What caused the spectacular flop of Sony’s big-budget hero shooter ‘Concorde’? | Games

aShortly after posting Pushing Buttons last week, big gaming news broke: Sony was pulling the plug on hero shooter Concord just two weeks after launch, citing reasons that no one was playing it. Refunds were being offered to everyone who purchased it on PlayStation 5 and PC, leaving the game’s future uncertain.

It’s a brutal series of events. Sony acquired Firewalk Studios, the makers of Concorde, in 2023. Concorde was an expensive game that was in development for eight years, with a custom cinematic and a long-term plan that cost over $100 million to develop. Estimates suggest that fewer than 25,000 copies were sold in the first two weeks of release. This is shocking compared to other bad news for developers and studios this year.

Many It is written The question remains as to why Concorde was such a huge flop. As Keith Stewart pointed out in his review of the game, it entered a crowded genre of hero shooters, where many players already had favorites (Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, etc.). Sony’s marketing for the game also seemed to flop, with very few people knowing about Concorde before it came out (I almost didn’t, but it’s my job to know about these things). Criticism was also leveled at the characters and design, which were generic and lacked any particularly interesting gameplay ideas.

Concord’s failure is emblematic of an existential problem in modern game development: Games are expensive and take so long to make that moment they can be missed years before a game is released. This makes publishers risk-averse, but simply trying to recreate something popular means it will be outdated by the time it’s finished.

Concord isn’t the first high-profile multiplayer flop of the year. Warner Bros.’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League also disappointed publishers with poor sales and disappointed players by shoehorning a potentially fun game into a live-service multiplayer model. Sega’s Foamstars went completely unnoticed. And let’s not forget Sega’s live-service shooter Hyenas. Cancelled This was just a few months before the scheduled release.

My sense is that people just don’t have time to play games that last forever anymore. Destiny, one of the first of the current generation of permanent live-service games aimed at keeping players playing for years, celebrated its 10th anniversary this week. The game has become part of the lives and habits of millions of people. Overwatch, Fortnite, and even the decades-old World of Warcraft dominate in their genres. What will it take to get these players to abandon the game for a new one or add a new one to their spare time? And with these types of games, people aren’t just abandoning the game, they’re abandoning their friends.

The proliferation of live service games reminds me of the time in the 2000s when nearly every publisher was trying to make a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. Every day we got a press release saying someone had secured millions of dollars in funding for a new Warcraft killer. Some of the resulting games were good (Guild Wars, to name one), but most were only moderately successful at best. Online games are Success isn’t easy. It never was.

It’s surprising that this game is coming out so soon after the sales surge of Black Myth: Wukong, a single-player only game. As I wrote last week, many factors contributed to Wukong’s success, but still, there is a huge demand for this game, and by extension, single-player games in general. Personally, I don’t want a game that takes years to play. I want a game that wants to say something, to convey an experience, and that eventually ends. Games where the artistry is reflected in the game. in front That business model.

This is partly a matter of preference. There’s clearly a huge market for live-service multiplayer games; it’s just that most people are already playing them. There’s no way there’s an untapped market for millions of players who crave hero shooters and battle royale games but haven’t yet found the right fit. It’s time for publishers to try something new instead.

What to Play

My family is still crazy about Astro Bot. My youngest son wakes me up every morning telling me about his favorite power-up (his favorite is the “Frog Punch”). But I wanted a break, so I took a long train ride recently. Bakel It’s a Japanese-style action platform game in the vein of the forgotten 1990s series Ganbare Goemon, which means absolutely nothing to 98% of people – it means defeating beautifully animated enemies. Yokai Use your drumstick to run through a world of manga-style depictions of Japanese towns and landscapes.

The difficulty level is clearly geared towards kids, so I barely had any trouble playing through the first few levels, but it’s still a welcome time-warp platformer that reminded me of the screenshots of similar Japanese games I used to pore over in Nintendo magazines back in the ’90s.

Available: PC, Nintendo Switch
Estimated play time: 10 hr

What to Read

• In more positive news for Sony, the long-awaited PS5 Pro It’s finally been announced, and for an extra £200 on top of the current system price you get an enhanced tech spec, a 2TB solid-state drive and more.

• As mentioned above, Bungie’s space opera shooter destiny It turns 10 this week, and as Christian Donlan writes in his anniversary essay, the game is about everytime There’s something to be said for this, and it’s not just one of the first ever-lasting games, it’s an ever-lasting conversation.

• The Mystery of Rubber Keysa new film about the development of ZX Spectrumwill be released early next month.

What to click on

Question Block

leader Maisie Question of the week:

After years of enjoying gaming on the Switch, I decided to broaden my horizons and bought a PS4 and a gaming laptop. The PS4 is great, but I’m having trouble getting Steam games to start. Working at a desk is different than lounging on the couch next to your husband. Do you have any tips for making PC gaming more fun and less like work?

I feel the exact same way about PC gaming. I hate sitting at a desk playing games. As a teenager I would play endless hours of Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims, and Age of Empires II after school, but now I sit at a desk all day. Not only is it the last thing I want to do after work, it’s also bad for my health. But I’ve been playing a lot of PC games lately, because I can play most games with a Bluetooth-enabled controller by connecting it to my TV with an HDMI cable.
PS4 Controller You can use any Xbox controller. I Xbox One Pad I use it for PC gaming now, but for many years I used an old, cheap, second-hand wired Xbox 360 one. Steam Deck It’s a game changer, so I highly recommend saving up and buying one.

For PC-exclusive games, that might seem like a worthwhile investment — almost all games are cross-platform these days — but… Baldur’s Gate 3 It really is great to play on PC, and if playing on PC doesn’t make you a fan of the keyboard and mouse, then nothing will.

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