It’s actually pretty crazy just how hard that game flopped. I would have always thought that a company like Sony could’ve just brute-forced such a big project to achieve some success (or at least break even), but 25,000 units sold is almost unheard of for a game as expensive as Concord.
It’s crazy that they released it. They had early access and preorders and those only attracted something like 1,000 players. This is a game that had a $100 million budget. So few players during the early stages should have told the studio to cancel it while it was still in production. Apparently they thought they’d release it and would just jump from 1,000 players to 100,000 overnight with no changes.
might as well release it and see what happens.
I mean - hearing it’s so bad only means that I have to play it now to see what the fuss is about.
100 million budget?
I though it was 200 millions.
$100 million is the reported budget for development. Generally speaking you double that to account for marketing and publishing costs.
(Though in the case of Concord, god only knows what marketing they actually did)
What mystifies me is usually when they do this sort of thing they throw it on Plus and get a mountain of players. Fall guys, and Destruction All Stars spring to mind as examples. I guess the effect isn’t so strong with the new tiered system, but it may have saved them some face.
When the game had a free beta, there was hardly anyone playing it. At some point you’ve just got server costs and promises of live service content rollouts that can only cost you money.
Its pretty tough when they release a game that took so long to develop, that was meant for an era of gaming when live service games were hot. Now that a lot of live service games are flopping due to over-saturation, I think even Sony saw it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to push the game further without either reworking it into something else, or just cutting their losses.
Importantly they tried to enter the market with a $40 purchase price, when the existing competition is mostly free to play.
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A lot of games media has talked on it (to varying degrees). But Concord basically had a bad beta/demo and launched at a time when EVERYONE wanted live games to fail (see: Stop Killing Games Initiative). AND it managed to piss off the gamergaters in the process.
We’ve seen this to a lesser degree in the past with… basically every Battlefield since the WW1 one? Bad demo/beta (mostly because people still haven’t learned to not play Conquest and to instead play Rush) coupled with the CoD/BF fanboy war results in outlets and Gamers actively wanting the game to fail and shitting on it every chance they get. It is just that EA understand that BF is the kind of game that still sells enough to justify keeping Dice around.
battlefields a bit different. battlefield basically nowadays is that the game always launch in a terrible state, and fixes itself a year down the line. battlefield players will play the game regardless and maintains ~6000 user playerbase active
I mean… where do you think the “this has a terrible launch” comes from?
If Influencers like a game, everyone looks past the massive performance and stability issues. If influencers don’t like a game, a single crash is enough to mark it as trash that should be ignored until a couple patches… which is a death sentence for a multiplayer game that requires a critical mass of players to be worth buying.
I totally get disinterest, but I get rubbed the wrong way when people “want games to fail”. I want the world to have more games that are good - and yes, occasionally those would come from publishers we traditionally grumble about.
I had no interest in Concord, but I’m not making video content laughing at its failure. I think that practice is a bit weird sometimes, and even victimizes some of the game devs that didn’t do anything wrong. I would guess at least 80% of Concord’a devs did their job well - just based around a bad concept.
My assumption is they are making sure they get their severance/golden parachute before the mass layoffs begin. But I guess it is still better than “This is a really hard day for me to fire everyone who put their trust in me. I am going to go drown my sorrows in a prostitute that is waiting with blow in my lambo outside” that we usually get.
You are vastly overestimating how good contracts for creative roles in the industry are, especially for a mid-sized studio of under 200 people. But even if that wasn’t the case, the guy isn’t quitting the company, he’s apparently stepping down as creative director and staying on in some other role, according to the article.
Ah. Shame on me for not reading the article. Usually associate the director of a big game as high up enough in the studio that they still get good money.
In that case… this is completely pointless and is just an attempt to avoid needing to figure out the right tone for the “This is the worst day of my life and I am so sad that I just fired a couple dozen people because of my business decisions” linkedin post that is usually associated with the mass layoffs. He isn’t even metaphorically falling on his sword. He is just washing his hands of it.
From the linked article:
“Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it,” said one former developer, who said he felt Ellis had poured a great deal of himself into the game, leading to a ton of stress. “Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development…he’s a good human, and full of heart.”
Sources told Kotaku that Ellis was too emotional to speak at points during a post-launch studio-wide meeting after it had become clear that the game was bombing.
You are conflating CEOs with game directors.
