^this!

People keep blaming the character design and un-sexy characters or whatever but I never though once, that I like some game because of the sexy nature of the character, but that's just me. Never ocured me before that the Minecraft character, Steve, was sexy or not. (this is somewhat a joke, made to replace a joke about mechs that was perhaps a bit too low)

I never heard about the game before yesterday, when I had a few youtube videos playing on the background and the silly auto-play function was activated. I know nothing about videogame design and much less about marketing but the characters I remeber from the video were a fat girl and the Michelin man mascot. None were ugly enough to the point of not wanting to play the game.

If the game didn't sell, the reason is simply lack of marketing together with the 40 buckaroos as the price.
If the people I know are a exemple to general public, those who play those kind of shooters are young people who rarely pay for games. They don't mind spending a bit on skins though. (Rocket League was a exception, before was made free to play)

Was about to write about politics, so better avoid it since this seems a very touchy subject for GOG...
With that said, not every project that fails, is because politics, because it's "woke", even when the characters are close to the pinnacle of cringiness.

Of course, the main reason was that it was an Overwarch clone nearly a decade too late with 40 bucks entry fee. The biggest shocker is that the game actually managed to release and was not cancelled earlier. Talk about out of touch corpos trying to ride trends.

The character design being some of the most unappealing I've seen in a while was just the cherry on top of the poop cake. But also make no mistake - the reasons for that do stem from the political territory, especially as the development started around 2016, which was the height of it. But as you said, let's not talk about that here.

There really was no saving this.

When a woke propaganda game shuts down and goes bankrupt, that is always a glorious day.

If only every woke propaganda game did likewise, immediately after releasing, then the games industry might stop being trash, and instead it might become actually good again.

Hopefully that day will come soon.

Concord going away is a great step in that direction. What great news!

Wasn't Overwatch also 40 bucks? I mean, 1st game, before they bury it under the great Overwatch 2, that went free to play due the lack of players... Wich itself was a clone of Team fortress 2 (free to play), 10 years too late and somehow was successfull, at least on USA.

I mean, sure, in 10 years many things change and there is a imperial ton of Team Fortress clones out there, wich amusingly all look the same cartoonish style to me, including Valorant (Overwatch and Counter Strike crossover).

[have to cut my post short, have to leave in hurry]

Most people play the same games they friends play, who knows if the game would sell a lot if they had a few more millions to get Keanu Reaves on stage...

It was, but back then, there was still space for such a game. And then we also come to why it became popular - and one of the big reasons was the character designs. In fact, the characters are pretty much the main reason it maintains relevance even a decade later but a hint - it's not because of what the characters do in the game, but in.... well, different places. Numbers 3, 4 and a letter R might be involved :P

It's funny that people brought up the planes, because anytime I wanted to Google something about the game, it would show me results for something completely different. But yeah, it's a brutal situation and I hope that Sony scraps the other live service games they have in production and just focus on single-player games again. It's what they are best at, anyways.

I on the other hand are heavily influenced by aesthetics. How much depends on the type of game obviously but those hero shooter / MOBA style games are all about letting you live out certain power fantasies. You want to be that sneaky ninja, that bad ass gunslinger, that sexy chick that can jump back in time. If you have enough characters it is OK if not all of them are appealing but at least the majority should be.

Concerning the price point: obviously Concord should have been F2P but let's not forget that their free open beta wasn't well populated either. And if they relaunch their game as F2P without heavily altering their design philosophy it won't do much better.

The stills really don't do the characters justice. I just watched the reveal trailer, the design looks much more sensible to me in motion. Nothing to write home about really, but then again, the character design of the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy wasn't anything to write home about, and that shit made billions. I've seen some Star Trek and Mass Effect designs which were decidedly worse. Shit, even Overwatch had rather underwhelming character design before they finally found the diversity button.

Concord has passable character design and that's an artist's statement.

Overwatch on the other hand has some great character design. The hip kids are playing Overwatch, they crush on these characters and "ship" certain relationships, and that's what they're going to do probably for generations to come. Concord never had more than an off chance to scratch Overwatch's throne. I hope I don't need to empasize that by the theories of the w word tossers, Overwatch should have 'gone broke' about seven years ago.

Firewalk's demise is a tragedy in terms of competition in the market. It means that more AAA companies will cling to stale old formulas and refuse to take risks, it means a stronger pull towards the monopoly, it means that the top dog can raise prices and reduce quality at will, it means more F2P and PTW bullshit. Why anyone would cheer Concord's failure is beyond me.

