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Sony Games

Sony Pulls Concord From Sale After Disastrous Launch (ign.com) 104

Posted by msmash from the tough-luck dept.
PlayStation hero shooter Concord will be taken offline on September 6, 2024 and all players will receive a full refund, Sony announced Tuesday. From a report: Announced on the PlayStation Blog, director Ryan Ellis said "while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn't land the way we'd intended."

Concord will therefore be taken offline so Sony and developer Firewalk Studios can "explore options, including those that will better reach our players." The game will be removed from sale immediately and anyone who purchased on the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct will be refunded to their original payment methods. Those who purchased on Steam and the Epic Games Store will be refunded in the coming days. Firewalk Studios' AA shooter was released less than two weeks ago on August 23.
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Sony Pulls Concord From Sale After Disastrous Launch More

Sony Pulls Concord From Sale After Disastrous Launch

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  • I thought Air France did that back in 2000.

  • The problem with "live service" games is that there's only so many players you can have of ALL of them. There's also pushes to stick to the same ones, only changing occasionally, sticking with the biggest games, etc...

    Between classics like team fortress, Fortnite, and more, I've seen a LOT of these types of games fall flat on their face because they don't offer anything new except for heavy monetization. IE in-app purchases to do anything.

    They definitely spent a lot of money on the trailers.

    • It looked expensive but really hollow. Feel paint by numbers. The game has been in development for 8 years though so when it first started being worked on it probably seemed like a good enough idea. If it had launched 6 years ago it might have done better

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z80a ( 971949 )

      There's no reason to buy a worse overwatch when you can play the real one for "free".

      • Yeah. Spectre Divide, which is just a Valorant clone which you've probably never heard about is 50 times more popular: https://steamdb.info/app/26414... [steamdb.info]
        The difference: It doesn't cost 40 USD to start playing.

        Multiplayer live service games need a lot of players to ensure matchmaking is not dreadful. Having a barrier of entry like that for an absolute no-name entry-level IP (It's not exactly Battlefield or Call of Duty) is insane.

        It must suck hard to have put 8 years of devving into it, only to see it bomb li

  • Never even heard of it (Score:3)

    by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <slashdot@keir[ ]ad.org ['ste' in gap]> on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @02:40PM (#64759522)

    They aren't going to be able to keep servers online to host a game no one is even aware exists, let alone plays

    • This is the first I really heard of it, looking at pre-release beta reviews, well, one of the statements during the open and free beta was that they couldn't even get players during that. How do they expect to get players at $40?
      I'm seeing reviews saying "nothing new", "Boring", "Poorly balanced", etc...

      • I also just read about all the self-inflicted "wokeness" controversy.

        Seems like companies still aren't learning their lesson to just stay out of the culture wars.

        • I didn't could you sum it up in a few words why it was seen as "woke" and in a way that could be considered worse than getting feedback as "nothing new", "boring" and "poorly balanced"?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The issue seems to be that it was in development for 8 years, and when the started it made sense, but today the market is saturated with similar games that are already established. On top that they ruined it with micro transactions and pay-to-avoid-grind.

  • Catering to a market that is nearly nonexistent... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @02:41PM (#64759526)

    could explain the disastrous launch.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Or oversaturated. Concord is a live service game - ones of those MMORPG like games where you go online to do stuff in it. The big difference between an LSG and an MMO is the former typically doesn't have monthly subscription charges - maybe you might get "season passes" but other times it's free added content (aka "stuff to do").

      Games like Destiny 2, Helldivers, and Concord. And what do they have in common? They're all by Sony owned studios. Bungie was bought because of Destiny in the hopes they could help

  • At one point there were fewer people playing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @02:52PM (#64759558)
    On steam and who worked on the game. I don't even know what you do with numbers like that.

    Jimquisition over on YouTube has pointed this out before but live services don't work as an industry. They are a design from the ground up to demand hours and hours and hours of time so even if you could find enough Saudi Arabian sheiks to buy into their microtransactions and make them profitable there just isn't enough hours in the day to attract enough players.

