• CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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    2 months ago

    It wasn’t a genre I enjoy, so I don’t really know much about it beyond the stuff about how badly it sold. I have to wonder though, just how bad does a game have to be to sell this badly? Whenever I see people complain about something in gaming, I inevitably see people talking about how people should vote with their wallets, but then whatever the thing in question is seems to be quite profitable despite the complaints and calls for people to stop buying it. What was so wrong with this one that actually caused practically nobody to buy it?

    • Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      It’s not really that Concord was bad, and more that it was unremarkable.

      The game was trying so hard to be a clone of Overwatch that what they ended up with was the gaming equivalent of those knock-off GI Joe clones your mother would buy you from the dollar store. Except that Overwatch is free, and Concord was $40. Why am I going to spend more money on getting the knock-off version?

      Copying what works only gets you so far. At some point, you have to actually step ahead of the thing you’re copying.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 months ago

      just how bad does a game have to be to sell this badly?

      It’s hard to say if Concord was actually that bad, I think the biggest issue was that it was a full-priced game when games in this style have generally been free-to-play for a long time. Even ones that started as paid like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch/Overwatch 2 are now firmly free-to-play and exist alongside a lot of other free-to-play competition including Valve’s new Deadlock which is in free public beta. In the context of that marketplace it’s a hard sell to get people to spend $40 on a title like that. Perhaps if it had been in the Overwatch era, but not now, when it’s all free-to-play.

      So who knows how bad it actually was, it bombed hard and fast because not enough people played it to begin with. Who can say a game is actually bad if they haven’t played it? That means only the small number of people who played can tell us if it was good, and their experience is tainted by small player count and quick shutdown.

    • warm@kbin.earth
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      2 months ago

      A lot of shit games still sell millions on the back of marketing, so for a game to sell as little as concord, it had to be a whole new level of shit along with shitty marketing.

      • kurcatovium@lemm.ee
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        2 months ago

        That’s the thing. They sell it due to marketing. Concord had virtually no marketing whatsoever.

        So Sony came up with $40 game that failed to be as good and enjoying as mediocre f2p ones, supported it with zero marketing and expected profits somehow. Genius.

        • warm@kbin.earth
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          2 months ago

          A good game will sell itself though. How they spent 8 years on it, I don’t know.

          • kurcatovium@lemm.ee
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            2 months ago

            Good game, yes. Concord was not one of those. It was mediocre, nothing special, definitely not a game people would pay 40 for.

  • astrsk@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    Late to the party. Generic designs. Boring uninspired gameplay that did nothing to advance the genre, and basically no marketing. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just a tax-loss project by the 8th year of development.

  • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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    1 month ago

    400 million dollar investment fraud scheme you say?

    Nah just good old incompetence. Damn shame.