An important update on Concord - Being taken offline September 6th, refunds to be issued

Shutdown within two weeks of release.

Never broke 1000 concurrent users on steam.

Estimated $100 million budget.

oof.

I don't think I even heard about it until now. 😂
What went wrong?
- This video does a good job explaining it. TL;DW Its an overwatch clone that came out about 6 years too late, looks generic af and can hardly compete with the free and interesting games already available
- yes
I read something along of 200 million? And 8 years of development? Not even sold 25.000 times?

If it wasn't for hundreds of people likely losing their jobs it would be really funny that Sony's greedy, cynical attempts to cash in on the live service fad keep failing

It’s probably not even the artists fault it turned out this shit. My gut feeling is that the game is victim of incompetent leadership. Indecisiveness on important matters and micro management on stupid things.
It’s also the same incompetent leadership who will get bonuses and promotions after this.
- Was it shit?
I want to paint easy villains into the world as much as anyone, but I didn’t see anything especially “evil” about Concord; just poorly planned and uninteresting. It’s more of a tragic failure of incompetence than anyone being greedy or hurtful.
- I don't think the parent comment was trying to say that it's particularly evil. They rather meant "greedy" in the sense that these companies get a bit too excited about money.
  Basically, live service games are pretty expensive to make and generally result in an incomplete/worse experience at launch. But if they're successful and gain enough of a player base, then they pay for themselves manyfold.
  That's why these companies keep on gambling, by building live service games, rather than two or three smaller games from the same budget.
Do they lose their jobs?
They delivered the product, they got paid for their work.
I can't imagine hundreds of people still working on the game beyond release. They'll probably move on to different projects.
- A failure this monumental will almost certainly result in Sony taking the entire studio out back and shooting it, just to placate investors.
  Edit: For context, Sony owns Firewalk - the studio - outright, they're not just the publisher.
- Most big game corps just shutter studios, usually letting them know via the grapevine after a board meeting or twitter post...

So to recap:

200 million dollars
8 years of development
Sony shuts down all of their Japanese studios and redirects their efforts into developing "cinematic" experiences to appeal to western gamers
Sony liquidates countless other studios in the pursuit of funding this game
Sony buys Bungie to aid in developing this game
Sony thinks this is going to be a huge success rivaling COD and Fortnite, so they fund an entire multimillion dollar CGI-animated episode to be aired in Amazon's Secret Level anthology series
Shuts down in 10 days
Sony refunds everyone

Man, Sony is taking L's like a motherfucker.

Sony shuts down all of their Japanese studios and redirects their efforts into developing “cinematic” experiences to appeal to western gamers
They shut down Japan Studio, that's a name, they still have studios in Japan.
200 million sounds like a lot, but it's like 2 weeks of PSPlus money.
For all this losing, they're sure making a lot of money. Just not out of this game.
And that money ain't gone yet, there's for sure a pivot towards a F2P, MTX ridden version of the game to be relaunched.
The problem is that gamers say they don't like that sort of thing, while the success of the likes of Fortnite indicates that there's a lot of gamers out there saying nothing, but buying V-bucks like a motherfucker.

The game was alive for about 1.5 days for each year of development that they put into Concord.

Let's acknowledge for a second that well over 100 developers are about to lose their livelihoods. Now let's acknowledge that they were building a product from the start that disrespects consumer rights and preservation of the medium, and I'm still glad it failed.

Chose a publisher as your leader in business? Well we know how that goes.
Those artists and programmers had about six years to find different jobs in the industry, I have zero sympathy for the ones that stuck around and did not see the writing on the wall.

Will the industry learn any lesson from this?

(no)

"Let's all laugh at an industry / that never learns anything, tee-hee-hee."
--Yahtzee Croshaw
"Clearly, the game would have worked if the characters would have looked like monkeys!"
- I dunno, I might buy a reboot of DK64's versus mode.
- Wait, are they still making beyond good and evil 2?

"Refunds for PlayStation Store and PlayStation Direct purchases may take 30-60 days to appear on your bank statement"

Why do companies do this? They can process millions of dollars of incoming payments instantly, but take up to 2 months to reverse? Give me a break.

Bank transfers are slow. It is generally taken out of the account the next business day, sits in escrow for a few days, then appears in the destination account where it takes another day to clear. About a week total.
Though, if it gets held for suspected fraud or needs to cross international boundaries, it can sit in that escrow account for much longer.
- In the EU we use SEPA and transfers are instantaneous. Used it when buying something of our local ebay when at the person's house. Also most banks even have Venmo style payment systems.. scan qr of your bank, click on my banks icon, authorize, done.
  Companies sit on cash simply for cashflow reasons. Keeping the money in your account for an additional x days means it can be used for other stuff.
- Sounds like I should start holding my payments in escrow, just in case the publisher decides to shut down their game less than 2 weeks after taking my money. Got it!
The company I work for does B2B and clients do the same shit. 45-90 day pay cycle after invoicing. That shit kills smaller businesses.
Your card is charged instantly, but it can take a week or two before it's cleared the fed's anti-fraud measures and they're assured you're not reversing it through your bank. Then they send the refund and it can take another week or two before your bank clears it and makes sure that they're not reversing their payment. Add in some wiggle room to cover yourself in case something gets flagged as potentially fraudulent and someone has to manually review it, and it can take a while.
In practice, refunds should arrive this week, but they want to be careful not to promise that in every case. What they're mainly worried about is people buying the game, immediately refunding it, and simultaneously doing a chargeback while in some faraway country.

Remember when Sony laid off a ton of Bungie employees? Talk about a series of bad decisions.

