Another crazy thing about Concord, at least on PS5, is that since it's a paid release you have to have at least the $80 a year PS Plus membership just to access it. If you don't play free to play games you may not realize it but you do not need to PS Plus to play them online. You don't need PS Plus to play Fortnite, Warzone, Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, Destiny 2, etc. You do need it for Concord, non-Warzone COD, most sports games and.. not much else since the biggest online games are free nowadays lol.

Seeing a lot more talk about the Steam player count. Apparently Gollum had more players on Steam day one than this. Another thing to note is that Sony's hit from earlier this year, Helldivers 2, is almost entirely a hit just because of the Steam release so the Steam number is important. The player count as I'm typing this is down to 387 on a Saturday morning/afternoon. Just a week ago Fortnite was struggling with having over 3 million concurrent players trying to join at this time of day for comparison.

[alligo]

From the first trailer it smelled bad, anyone saw it except the developers.
I don't know if it's true, but it seems that the game benefited from 8 years of development, it must still hurt them...

The game should have been free from the start, this type of game is saturated on the market anyway and the characters have no charisma or make you want to play.

[weirdfeline]

Reports are saying it has sold 10k on PC and 15k on PS5.

[kamikazekeeg]

Reports are saying it has sold 10k on PC and 15k on PS5.

Even if that's off by half of what it actually is, which I'd be curious how they found out the console numbers, anything below 100k for a game like this is devastating with how much money was put in.  I'm hoping that because Sony bought the guys so recently, this flop won't affect the studio too much, we don't need anyone else losing their jobs, but has to be a bummer to spend so long on a game just to have it face plant out of the gate.

[BinaryMessiah]

I doubt it's their biggest flop, but I fully expect this to be shut down by the end of the year. These Overwatch clones just can't capture the same lightning in a bottle. I don't know why Sony needs this. They have Helldivers 2 which is doing gangbusters. The game looks totally phoned by a bunch of people who were forced to make this. No love, no personality, just literally made to make money.

[kamikazekeeg]

The game looks totally phoned by a bunch of people who were forced to make this. No love, no personality, just literally made to make money.

There's certainly things to criticize the game for, but nothing about what is here comes across as phoned in to make a buck, it was the studios first game, with how long it was likely in development, the years of support from Sony, to Sony outright buying the studio itself, that comes across like a passion project to me.  The game looks good, they put a ton of money into the cinematics, seemingly plays well, it just has no audience.  If they wanted to just jump on the hero shooter bandwagon, the game would've likely been very different than what it is now and would've release sooner than it did.

[telekill]

Hopefully this puts Sony on the path to realizing we don't want live service games. If the quick death of Concord even points Sony to the start of that realization, I say, let it burn.