Update: players are now throwing themselves off cliffs to grind xp for the platinum trophy https://x.com/realradec/status/1831041419756388429
This is probably a new record
I feel like short of making it free to play and having a complete art style rework this game doesn’t have great hopes of ever being relevant. I mean from what I’ve gathered the gameplay itself is decent to good. But yeah they just misfired so hard with this.
Despite it all, I feel bad for the majority of devs who spent so much of their life working on this and who are likely going to be out of a job. Of course I don’t know anything about the inner workings, but I’d be willing to bet it’s not most of their fault’s that sony had been pushing so hard for live service stuff under their former leadership
I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.
If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?
At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.
I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.
This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.
As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.
The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.
Just read the article, id hardly call that a “meltdown” lol. Sure, it was unprofessional, but it wasn’t a rant. This article feels like it’s trying to spin a narrative that doesn’t exist.
The post in question.
eh, i don’t really care. it was a huge labour of love from a lot of insanely talented people making an awesome game. why would i care about a bunch of talentless freaks hating on it? i’m sure having fun playing it, and i wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Note that this is the only post they’re talking about. It wasn’t like a drawn out thread with name calling.
Again, not saying it’s professional, but calling this a meltdown? Come on now… Y’all are being ridiculous. This is like the tamest fucking tweet.
Don’t feel bad for them. Firewalk Studios may only have Concord to it’s name, but the Devs are all from Bungie and Activision. That should already ring some alarm bells.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They are the ones that sold the idea of Concord to Sony. For once I doubt Sony had to push for any of the bad decisions.
They didn’t waste $100 mill+ and 8 years development time on a random passion project. This was designed for a single reason, to make money in ridiculous amounts. To squeeze every penny out of kids and their parents.
I can’t feel bad for anyone that worked on something like that when it fails.
I think that’s common in gaming development. You work on a project until it’s done, then pivot to another or get let go.
The game bombing likely doesn’t help but I expect most devs involved expected this. Apparently development ran 3-4 years, which is a good time to leave a job in tech generally, if not earlier if you want to maximize income.
I heard the project had been in production for 10 years and in development for 8
It is astonishing that the leads on this game didn’t take any notes on the successful parts of other team shooters released during that timeframe.
I think they did. As people keep saying the gameplay was fun. It’s everything else that doesn’t work.
This would be a perfect spot to advertise that EU petition. There must’ve been at least 1 person who liked the game and now can’t play anymore.
They get a refund and it has been only 2 weeks out. The situation is vastly different from the EU petition that is going on.