At least they're giving refunds.

Just saw a Bungie job listing on LinkedIn too. Make it make sense. I did apply though
- They want to pay less than they were to whoever was in that spot before.
  That or it's one of the essential positions they didn't want to downsize but the previous person left for other reasons.

I wonder why they didn't make it free-to-play and try to cash in on microtransactions

That's presumably why it's going offline and everyone getting refunds
- With all the negative press, I doubt they would try that. Even if it goes free, people will recognise the name and wouldn't bother trying it.
It's a non zero amount of work, and there's every chance they spend more money making that change than they would bring in.

Haha holy shit that was fast. Stop shoving live service down your customers fucking throats maybe, sony?

Don't worry, they'll try again with the next "game"

It looked like every other generic hero shooter on the market. They were late about 6 years or so.

Every other generic hero shooter but not free
With an even more generic art direction.
- And PSN requirement for PC gamers.
I can't even name another apart from Overwatch.
Unless you're counting each hero as "soldier with a slightly different machine gun".
- Apex Legends
  Team Fortress 2
  Paladins
  Dirty Bomb
  Battleborn
  Gigantic
  Monday Night Combat
  Deceive Inc.
  to name few

Wow, I expected they'll go straight to free-to-play but I guess the game has such a bad reputation that they decided to take it down completely. Refunds being issued is awfully nice though.

Yeah, ain't no monetizing scheme is gonna save this one. There's just too much bad rep.
- There's just too much bad rep.
  On the one hand, that's not a bet I'd take since No Man's Sky exists.
  On the other hand, NMS is definitely the exception, not the rule.
- Yeah, ain't no monetizing scheme is gonna save this one.
  This is the key marketing fail. They released an OW clone, and then failed to highlight the differences. I might have thrown $40 at it, if I’d known that there wasn’t going to be a battlepass or something equally asinine to come with that price tag.
  I played through their free weekend beta some time in July and didn’t hate it, but it was clunky and the designs were uglier than OW. That said, I had expected them to clean it up before release; anything except let it stand with its overarching veneer of greyige+olive green over every character.
  I think they just released it to say it was released and be able to do the write-offs. Otherwise, any game that had been in development this long would have seen a huge marketing campaign that highlighted why players should abandon OW, et al for Concord instead.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.

I didn't realize that there was a physical release for this game. I just bought myself a copy to keep sealed in my collection.

May I ask why? Genuinly curious.
- I'm a collector, and this is a game that may have a high value in the future due to being rare. If it was literally only available for 2 weeks and they pulled all the remaining copies and refunded people, there's not going to be many, and I will have a sealed copy. Of course, it's possible that they may re-release it in the future if they decide it's worth the money to tweak it, but I honestly kind of doubt it. You may be wondering why it matters if it literally can't be played and who would want it, and that's absolutely a fair question, but in the end, the answer is collectors.
It's tempting lol

Remove from sale. Add more monetisation features. Rerelease as F2P. Cross fingers and hope for best.

The Multiversus approach!

Really looks like this game was designed by incompetent suits and marketing teams with the primary goal of turning those millions into more money. The game looked good and didn't seem to play (totally) awfully either. It just doesn't stand out or make anybody want to play it, like at all. It really is a another one of those AAA unfinished style over substance tech demos that masquerade as a game that got released into really saturated market at a really bad time, where the competition is usually also free.

Also something, something big capital overtaking creative process is one of the great disasters of our time.

Could have been a cool single player game

Could have been a cool split screen and LAN game.
- People can barely find anyone to play with globally over the internet. It wouldn't work as a lan game.
That’s what I thought it was going to be from the initial trailer, but then seeing it was yet another hero shooter made me lose all interest.

The age of DRM means that they can now "unlaunch" the game and force you into a reimbursement while giving up the game. Why? What if someone liked it and wanted to keep playing? is this an online only game? This is just sad.

edit: this is a good time to remind people, if you live in the EU, please support the "Stop Killing Games" initiative, it has just past a third of the required signatures, and has 10 months to go still:

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

It is an online-only game.
- So ? We use to have dedicated servers for online only game. There is no technological barrier to continue doing that.
Done!
Don't worry. The only people that like the game are the devs and I'm sure they have been playing it for a long time.

Game Preservationists When a Game Sucks:

"Good I'm glad it's gone."

Eh, there is no such thing as preserving a live service game. Lots of OW1 copies on disc that are coasters now
One of these days, it's going to teach them to stop making games designed to destroy themselves. Preservation needs to be good for business, and the lack of it needs to be bad for business.
If Concord doesn't see a F2P re-release, it will DEFINITELY be some highly-sought cultural relic in the future
- it should have been a fp2

Oof. Pivoting to free to play then, or at least a PSPlus relaunch.

Like it's namesake it was quick and ended in a big crash.

Concorde ran for 34 years, with only a single accident.
This lasted less than a bunch of Concord grapes. Maybe only the British resolve at the Battle of Concord would be less.

Get fucked

Jesus christ

Can't help but wonder if this would have been a hit if it was F2P rather?

With the amount of marketing it received, I think people would still stick to Valorent or Overwatch 2. I only see videos and posts about Concord being a flop, than promoting it.

Kekw

I can never tell if it’s new gen z word or a spasm of some sort
- Kekw is deeper internet slang than most people are willing to discover. Kek is like a giggle or snort, not a full laugh but a chuckle. The w modifier means this is a win for them, so kekw is a chuckle about a good situation. If you want more info you can ask someone on 4chan, they are super helpful and nice to new members of the community.
- ?