Concord - PlayStation's biggest flop?

[BinaryMessiah]

I was right! It's being shut down 2 weeks after launch so technically, my prediction for before the end of the year was correct. My thought on this is either:

1. Some group in the team is very untalented and they phoned this in

2. They pitched a better idea and were forced to shape the game the way it is today against their will

3. The entire idea was really bad and someone at Sony approved this not knowing what the hell a good game even is and was just seeing dollar signs

4. A combination of them all

[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.

Why do you doubt this being their biggest flop?

Sony as a whole also has movie flops that cost way more. Destiny has also been a huge loss for them so buying Bungie was not the long term money making machine they thought they would have. Sony has been around for a long time. They have had bigger losses, this isn't the worst of them. They have had multiple online multiplayer games like MAG that flopped hard. They shuttered Zipper Interactive after poor sales of the last SOCOM game and Unit 13 for Vita. The Vita itself was a huge flop despite it's great reception and sales shortly after launch. Concord is a blip in their history of flops.

[telekill]

Revisiting this as I think Concord will go down as one of Sony's quickest commercial flops, but I'm going to agree with Binary in that the acquisition of Bungie was far more costly.

[bikingjahuty]

I was at Walmart this evening and saw a few physical copies still in the case. I thought about buying one as a collector's item, but I couldn't bring myself to do it at $70. Maybe I'll regret it when these physical games are going for $200+ one day, but this game looked so shitty I doubt that will ever happen, even if it's very rare.

The MSRP for Concord was set at $39.99 and was listed accordingly on Walmart's website. But, even at that price, I'd have passed on it too. I don't buy games as a means of investment.

Even at $40 I still don't feel bad about not picking a copy up lol. Someone in a Facebook gaming group I belong to posted a pic of people trying to sell physical copies for ~$200 already. That didn't take long.

[kamikazekeeg]

Already turning out to be the way I thought it could, but as Concord goes out, Sony is getting what is currently one of the second best reviewed games of the year with Astro Bot, a character I think started out in PSVR, then was a PS5 tech demo, and is now set to hopefully do really great in a genre that is mostly non-existent with Sony nowadays.  This needs to big the biggest slap to the face of Sony as it can be to make them realize what people actually want.  Trend chasing, expending massive amounts of cash, and spending excessive years to make a game is bad business.  They need to have more than just the biggest possible hits, they need those mid-level releases that don't cost all of the money and don't need to make 10+ million in sales with continued years of microtransactions, it's not sustainable.

[weirdfeline]

Already turning out to be the way I thought it could, but as Concord goes out, Sony is getting what is currently one of the second best reviewed games of the year with Astro Bot, a character I think started out in PSVR, then was a PS5 tech demo, and is now set to hopefully do really great in a genre that is mostly non-existent with Sony nowadays.  This needs to big the biggest slap to the face of Sony as it can be to make them realize what people actually want.  Trend chasing, expending massive amounts of cash, and spending excessive years to make a game is bad business.  They need to have more than just the biggest possible hits, they need those mid-level releases that don't cost all of the money and don't need to make 10+ million in sales with continued years of microtransactions, it's not sustainable.

I thought he started out in 2013 with the PlayStation Camera and The Playroom? I don't think he was named Astro Bot at that time but Asobi.

Ratchet is apparently getting another game in 2029 or so.

[weirdfeline]

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.

Why do you doubt this being their biggest flop?

Sony as a whole also has movie flops that cost way more. Destiny has also been a huge loss for them so buying Bungie was not the long term money making machine they thought they would have. Sony has been around for a long time. They have had bigger losses, this isn't the worst of them. They have had multiple online multiplayer games like MAG that flopped hard. They shuttered Zipper Interactive after poor sales of the last SOCOM game and Unit 13 for Vita. The Vita itself was a huge flop despite it's great reception and sales shortly after launch. Concord is a blip in their history of flops.

Well, it's about being PlayStation's biggest flop but yes they have many movies that fail. Destiny isn't a flop but it's not covering the costs of their acquisition. MAG and Unit 13 combined didn't cost nearly as much as Concord. Not sure if the Vita turned a profit or not but I feel like they probably still lost more with Concord.

[kamikazekeeg]

I thought he started out in 2013 with the PlayStation Camera and The Playroom? I don't think he was named Astro Bot at that time but Asobi.

Technically yes from the looks of it, I didn't even know the character originally started there, but that's pretty neat to see.

[redblaze57]

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.

Why do you doubt this being their biggest flop?

Sony as a whole also has movie flops that cost way more. Destiny has also been a huge loss for them so buying Bungie was not the long term money making machine they thought they would have. Sony has been around for a long time. They have had bigger losses, this isn't the worst of them. They have had multiple online multiplayer games like MAG that flopped hard. They shuttered Zipper Interactive after poor sales of the last SOCOM game and Unit 13 for Vita. The Vita itself was a huge flop despite it's great reception and sales shortly after launch. Concord is a blip in their history of flops.

Well, it's about being PlayStation's biggest flop but yes they have many movies that fail. Destiny isn't a flop but it's not covering the costs of their acquisition. MAG and Unit 13 combined didn't cost nearly as much as Concord. Not sure if the Vita turned a profit or not but I feel like they probably still lost more with Concord.

