How did theConcorddisaster even happen? How many ill-advised decisions had to be made for a game like this to see the light of day? How many executives looked at this game and nodded their heads with hubris that this hero shooter would be a success? We’ll never know, but it shouldn’t have happened.
Sony shouldn’t have gotten to a point where it bankrolled a game of this scale, ignored the pleas of its community, and launched it into oblivion,only to shut the studio responsible for it down in a matter of months. Now hundreds of people are out of work and millions of dollars have been thrown into the fire.
Concord Is The Modern Gaming Landscape In A Nutshell
When Concord was first revealed earlier this year, the writing was on the wall. The majority of people watching the debut trailer were charmed by its initial cinematic but turned against it the moment it revealed itself to be yet another hero shooter in a landscape filled with hero shooters. PlayStationhad already cancelled Factions 2and failed to penetrate the world of live service games several times, and this was yet another expensive attempt that, from the perspective of its community, spent resources that could be better used elsewhere.
Firewalk’s ambition to build upon Concord with weekly animated sequences would have only ever worked if it gained a steady audience in the first place, which it didn’t…
No matter the intentions of Firewalk Studios, who, for all intents and purposes, made a pretty solid shooter in Concord, it was never going to get off the ground. Anyone with an ounce of foresight could see that it didn’t stand a chance againstFortnite,Apex Legends, orDestiny. It wasn’t even going to dethroneOverwatch, the game it arguably takes the most inspiration from. Players already have live-service games they dedicate so much of their time to, and it will take something monumental to pull them away and try something new. What they want, as is evidenced by the popularity of recent titles likeAstro Bot, are single player experiences that PlayStation has long been known for.
But when shareholders want constant profits and the highest earners in the industry are also live-service shooters, Sony will walk in that direction whether it’s the right decision or not. Yet failure after failure has to change something, even if theinternal emailannouncing the closure of Firewalk Studios has Herman Hulst once again committing to a future largely defined by live-services.
I bet we will see the multiplayerHorizongame rise and fall along withMarathonfailing to attract an audience before things truly start to change. Concord has to be the start of a new path, or at least the final obstacle before the end of this current one the games industry finds itself on.
Things Need To Change Before They Get Worse
Concord reportedly cost $200 million to develop, and that doesn’t include marketing or any of the additional costs accrued after its disastrous launch. That’s a lot of money, and given that Sony refunded every purchase after shutting the servers down, it is a front-runner for the biggest media flop in history. I know that video games can still fall outside of mainstream discussion sometimes, but this sort of commercial devastation simply can’t be ignored. We must learn the right lessons from it, or we’re doomed to repeat our mistakes.
Just imagine the amount of original teams, projects, and ideas that could be explored with $200 million, and how much more effectively spread such resources might have been if greed wasn’t at the forefront of
Sony’s mind.
Games take a lot longer to make, and when projects like Concord or Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League are put into production, they are often done so with the best intentions. Huge corporations will glimpse a successful live-service title and believe their next game should be just like it, but several years later when it finally arrives, people have moved on.
Boardrooms packed with out-of-touch executives fail to realise that games like Overwatch, Fortnite, and Destiny all naturally accrue their respective reputations, and have spent years earning the trust of its players and developing worlds, gameplay, and mechanics that people care about. You just can’t bottle that phenomenon and recreate it in a lab.
When you do, it all goes wrong, and we’ve seen this again and again and again. There has to be a breaking point as mass layoffs and cancelled projects continue to be regular news. I know that things are likely to get much worse before they get better, but triple-A gaming sits on the precipice of something awful, a point of no return where blockbuster titles both single and multiplayer cost too much, take too long, and fail to offer the neverending returns that corporations expect from them. There has to be a better way, but with the failure of Concord, it’s clear all the big players refuse to acknowledge that.
There has never been a better time to play video games, but as a direct consequence, there has never been a better time to bring the powers in control of this medium to task, because if things don’t change, we are going to fall straight into another crash. Concord needs to be the start of something new, and if it doesn’t, what on earth are we doing here?
Concord
WHERE TO PLAY
Concord is an upcoming FPS from Firewalk Studios, part of the PlayStation Studios family. A PvP multiplayer title, it is slated for launch on both PS5 and PC in 2024.