    When they lost loot boxes because of how predatory they were they moved to a battle pass model where you basically have to trade money for time if you want to get the various unlocks and where the mathematics work out to constantly keep you chasing and playing.

    For a small number of players that makes hundreds of millions of dollars so I get the appeal of entering the market but you can't have more than about five or six of them in total operating in the entire market because they're just isn't enough hours in a day for the model to work and exploit players. If you're already spending 20 or 30 hours a week grinding destiny or fortnite or rainbow six you don't have another 20 or 30 hours to grind Concord.

    What I don't get is how the suits didn't realize this. The developers are going to make whatever the suits tell them because their artists and they just want a chance to play with the cool toys and make a game. But I mean simple math should tell you you The market of people willing to spend that much time on a game is finite

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      But I mean simple math should tell you that the he market of people willing to spend that much time on a game is finite

      It should. But it comes with two requirements: 1) You need to be able to do simple math and 2) you need to ask the question in the forst place. I think the type of "suit" prevalent today has real trouble with both.

      • Yeah it is a lot of Nepo babies out there. The funny thing is they're smart enough to know to hide when they are Nepo babies. A bunch of Wikipedia articles for famous people have removed their early childhood sections where you find out who their parents are.

      • On a smaller scale, think about all of the people training/working really hard for careers as writers/singers/athletes/youtubers when we all know that only a small slice of those who try hard will succeed. It's just that when you succeed in something like that, the outcome is so incredible that tons of people chase after it.

        Some of the microtransaction/live service games have made $1B+/year in revenue. For a company like Sony, even if they only make a hit 10% of the time in that market and spend $100M on

    • The market of people willing to spend that much time on a game is finite

      The problem is the suits all think they shit pure gold and that this market will move over to them. It's not about sourcing infinite customers, it's the idea that releasing a game can lead to stealing all the customers from a competitor. And honestly if the game is good it will.

      You know those meme videos of timelapse scales of popularity of certain things over the years, well I saw an interesting one about gaming, and something very interesting stood out. Back in the 90s it was a few key games up the top, a

  • ... that has forgotten how to do it. Seems to be a common topic with the big IT players these days.

  • Not necessary (Score:3)

    by Baron_Yam ( 643147 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @03:03PM (#64759588)

    Why not have private server and offline play, then throw in modding support.

    You sell the original game, run it through your authentication server if you must, and then sell subscriptions to your quality official server with moderation and cheat monitoring etc.

    Then if you have to drop support for a specific title, you only have to support account authentication. And you know what? You can split that off into a separately billed service and maybe 40 years from now still have people paying to play a game you haven't assigned a dev to for almost as long. If you only sold one copy, that's still income you're not throwing away.

    It also makes games playable in a way that can build and maintain a cult following. Maybe one day you'll decide there's new money to be made spinning up a server again. And you can even keep selling the game with local/private server play only. Money money money, and people who bought the game never get pissed off because you clawed it back.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by m00sh ( 2538182 )

      Why not have private server and offline play, then throw in modding support.

      You sell the original game, run it through your authentication server if you must, and then sell subscriptions to your quality official server with moderation and cheat monitoring etc.

      Then if you have to drop support for a specific title, you only have to support account authentication. And you know what? You can split that off into a separately billed service and maybe 40 years from now still have people paying to play a game you haven't assigned a dev to for almost as long. If you only sold one copy, that's still income you're not throwing away.

      It also makes games playable in a way that can build and maintain a cult following. Maybe one day you'll decide there's new money to be made spinning up a server again. And you can even keep selling the game with local/private server play only. Money money money, and people who bought the game never get pissed off because you clawed it back.

      Their main business model is selling cosmetic micro-transactions. That wouldn't work with this model.

      • Sorry, I brought rational thought into a truly weird area of economics.

        At an emotional level, I understand cosmetic purchases less than the P2W stuff. Which is already kind of stupid.

