PlayStation’s Concord, a game reportedly in the works for eight years trying to break into the hero shooter market, has launched with sub-700 concurrent players on Steam
Its an enormously overproduced Overwatch clone with zany characters that seem to be going for Guardians of the Galaxy, an art style that is basically just bizarre, and gameplay from a decade ago.
Sony wanted their own Overwatch, after seeing its success, then spent a huge amount of time and money developing it, and this is what they came up with.
Oh, right, it isn't free to play, costs 40 bucks, and then also has an astounding amount of microtransactions.
EDIT: Based off of current active player count, Concord has cost approximately $200,000 dollars per active player to produce.
Better hope they are all omega class hyper whale spenders, I guess.
I just watched the trailer because I wanted to understand your comment. I definitely see the zaniness and Guardians of the Galaxy vibes. I always thought Overwatch was bizarre (but that's just me) but this is clearly more.
However, as someone that doesn't play shooters, could you develop more on what defines a gameplay from a decade ago? I wonder what can change that much in that kind of game.
It’s a new game in which you play two folk musicians from New Zealand. You start off in a small NY apartment trying to get gigs and establish a relationship with an official at the local New Zealand consulate who later becomes your band manager.
It cost $4-billion dollars to develop, utilizes the F-14 Tomcat game engine from GameBoy Advance, and is expected to generate tens of dollars of revenue for Sony Corp.
Yeah, hadn't heard about it until today either. But Steam also kind of torpedoed their launch by lifting their NDA for Deadlock on the same day. Not sure how similar they are, but that'll grab most of the attention from gamers right now.
Both have heroes and are shooters, but the similarities end here, but you're overall right. From what I've seen of concord, it's just valorant with a mediocre twist, whereas deadlock has been my go-to game for the last week.
The marketing has been appalling. They've mainly focussed their intentions on PS5, but why release a game on a platform but not advertise it for that platform?
Maybe word-of-mouth about the game and some discounts might improve things over the coming months, but Sony have made a bit of a mess with the PC side of this.
This is one of the problems of growing up in a different age. This was advertised, but are you any of the places they promoted it? It was the main game in a state of play, they bought ad space on steam, and I assume it was advertised elsewhere where I wouldn't have seen it. But not everybody is watching TV anymore, and we are on Lemmy. Probably not the best place to judge what's being advertised to the masses lol.
I watch plenty of streamers (about half of which play shooters), my primary gaming platform is Steam, and I do watch a small amount of TV, where other games have been advertised during this time. If they used those platforms for advertising, they didn't do it well. You got me on the State of Play tho
they showed it off at the May 30th state of play, and thats about it for advertising. if you were a pc player and didnt watch sonys presentation, you likely would have never known
I only ever saw one ad for the game, on my PlayStation, the day before it came out and even then I couldn't tell what it was. Is this a game? A movie? A TV show? The trailer fucking sucked at actually advertising what it was. No gameplay, no mention that it even was a game. It just seemed like a scene from an animated show for tweens.
I was watching a livestream of this game's reveal trailer. The chat was excited at first during the cinematic trailer. Sure, it looked like a Malt-O-Meal Guardians of the Galaxy, but it still looked like it could be fun. Then as soon as they said "5 v 5 live service game" there was a giant, collective "oh nevermind lol" from the chat.
From what i saw from the game it just looked super bland and boring. No one looked interesting at all, it didn't pop, if someone told me it was a passion project from a 3 man dev team i would've totally believed it.
There are too many games of this sort. Nobody wants to play them because you have to devote your life to grinding and getting good if you want to be play well.
We need some new ideas and you don't need to bet the company on every game. Instead of pouring millions of dollars into a clone of existing games, develop several smaller more innovative games and see which ones succeed. For every Concord there is a Stardew Valley, Vampire Survivors, or Among Us.
I don't know why they keep insisting on live service with an upfront cost. The only way these games are successful is by having a fuckton of teenagers with no money to fill the lobbies and make it feel lively and worthwhile. The minute you add an initial cost, there's just not enough of a player base to support a game with microtransactions.
I'm not a business genius, but they don't have to learn from me. There is the very clear precedent of Kill the justice league that they're choosing to ignore!
As expected. The fact that this game wasn't marketed well or even that it is a hero shooter are not its only problems. Game has other issues and that's why people don't play it.
Sony's executives thought it was a great idea to buy this studio when they first saw the game as it was reported last year. I don't know if the character designs were mandated to be this way because Sony executives demanded it, or if the devs designed them the way they are. Did they want to chase the blue hair vocal minority on xitter that complain about games not being diverse enough, then don't buy the games with these incredibly diverse, brave and quirky character designs anyway? On top of that a $40 price tag is enough to make a dead on arrival game among other issues like a forced PSN account and no Steam Deck support.
Yeah, the "diversity" (aliens and shit, really? You want to tell me they're targeting the "diversity" crowd with non-humans?) is not the reason for this failing. It's a generic $40 live-service game. That market is far too over saturated. Plenty of people like and buy games with diversity, although they have to be good games first and foremost. It's just a way to help your game appeal to a larger audience, but it has to appeal to anyone first. This doesn't.
I just don't understand the insistence on targeting the woke demographic instead of core gamers. They've repeatedly shown that they are masters in the complaining department, but when it comes to buying diversity-infused games, they are a no-show.