Anybody play Concord? Sony's $400,000,000 failure

[Gameguy]

I'm surprised nobody has been talking about this as it's basically big news at this point. The game came out recently, was shut down just two weeks after it launched, and everybody who bought a copy was refunded. And Sony apparently paid $400,000,000 to develop this, making it the most expensive game they ever produced. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Another aspect to consider, physical PS5 copies are possibly set to become future rarities as so few copies were purchased.

[Gametrek]

I changed my mind. Still I disagree with the art team from Concord

[kupomogli]

Sony should have paid me one million to tell them this was a bad idea. Sony's ran their Playstation brand into the ground. Outside of the $3b purchase of Bungie, Concord's $400 million development costs, the purchase of the Firewalk Studio however that was on top of Concord, the $200 million loss of the cancelled TLOU online, aside from all of those that are clear losses, the Playstation brand despite its profitability outside of these, has been driven into the ground.

The Playstation brand though has been ruined, there's no coming back from this because by the time Sony figures it out, that's it, it's over. So in the current generation Sony has released three exclusives and these games aren't even exclusive as they're on PC now, but Returnal, Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart, and Demon's Souls which is just a remaster, so okay, only two actual exclusives. Only two games and it's been four years, everything else has been a remaster, even Spiderman 2 which is just a glorified expansion of Spiderman remastered which happens to only be playable on the PS5.

All of their games are on PC though and Sony is pushing hard as fuck to make sure that we only play their games digital only as seen with the launch of the PS5 Pro and the 30th anniversary consoles that all require an $80 add on in order to use physical games. Remember when the PS1 had to have an add on to play your physical games? But the point here is that all these games are playable on PC, nearly everything on the console is playable on PC. Now understandably some people may just want to play on consoles and won't buy a PC, and all of this other stuff is just corporate profitability so I'll get to the overall point by the end of this post. But, let's say that the gamer doesn't care about physical and they don't care where they play, with common sense they see that they can pay for an $800 Laptop that they found through a great deal on Slickdeals and a little bit of research they find is nearly as powerful as a PS5 Pro but they can play PS5 games, Xbox games, everything on PC, and oh yeah, it's a laptop that htey can also use the external HDMI to view on their HDTV or projector? So Sony has now lost all of those potential sales. Also, anyone who may have purchased a PS5 but didn't have one that was considering to purchase it to play Playstation games after enough games they were interested in that are exclusive released, well, now those people only has to buy each individual game they're interested in, Sony only makes 70% of that games profit while the rest goes to Steam, Epic, or whoever. There's no extra income because they didn't sell a console, they don't get the console sale, they don't get the accessoriy sales, they don't get each 30% from third party sales that the system may have cost, and they also aren't able to swindle people $80 a year in order to play their games online. This is everything that's lost just so they can make a little bit of extra money by releasing their games on PC.

So the above paragraph was describing all of the potential loss by releasing their games across PC in monetary value. Many people complain that "exclusivity doesn't matter in this day and age." It matters. It matters to EVERYBODY. It's not just to make the company money, it's not just to be a shill. Whether you're a Playstation, Xbox, or Nintendo fanboy, no exclusivity is going to kill the industry. On paper no exclusivity means that we can play every single game on any console we own, less money that we have to spend to still support the industry, but the reality of it is that we actually get less games than more. This means the developers and publishers are less profitable and us gamers have to pay more as we now need to buy more hardware to play these extra games, but each console publisher retaining exclusivity of all their games means that each of these publishers need to be more competitive to gain our interest. Look at Nintendo Switch, they merged their console and handheld business so they could put all their development resources into developing games for a single piece of hardware after the failure of the Wii U, giving us both a console and handheld in one with the full support of Nintendo as a first party publisher behind it. We've pretty much got the best generation of Nintendo as a first party developer even if the third party line up imo does not match the DS or 3DS when it comes to exclusivity. Can you buy any of these Nintendo games elsewhere? No. Except for the ports, which you can purchase on the Wii U, you have to buy a Switch. All of those great games that Nintendo pushed to release, all the third party exclusives that they've paid for, they put a lot of money into making their console more appealing to get people to buy their console even if the people already own something else. For the PS5, Sony hasn't done that, even if all of the games on PS5 were exclusive, you can buy atleast 75% of them on the PS4, but if you didn't own a PS4, all of these games are on the PC so why would I buy them.