        • Any "live service game" is like social media, it lives and dies on it's daily users. Nobody to play against means nobody is playing at all and if a person hits a 7-minute wait to find a match there are literally dozens of other games then can turn to. F2P is a way to get the servers populated and once people are playing they will tend to make some sort of purchase, a cosmetic, a battle pass, what have you. Get a steady community going and then you get the whales that make up a large percentage of F2P rev

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rinnon ( 1474161 )

          At an emotional level, I understand cosmetic purchases less than the P2W stuff. Which is already kind of stupid.

          Understanding cosmetic purchases all comes down to the idea that a player will see someone (another player, a streamer, etc.) wearing something and they'll think "I wish I looked like that." Keyword here being the second *I*, wherein the in game avatar is serving as a representation of the self. Then it's just as simple as answering the question why anyone would pay what seems like a silly amount of money to "look" a certain way: ego.

    • The major industry moguls like the ability to block players from being able to play old games at all, as it pushes those players to play the new games instead.

      They don't want old games competing against new games for attention, especially since new games cost a lot to make.

      In the case of this particular game, it looks like even if they did offer private server support, game sales were so low that they didn't even earn back the costs of development. Giving people their money back for a game that those same

      • I don't think it's a goodwill idea at all. It's simple economics: They sold enough copies that just shutting down the servers without refunding would get them a class action lawsuit that would end up more expensive than just refunding.

    • Why not have private server and offline play, then throw in modding support.

      It was a live service game. One which never got a community built around it. It literally makes no sense to do anything other than throw it in the trash. Seriously check out this chart: https://steamdb.info/app/24437... [steamdb.info] it had a maximum all time high of 660 players. SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY. Sure that was steam only, but it's reflective of just how big of an uninteresting turd this game was.

      Do you know just how shit a game needs to be for IGN to rate it 6/10?

      I'm with you in general on principle, but this game

  • Just name it concord, how dumb could you be?

  • I feel really bad for people working on this (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2024 @03:58PM (#64759722)

    This is pretty astounding they would actually pull the whole product and issue refunds. But really it's the right thing to do when you release a multi-player focused game where there are no players.

    I just feel really bad for people who have spent years of their lives working on what from I could tell from reviews, functioned mechanically quite well - it's just that the art design and pricing strategy seemed to have let down the whole company.

    Game development just seems like a brutal industry to work in because so much that can make or break a game is out of the workers control.

    • Yes, game making IS a very brutal industry. It is notorious for overworking staff to the point of burn-out, because they have an abundant supply of talent (young people like playing games and think it would be really cool to make them for a living).

      Also, the market is very saturated at this point. Making a game that sells well is hard and expensive, and you still need a lot of marketing to compete against all the OTHER video game marketing that is trying to drown you out.

      This genre in particular, the team

      • Also, the market is very saturated at this point. Making a game that sells well is hard and expensive

        This is a great point, I am seeing ads all the time for game after game after game... even if they were all great there just is not enough time to play all of these massive games coming out, almost everyone has to pick a small number they will actually play.

        This genre in particular, the team-based PVP shooter, is also a very thoroughly-saturated sub-market of the video game market

        Yes also a great point, that

    • Judging by what some of the people who worked on this been spitting out on Twitter etc I absolutely do not feel bad for them even a little, it is one of the most well deserved holes in the ground and I hope they learn a valuable lesson from it at the very least in humility but I am afraid they just wont and keep blaming everyone else instead.

  • It's always freshly shocking to me how much the executive class of supposedly "creative" industries fails to understand how media works.

    People like things that are new, sure, but only if they're also good! So sometimes new things that, on a shoestring budget and against long odds, actually managed to get made, perhaps largely as a labor of love by individual contributors, may become explosively popular and make money. As will the first few copies of that thing, because those early copies can incorporate t

    • It's always freshly shocking to me how much the executive class of supposedly "creative" industries fails to understand how media works.

      People like things that are new, sure, but only if they're also good! So sometimes new things that, on a shoestring budget and against long odds, actually managed to get made, perhaps largely as a labor of love by individual contributors, may become explosively popular and make money. As will the first few copies of that thing, because those early copies can incorporate the improvements that become feasible, dependable even, when a soulless corporation authorizes you to spend ten times more money than on the earlier, rudimentary prototype.

