When the game came out back in 2024 it barely surpassed 1000 players on steam, eventually the servers were shut down a fortnight after it was released: so the game didn’t even last that long. Development costs were not cheap either, since Sony invested $400,000,000 into the project for it to fall apart upon release, talk about a waste of investors money. Have you played it at the time? If so, what made it a shit game that’s forgotten?
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The fact that it was $40 in a sea of a bunch of other similar games that were free to play was most likely the biggest culprit.
I didn’t play the game when it was available, but it seems a lot of people who did just didn’t enjoy it either.
It was a hero shooter with a boring roster of heroes and unremarkable shooting. Can’t get much worse than that.
Because it was a soulless designed by committee game. It somehow managed to put out some of the most boring and dead designs in a game of its type.
It was a live service game at launch so it expected people to put in time to progress and grind but any of the rewards for that grind was just eh.
So people saw it for what it was and just didn’t bother with it.
It’s not that hard to understand, really.
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it’s yet another hero in an ocean of hero shooters, with pretty much no unique points.
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the gameplay Is pretty much a worse Overwatch, with half the skills ripped directly from Destiny.
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it’s a worse Overwatch, except Overwatch is free and concord was 40 bucks
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the character design was crap. Half of them are basically shapeless blobs that look the same with a badly done colour swap. And the aesthetic was all over the place.
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The advertising campaign was terrible. It took 8 years to make, but they kept quiet pretty much till 6 weeks before release.
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a shitload of money went into full mocap videos to form some sort of “Concord Universe”, but it wasn’t actually interesting at all, because nobody knew shit about Concord. That sort of thing should be a second step, not a first step.
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small side note, but look up the terrible character sign combining so absolutely horribly with the mocop videos. It’s amazing how nobody realized these blobs don’t animate well.
So, it cost more, did less, was extremely derivative and had pretty much nothing going for it. It was bland and mediocre, but came with 400 million dollars of expectations.
Out of all these points, the key one is that it was $40 in a genre where the median price for entry is $0. That really deserves to be front and centre above everything else.
Everything you’ve said is completely accurate, and describes why Concorde failed, but the key to why it failed as hard as it did is the decision to slap a price tag on it.
To get away with being a $40 game in a free-to-play genre, they would have to have something so compellingly unique that it could not only stand out in the crowd, but stand head and shoulders above it.
Concorde was still destined to fail even without that decision, because, as you said, there was nothing unique about it. Forgettable, boring characters battling for unclear stakes in generic arenas with generic powers. No differentiation at all. But released as a free to play game it might at least have gone maybe a year before it collapsed.
But the sheer arrogance of taking this boring, also-ran, generic hero shooter clone and deciding that it was so special that it deserved a $40 price tag… That’s what turned Concorde into the greatest failure in the history of video games.
I don’t think free to play would have made any real difference to Concord (highguard says hi).
At the time of announcement, I was in a discord call, and I would say 9 or 10 people were interested at the cinematic trailer, when they had missed it being a multiplayer game, and they assumed it was a action RPG/ space opera.
Everyone who had any inclination of excitement, lost it immediately at the gameplay trailer.
They honestly didn’t care for another multiplayer game, especially with Marvel Rivals having been played and looking better around then as well.
My point is not that free to play would have saved it. I was pretty clear about that. But the scale of Concord’s failure is absolutely staggering even when compared to other high profile failures. Highguard peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Concord’s peak? 697. That is literally more than two orders of magnitude less.
So yes, even though Highguard ultimately failed, there’s an argument to be made that with some continued investment it might have found a core player base and built that into some kind of ongoing source of revenue. Would it have made back its development costs? Probably not, but there’s a chance. But Concord’s failure is in a whole different league. It didn’t just fail, it smashed into a brick wall at 200mph. And that was only possible because of the sheer arrogance of slapping a price tag on it.