Remember when Xbox released all their games on PC at the start on Xbox One? I made the same comment then, that there's now no reason to buy an Xbox. Not for myself of course, but anyone who doesn't care about digital only, and look at how things have turned out with the Xbox Series X, the most powerful console(aside from the PS5 Pro) and Xbox is doing worse this generation than ever. Because it took time for the effects of their decision to appear. Many people who already were interested Xbox were going to get an Xbox One back then. Same with many hardcore Playstation fanboys like myself were going to get a PS5 anyways. You've got a history with the console, and the backwards compatibility of people who have really large libraries. But if you look at the average software to console sales ratio between all consoles, it's around 10-15 games per generation meaning that number is even lower for the average gamer probably more like 5-6 per generation for most people. There's not really a loss for your average person who's not huge into gaming to make the jump. This is the reason that these Xbox 360 dude bros had no problem jumping to the PS4 and will have no problem jumping to the PC. Much like the Xbox One which needed around a decade to see the state that Xbox was really in, we're starting to see the effects of this with Sony reporting poor console sales and less game sales over the past year, another five to 10 years Playstation is going to be in the exact same situation that Xbox is in, but atleast Microsoft has Game Pass, which is far more successful and has far more positive views than PS+ which people generally shit on just because "no day one releases" when otherwise the line up of software is equally good or better.

So if all of the above didn't point a clear picture. Once Playstation and Xbox are pretty much dead, Nintendo will have to put far less effort to get people to pay attention to their console. They will spend far less money on securing second party exclusives. While Nintendo being Japanese rewards loyalty instead of firing and rehiring employees for lower pay we will still probably see a consistent first party release line up, we won't see all that money they've spent in supporting third parties as much as they've did before. Why would they when Nintendo will be the go to for everything other than PC? They don't need to be as competitive any longer, and the less money from Nintendo to pay for exclusivity means the less games, is this starting to make sense, those games don't just appear elsewhere because there's no money driving their development costs.

Sony has even licensed their first party games to be released to the Switch with Horizon Lego, and Dimps, who are the developers of Sony owned property Freedom Wars, has been given the license to develop Freedom Wars and is allowing the console to be published on PS5 and Switch as long as Dimps finds a publisher. Sony has basically already went third party. The writing is on the wall and their short term monetary game that Sony appears happy about is what is going to push them into financial ruin as a company. Let's revisit this in five years to ten years.

[Steve W]

Sony made a Concord controller, I looked at it briefly on their website ($85 - ouch) but passed on it... I kind of wish I hadn't now. I don't have a PS5 to use it with, but it would have been a great collectible for the future, far more than the physical release of Concord. PS5 games made it to a lot of stores, the controllers were online only as far as I know.

Concord will send a chilling message to the rest of the game industry; don't go against the gaming public. We want our escapist media to be devoid of the politics of modern audience idiots overriding everything we like about games. Gamers want fun, not lectures. And the designers didn't want any of the characters to look attractive, so they made them look as plain and uninspired as possible. All women should look as masculine as possible, there's no white people because the developers are majority white but they treat minorities as tokens to throw into things so they can say "look how progressive we are!", and there seemed to be a culture of refusing to speak about all the things wrong with the game. They might actually fire people for saying that there were problems with the game.

Everything we keep hearing about the development of Concord shows just how out of touch they were and their refusal to see how badly everything was going. It seems that after two and a half years and $200 million they had a barely functional game where the online didn't really work, and Sony spent another $200 million to pay other studios to pitch in and develop all the other functions that Firewalk Studios were too incompetent to get working, and it culminated in a game that earned maybe a million dollars. Maybe they shouldn't hire activists and programmers based on their skin color and/or where they are on the oppression index, and instead hire people based on their programming skill.

Now we need to know the real numbers of the cost of the game Dustborn, the game that launched around the same time and sold even worse than Concord. Dustborn's sales make Concord look like a smashing success in comparison, in the first week they had less than a thousand sales on Steam, and their highest concurrent player count was only 83. Dustborn had to cost a fortune, and it was a laughing stock in the gaming world, filled with cringe dialog, bad songs, and was described as "a woke wet dream". This game wasn't made for the gaming audience, it was made against the gaming audience.

[Gametrek]

So I am changing my mind on the game "Dust Born". Many people have not played the game and is clearly a case in terms of the marketing of "Phantasy Star III" where the magazine editors all dispromoted SEGA for including a guide-book, because these people who have nothing to do with SEGA wanted to print there own guide books.

They ( press just like with Five-guys AKA Pizza-place ) AKA NEO-Gaf for instance...who are spoon-fed people who enjoy watching two-hundred people inside an apartment building being blown up by two hellfire rockets in Gaza. That is the kind of people who are being cry-babies about this game.

Say what you want about "Concord" but leave "Dust born" out of it. The game is a good play it is literally something a person who enjoy Comic-Adventure / Point and click will enjoy. Have you running around from area to area simular to "Futurama".

"X-men + Final Fantasy" + ( All games since "Longest Journey" ) = Dust Born, and "the press" ( random people are bashing the game for no reason at all.

There is nothing LGBT about it unless you read into mixed messages, asides the fact that you have a rich kid ( If Prince was a girl who worship Marylin Monroe ) who manipulating a illegal-immigrant-terrorist and a "young" round girl. Then she have her techie ( who is a regular guy ) on the side.

Which is literally what the party consists of.

Like X-men you have people who are "different" and "the-man" does not want them to be a threat, rather then helping those people, but to use them like weapons. It is like if Naruto ( or Sonic ) woke up in our world, and the entire military is targeting them like Godzilla.