      But you can't keep doing that forever.

      And battle-royale shooters like Doom and Quake and Counterstrike and Team Fortress and, what is it, Overwatch? Fortnite? are, like, a hundred years old now. There's no more real improvements to make. And there are only so many players who are playing this kind of game. Most players get tired of the same old mechanics and quit playing the whole genre after a few days or weeks or months or years. The ones that don't quit outright are adequately served by the old games, thank you very much.

      This will keep happening, over and over and over. Because creativity and business are opposites. Maybe the executives could save a bunch of money next time by just bookmarking this post.

      Creative "industries" tend to drown in the "industry" part. For some reason, the management teams never seem to be able to wrap their head around the idea that they are putting out "creative" products, not just manufacturing widgets. Selling the same thing with slightly different paint isn't going to do for creative works, yet a lot of the industry decision makers seem to be convinced that's literally the ONLY way to "create" new product.

      I'm a creative in my hobby life, and I get no end of frustration from

    • And battle-royale shooters like Doom and Quake and Counterstrike

      I don't think you know what battle royale games are.

      Here:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Most players get tired of the same old mechanics and quit playing the whole genre after a few days or weeks or months or years. The ones that don't quit outright are adequately served by the old games, thank you very much.

      Yeah, no. Call of Duty is doing pretty well. Next month, Black Ops 6 will be released. That is the 21st Call of Duty proper game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • I think they were probably going with an older definition, more medieval even. Where a "battle royale" was where you had a bunch of competitors enter the arena, normally just a marked area of field, with the last individual/team standing winning.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Under the older definition, Doom, Quake, and Counterstrike qualify.

  • Not knowing what it was I watched the trailer and.. why would I pay for another team fortress clone?

    I loved the original team fortress, but the TF2 that everyone knows now was all cartoonified, which clearly has a market, it just wasn't the same for me as the classic.

  • I've never understood the appeal of cramming 50 to 100 characters into a small space and expect it to be fun. I want to take players on one-on-one and hunt for them. Searching through giant maps for an opponent is half the fun, especially when the map is interesting and engaging. I used to play on-line games back in the day like Unreal with the Serpentine Mod. Huge engaging maps, usually no more than 16 to 24 players at a time, and plenty of one-on-one action with the occasional asshole coming along a lobbi

    • I miss UT, though the graphics were pretty limited. I used to play a lot of Tactical Ops. My coworkers and I at Media X specialized in low-grav CTF, we played on Fridays "after" work.

  • Back when Overwatch was the new hotness. They decided to chase this trend, and now the field is crowded with free to play version. The bad character design isn't helping.

  • If I wanted to do battle with 400 pounds pink haired feminists with pronouns in their bios, I'd join Twitter.

  • sony would have instantly made more money and had more players by giving it away for free and charging for skins.

    but you can't beat free, especially when volvo is making it.

  • I never heard of the game, or seen it, but someone said it was woke? And no one wanted it? It doesn't matter how much media you throw to pretend it's what people want, they don't, the vast majority don't care for the poor behaviors and attitudes of a few people of a specific ideology. It doesn't matter if you have an army of people dumping on any comments about people not liking it, or if you scream louder, but the world doesn't revolve around group identities, although many countries keep trying it.

    Still r

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I never heard of the game, or seen it, but someone said it was woke

      Oops. You said the word that makes me stop reading your opinion. Have a nice day.

  • I have to wonder how much of the negativity towards the game comes from people who's motivations are tangential to the games actual quality. Reviews seem reasonable and people who played the beta seemed to indicate that the game did a few interesting/unique things compared to others in the genre, but the game was suffering massive negativity well before anyone got their hands on the game.

    I think it's a big extra risk for multiplayer games (particularly co-op games).

    With single player games if a certain
  • Go Woke Go Broke!

  • Having someone who insisted on Professor's team to referred to the Professor by that pronoun surely help building the best game in the world?

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