Gaming Cannot Afford Another Concord

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Jade King

Published Oct 30, 2024

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How did the Concord disaster even happen? How many ill-advised decisions had to be made for a game like this t🅘o see the light of day? How many executives looked at this game and nodded their heads with hubris that this🍃 hero shooter would be a success? We’ll never know, but it shouldn’t have happened.

Sony shouldn’t have gotten to a point where it bankrolled a game of this scale, ignored the pleas of its community, and launched it into oblivion, 𝔉o♒nly to shut the studio responsible for it down in a matter of months. Now hundreds of peꦗople are out of work and millions of do⛄llars have been thrown into the fire.

Concord Is The Modern Gaming Landscape In A Nutshell

When Concord was first revealed earlier this year, the writing was on the wall. The majority of people watching the debut trailer were charmed by its initial cinematic but turned against it the moment it revealed itself to be yet another hero shooter in a landscape filled with hero shooters. PlayStation 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:had already cancelled Factions 2 and failed to penetrate the world of live service games several times, and this was yet another expensive attempt that, from the perspective of its community, ဣspent resources that could be better used elsewhere.

Firewalk’💯s ambition to build upon Concord with weekly animated sequences would have only ever worked if it gained a steady audience in the fi𒁏rst place, which it didn’t...

No matter the intentions of Firewalk Studios, who, for all intents and purposes, made a pretty solid shooter in Concord, it was never going to get off the ground. Anyone with an ounce of foresight could see that it didn’t stand a chance against Fortnite, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Apex Legends, or Destiny. It wasn’t even going to dethrone 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Overwatch, the game it arguably takes the most inspiration from. Players already have live-service games they dedicate so much of their time to, and it will take something monumental to pull them away and try something new. What they want, as is evidenced by the popularity of recent titles like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Astro Bot, are single player ex🅰periences that PlayStation has long been known for.

But when shareholders want constant profits and the highest earners in the industry are also live-service shooters, Sony will walk in that direction whether it’s the right decision or not. Yet failure after failure has to c🍃hange something, even if the announcing the closure of Firewalk Studios has Herman Hulst once again c🦄ommitting to a future largely defined by live-services.

I bet we will see the multiplayer Horizon game rise and fall along with Marathon failing to attract an audience bef🤡ore things ꦏtruly start to change. Concord has to be the start of a new path, or at least the final obstacle before the end of this current one the games industry finds itself on.

Things Need To Change Before They Get Worse

Concord reportedly cost $200 million to develop, and that doesn’t include marketing or any of the additional costs accrued after its disastrous launch. That’s a lot of money, and given that Sony refunded every purchase after shutting the servers down, it is a front-runner for the biggest media flop in histo💃ry. I know that video games can still fall outsid🤪e of mainstream discussion sometimes, but this sort of commercial devastation simply can’t be ignored. We must learn the right lessons from it, or we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes.

Just imagine the amount of original teams, projects, and idea🌳s that could be explored with $200 million, and how much more effectively spread such resources might have been if greed wasn’t at the forefront of

Sony’s mind.

Games take a lot longer to make, and when projects like Concord or Suicide Squad: 🍌Kill The Justice League are put into production, they are often done so with the best intentions. Huge corporations will glimpse a successful live-service title and believe their next game should be just like it, but several years later when it finally arrives🦄, people have moved on.

Concept art for The Last of Us Factions 2, showing two people defending themselves from zombies from a vantage point.

Boardrooms packed with out-of-touch executives fail to realise that games like Overwatch, Fortnite, an༒d Destiny all naturally accrue their respective reputations, and have spent years earning the trust of its players and developing worlds, gameplay, and mechanics that people care about. You just can’t bottle that phenomenon and recreate it in a lab.

When you do, it all goes wrong, and we’ve seen this again and again and again. There has to be a breaking point as mass layoffs and cancelled projects continue to be regular news. I know that things are likely to get much worse before they get better, but triple-A gaming sits on the precipice of somꦺething awful, a point of no return where blockbuster titles both single and multiplayer cost too much, take too long, and fail to offer the neverending returns that corporations expect from them. There has to be a better way, but with the failure of Concord, it’s clear all the big players refuse to acknowledge that.

There has never been a better time to play video games, but as a direct consequence, there has never be💟en a better time to bring the powers in control of this medium to task, because if things don’t change, we are going to fall straight into another crash. Concord needs to be the start of something new, and if it doesn’t, what on earth are we doing here?