Yeah, and if you go back in time even more, originally Team Fortress 2 also cost money, I almost bought it too (I don't recall though if it could be bought separately or only as part of some "Orange Box" that included probably Half-life 2 and/or Portal too...).

Anyway, fortunately I was too lazy to buy it and kept playing its predecessor, Team Fortress Classic, until one day TF2 was also re-released free-to-play. Then it was a good time for me to try it out. :)

It is interesting to think I still find that one game interesting to play. Basically I am playing the same maps over and over again, honing my skills against other players and occasionally even learning new tricks that I haven't seen others do, and have no desire to move to some other game like Overwatch 2 or Fortnite (tried them, meh...).

Paying 40€ for a new similar(?) online shooter? Umm, no. I guess that is one of the main problems online shooters and other online games have to deal with: how to get people to jump ship from the older online game to the newer game? If it is just some new Call of Duty or Overwatch 2 or similar, then I guess you can kill the earlier game and force people to migrate to the newer one, but this game didn't even have that luxury so it would have had to somehow convince online shooter gamers to migrate to their game, and even pay for it.

It would make lots of sense if they released it free-to-play. Then I don't necessarily mind trying it out, similarly as I tried Fortnite, Counterstrike 2 and Overwatch 2.
I might lightly "cheer" on it in a sense that maybe it makes more companies concentrate on single-player games. A bit like Warner earlier made lots of money with the Hogwart's Legacy single-player game, and then didn't with their next online multiplayer game (Kill Squad or whatitsname). Or, Baldur's Gate 3 being single-player only and still being very successful, and why not even Cyberpunk even with its initial launch problems.

Yes you can make lots of money with online games if you strike gold and become popular, but it can be much harder to convince people to pay for your online game (either upfront of through microtransactions) than it is with single-player games because online games tend to be so time and effort-consuming that people tend to concentrate on one or few online games at a time for a long time, and would need to abandon that to start playing the new game.

Single player games at least tend to end at some point, after which people are ready to buy and try out other single-player games. Or like me, I've bought masses of single-player games in advance, without knowing when exactly I will actually play them (if ever). I'd never do that with multiplayer online games, I'd buy them only when I am sure I will start playing them right there.

Woke games bad!

In other news: Woke games good!

Almost as if it has very little to do with a game's popularity...

...and this is all pretending the word is a well-defined, universally accepted term, that has any meaning whatsoever.

I don't even know what you cool kids stand for these days. Today it might be "This computer game character doesn't look like a blonde pronstar! This game is woke! Go broke, I will cancel you!", tomorrow it's "Representation doesn't matter! I don't care about the ethnicity or gender of the protagonist!" and the day after "Not gonna play a video game because the main protagonist is black and female!".

Makes your head spin, no? Have some consistency please.

Let's hope other companies learn with this historical failure.
Possibly we will still see similar situations in the next 2 ~ 4 years because many games are in-dev since 2019 ~ 2022 with the same premises of Concord. So we will probably only see real deep changes in the market close to the next decade. (2028 ~ 2030).

lol @ all the people who think woke is causing these games to fail... similar to the ones thinking anti-Denuvo 'non-buyers' are numerous enough to cause games to fail.

They needed to say NO to Spirits on the first go and say he needed to make a movie based on FF6 or 4. That would have guaranteed the audience needed but when someone is that successful they never say no.
I am GLAD the merger with Enix was delayed. As an RPG lover it was the WORST merger in console history in my opinion. Activision Blizzard types can bitch all they want, at least they got Overwatch as a new IP after the merger...meanwhile WTF did EnixSquare release that felt like Enix after the merger and was a new IP?!
Enix volunteered to be the sub when SQUARE should have been it. If Enix had been in charge we would not have seen as many massive screw up's from this company in my opinion.

Think about it in superhero movie terms. The thing with superhero movies is, they're extremely formulaic. Once you've seen one, you've basically seen them all. We have enough of them to last us two lifetimes. But when one really bombs, nobody says: "maybe we should make more original movies without superheroes". They'll just go on making superhero movies. Same thing with multiplayer – or games without closure. No developer thinks that these things could actually be what's wrong with their games.

Depends, but if this mass rejection of BS can be kept up on the consumer side, it could even be a year or two sooner. Course can be changed for stuff in early-mid stages of development. Although big corpos are fabled for how slow they adjust for... well, anything.