Don't forget that Sony also acquired Firewalk Studios, the team behind Concord last year. between how bad the game did, it's budget (which I've seen numbers between $100,000,000 and $250,000,000) and the Studio Acquisition (can't fine a number). Considering what the Break-Even point can possibly be I'm thinking it might be one of the biggest AAA flops

[sly345]

Don't forget that Sony also acquired Firewalk Studios, the team behind Concord last year. between how bad the game did, it's budget (which I've seen numbers between $100,000,000 and $250,000,000) and the Studio Acquisition (can't fine a number). Considering what the Break-Even point can possibly be I'm thinking it might be one of the biggest AAA flops

The 200 million dollars is usually seen as both the cost of the game and the aquisition of the studio combined.
I'm not surprised it failed, the genre of hero shooter games is so oversaturated that you really need something amazing to even have a chance. Most of those games are free to play. Concord was a 40 dollar game with "live service" on top of it, that will kill a ton of interest. I don't think the woke stuff played too much of a role, yeah it's ridiculous to use pronouns and put them on a robot, but if the gameplay and game design was great, it would've been a hit regardless.
The game was just horribly made though, gameplay was the same by the numbers design and the characters were just horrible to look at, as if it was more of a parody of games like fortnite and apex and all those other hero shooters out there.

I'm still amazed it bombed as badly as it did and i'm amazed that even the announcement of the servers ending didn't leat to a increase in player numbers, i mean there are enough achievement nuts out there who would revel in having these super rare achievements, but...nope, at least on steam the numbers still declined

[weirdfeline]

somehow it has gotten even worse!!!!! https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2024/09/rumour-concord-cost-usd400-million-sony-believed-it-was-the-future-of-playstation

400 MILLION??? double the previous estimate??? how has Hermen Hulst not been fired?? Why was he hired in the first place? If they wanted a studio head why not Ted Price since he actually knows how to get multiple games released instead of just one every five years? At this point it seems like their best bet would be to just relocate back to Japan.

[kamikazekeeg]

I wouldn't go all in on that number, the guy who is reporting on it sounds like a legit guy, but without real confirmation, it comes like someone could have been misinformed.  Some other industry type folks were talking about how the numbers don't make a sense, as it only had 4 years of development, a budget like that would be basically the same as Spider-Man 2 and Horizon 2 combined, but this a small scale multiplayer game, with a much smaller dev team than either of those.  They certainly blew a ton of money for sure no matter what though.

I think a lot of the other talk sounds a lot more reasonable and makes a lot of sense, because no matter what the budget really was, this game got such a weird amount of support for no real reason.  The idea that this will be a "future of Playstation" sort of game is insane for a game that was behind on the genre hype even when Sony bought them and such a bland art style for the game.  It's actually funny, because some of the concept art they had for the game that I've seen, at least for a character or two, look so much better than what they went with, like the one big woman with the green puffy armor looked cool and then they went and made the lamest choices for her finalized look and I've seen artist come in and do legit redesigns that look awesome while keeping reasonably true to the original character.

I had realized I never heard of Hermen Hulst before this really, but it's crazy that this guy who was the co-founder of Guerilla Games and was at the head of the studio for games like the Killzone series and Horizon, and then ended up making such disastrous decisions with this one game.  Wild.

[redblaze57]

It's  confirmed that Concord was in development for 8 years not 4.i'm also willing to believe that if the game was in such an unplayable state when Sony bought Concord that the budget would balloon in and attempt to get it playable when bringing on other devs.

The only thing that keeps me from thinking this real is why sell it for $40 and not $70?. At 400mil this is one of the most expensive budgets for games, hell no other Sony titles come that close. Looking at other media only 3 movies have had a budget of over 400mil (excluding the last 2 avengers as those were filmed back to back.)
Star wars the force awakens
Star wars rise of Skywalker
Jurassic world fallen kingdom

There's a lot to consider with this. Also that 400mil doesn't include the firewalk Studios acquisition. I'm willing to bet at some point there are going to be documentaries made about the failure of this game not just by some random youtube documentaruon too. I'm willing to say this game is one of the biggest flops in media, not just games at this point.

[kamikazekeeg]

It's  confirmed that Concord was in development for 8 years not 4.i'm also willing to believe that if the game was in such an unplayable state when Sony bought Concord that the budget would balloon in and attempt to get it playable when bringing on other devs.

The only thing that keeps me from thinking this real is why sell it for $40 and not $70?. At 400mil this is one of the most expensive budgets for games, hell no other Sony titles come that close. Looking at other media only 3 movies have had a budget of over 400mil (excluding the last 2 avengers as those were filmed back to back.)
Star wars the force awakens
Star wars rise of Skywalker
Jurassic world fallen kingdom

There's a lot to consider with this. Also that 400mil doesn't include the firewalk Studios acquisition. I'm willing to bet at some point there are going to be documentaries made about the failure of this game not just by some random youtube documentaruon too. I'm willing to say this game is one of the biggest flops in media, not just games at this point.

Firewalk Studios as a company has only existed since 2018, so it could only have been 6 at the most and from what I've read, the 8 years talk was like "We have an idea" sort of stuff, so it was a general concept for that long, but didn't really hit full proper development until the past 4 years.

Great point about the price tag though.  You don't have a game that costs that much that you sell for so little unless you have a pretty notable amount of post-release monetization behind it, which Concord didn't I believe as they were going to have all new characters and maps for free.  Helldivers 2 was likely not even half of the even estimated 200 million dollar number for Concord and they made it work at 40 because it was a co-op game, so it's more easy to get a couple buddies with you on a cheaper game at 40, which is less per person, but has potential for greater sales numbers than if it was sold at 60 or 70.  And they had a very reasonable bit of monetization by selling gear content passes on the regular.