Alternative theory: launching a free to play game in any genre these days may as well be buying an extremely expensive lottery ticket. The top 10 charts in player numbers, not just on Steam but on any platform, are entrenched games that have been out for 10+ years and perhaps Valorant. It takes a lot of players to financially sustain a free to play game, and without the price tag, they would have only burned through money faster. When the game was free pre-release, it had already proven that there was no interest in the game. 2XKO was one of the most popular fighting games out there by player numbers, but for what it needed to make that make financial sense, it was nowhere close. Highguard was free to play and had a tremendous amount of players at launch, but it barely lasted longer than Concord.
I didn’t say free to play would have saved it. It was destined for failure either way. I said that it failed as hard as it did because they decided to charge for it.
It was a total loss on their books either way, so it sure looks like free to play would have failed exactly as hard.
From a business point of view, sure. But that was never my point.
it’s yet another hero in an ocean of hero shooters, with pretty much no unique points.
That’s not really a reason to fail. Other genres have similar games in a crowded competition and still sell well, even if they are not very special different. And I even argue that there are not many hero shooters in the style and gameplay of Ovewatch. So I / we are in dire need of more alternatives. Compare this to other genres, where vast amount of different games are available. There are many reasons why Concord failed, one of them being ugly characters in example. Also it depends who makes those games. Nobody asked Sony to do this, as every Sony fan was expecting single player games. Having “too many” hero shooters in the type of Overwatch is not the reason the game failed (there aren’t many).
Other genres have similar games in a crowded competition and still sell well, even if they are not very special different.
Other genres are different. These always-online pvp games have massive player buy-in. For something like Call of Duty, or StarCraft, there comes a point where most players will be mostly done with the game and are looking for something new. These games are constantly updating, releasing new content, and work incredibly hard to keep players locked in.
So, if you want to take market share in the newest soccer game, all you need to do is gather up the available players with something new, because they’re already looking. To get market share in this genre, you need to actively pry players away from their current game.
So even if you’re a bit better, you still need to beat the attachment players have to the other game, where they have a hundred levels, 62 special skins and 300 achievements. If your game is just as good, but people have no attachment, you’re going to lose.
And Concord was not remotely as good.
It’s a perfectly valid reason to fail, and that’s because Concord was an always-online multiplayer PvP title. Games in that genre are kept alive by the players. If they can’t maintain a critical mass of players to maintain the multiplayer playerbase, the game dies.
Concord entered a saturated market with nothing special to offer. Just being a good game today isn’t enough. You need something special to attract players from other games; their “home” games, where they have experience, friends, competitive ranks and prestige, and probably spent money on cosmetics. If you don’t have that something to raise interest, and then maintain a healthy playerbase, your multiplayer PvP game will not survive. Highguard at least had “we made Titanfall (allegedly)” to hype itself and it still ate shit once players realized they’d been handed a lemon. Compared to that, Concord has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and players had no reason to even consider it.
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No advertising of note, no one to goon over. Every character was kinda ugly.
It seems like they deliberately made characters that nobody would ever make porn of and it never occurred to them that bland, boring characters would be a problem.
I’m 100% sure that rule 34 of Overwatch has probably brought a solid 10% of its playerbase in. Gooners are not to be underestimated.
My pet theory on why Betamax and HD-DVD failed is in small part because porn was more difficult to put on them compared to VHS and Bluray respectively.
I’d seen more gifs of Widowmaker’s arse long before playing the game. I wasn’t even searching for it, at first.
Except porn had chosen hddvd (or Sony blocked their use of blueray). Their streak of picking the winner ended there. But most of that was being watched online by then anyway.
Despite the downvotes, this is also a reason. I don’t play the games but i recognise the blue themed chick with the pink lines on her face. Or the one with lots of orange. Or the other one with lots of purple.
I remember a while ago, they changed the butt on one of the characters and it was an active controversy in gaming social media for a time.
It was the orange one and it was a pose change, apparently, not a model change, and it was over a decade ago 😕
Why do I remember this and not the countless things I have forgotten since then? IDK. People have strong feelings about butts.
Yes that orange one lol I think i remember seeing that controversy around, or maybe it was a different one…
All I know about it, is it didn’t offer anything new or anything that other established games didn’t already do better
