"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy"
"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy"
Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
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Every game executive and investor wants a Fortnight. That's why no matter how many times gamers reject it live service games will continue to be developed. Because AAA games are made for investors not players.
When God of War was popular, they wanted a God of War of their own.
When Call of Duty was popular, they wanted a Call of Duty of their own.
When Overwatch was popular, they wanted a Overwatch of their own.
When Fortnite was popular, everyone wants their own Fortnite.
Rinse and repeat.
Oppai Succubus Academy exists. So where the fuck are all of my Oppai Succubus Academy clones?
They're all on F95.
I mean sometimes it works. Pubg was the big Battle Royale in town until Fortnite (as a battle Royale) came along. League of Legends too. The problem with Concord is it took about 6 years to come out so it couldn't draft on the hot trend.
League of Legends is a pet peeve of mine, since one bad person took down DotA forum, stole ideas from it, created LoL, and acted like a big shot. He wasn't alone, but you know what I mean.
To this day I think that Blizzard hates esports, because they left DotA with 0 support, and only after many years of Dota 2 they created Heroes of the Storm, which was even more watered down than LoL.
And LoL is such a simple game, which is OK, but once you actually understand Dota, it doesn't come anywhere close. It brought nothing innovative. Which is sad.
Source: I played hundreds of hours, and put hundreds of dollars into LoL back in the ~2010.
Conceptually, LoL filled a hole. DotA was DotA, complicated, hard, lots of nuance. Some people wanted an even more complicated DotA. Heroes of Newerth filled that hole. Some people wanted a simpler DotA. LoL filled that hole.
I personally preferred HoN, but I can't fault people for preferring LoL.
I bought HoN like two weeks before it went free, and I haven't played much.
How was it more complicated?
It’s not like any game is completely original anyways. They all take inspiration from games that come before, some more than others.
While that is true, the issue is that they are trend chasing for a quick cash grab and put in next to no effort to make the game good or listen to consumers saying that this isn't what we want.
I mean aren’t those just issues that any business venture has to deal with? I don’t think the game type matters per se. It’s more a problem of poor business decision making. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with chasing trends and they certainly had the right budget. $100m+ is hardly chump change but taking 8 years really put them quite behind.
I think the shareholder takeover of gaming removed one big thing from the tendency to “take inspiration” from competitors, and that is developing the world and characters in order to make the clone feel unique and deep.
I wonder what all the big publishers are pushing now. A Genshin? A Palworld?
actually yes, there have been alot of games in the rpgmmo ish game like genshin and the ark / survival builder games like Palworld.
Whenever a game becomes popular people and studios try to make thier own. Palworld is an example of one that worked (it being Ark survival evolved: pokemon editon)
expect a push of gacha games, gacha games will be considered potential money printing machines by higher executives
Genshin-likes are being very popular in the east, this year we got Wuthering Waves (which is actually much better), and 2-3 years ago we got Tower of Fantasy (which was terrible), now the same studio from ToF announced Neverness to Everness which is the same concept of an open world anime action rpg but in an urban setting, suspiciously years after Project Mugen had been announced which is has the exact same premise.
Problem with trying to get a Fortnite was that Epic was wanting to get it's own PUBG after realizing that trying to get their own Minecraft was a failed endeavor. They quickly pivoted the game formula from a Minecraft type tower defense to a battle royale game.
Concord should have seen the writing on the wall early on and pivoted it's game into something else thats flavor of the month.
Wait wasn't the original concept for fortnite actually a wave based tower defence game? I remember being excited for that and then battle royal happened and I lost all interest.
People paid for that original game too, it wasn’t free. I don’t assume they got refunded. It was basically a massive bait and switch.
I was a sucker and my friend convinced me to get and pay for the orginal game. I think it was only like 3-4 weeks after the game was available when they shoehorned battle royal mode in. It wasn't long after that before they switched to free to play and gave us I think in game currency that was worth the $60 or whatever the game costed at launch. I stopped playing altogether because I paid for a co-op PvE tower defense game, not a free to play PvP battle royal game.
Yea I recall it being like 20 something. That's why I never pre-order. Without having poof I would assume they got refunded if it stopped development, it's epic games. I do recall it did get released eventually but I had lost interest by them.
Yeah, the original trailer made it clear they were trying to go after the Minecraft style of gathering resources, building up a base and fortifying it, then defending from zombie mobs at night, like the Minecraft mobs.
Maybe not so much the pixel/block graphics, but the ideas behind Minecraft, with an actual objective, which Minecraft lacked.
That reminds me of hypixel.
Yeah the tower defense part of it was actually quite fun
It's not like gamers are rejecting live services as a whole, because there are still quite a lot of successful live service games. And when a live service is successful, it's really successful. So much so that it's worth it to investors to keep gambling on them, one hit can compensate for a dozen flops.
Can they stay solvent through a dozen flops when each one costs them hundreds of millions of dollars?
Usually they don't completely flop though, they just underwhelm expectations but if they can stay active long enough with the right amount of whales and fish they can usually break even or make a small profit. Concord is just a high profile legitimate flop that was turned off before it could do anything.
Its trajectory was that it was going to continue to burn money. Sega didn't even launch Hyenas because they realized they'd only lose money by letting it rock. A lot of these games chasing the live service trend are spending so much money that they need to hit hard in order to turn that profit, like Avengers, Suicide Squad, Concord, the forthcoming Marathon and Fairgame$, etc. The Finals was huge at launch, lost most of its playerbase in the next couple of months (which, btw, happens for nearly every video game ever, live service or otherwise), and because it was so expensive, it's not looking long for this world. Compared to something like Path of Exile or Warframe or The Hunt: Showdown, that launched a leaner game at the start and scaled up responsibly, they didn't need to be the biggest thing in the world in order for it to make financial sense.
To be clear, I hate all of this shit, even when it's a sound business strategy, but the risk involved in a project like Concord is visible from space, and the chances of it making up that cost are so clearly small when they're not the first one of these to market.
This is the truth people don't want to admit, but Final Fantasy XIV being successful carried square enix through their darkest days when everything wasn't making a profit. Cygames using all the money they got from the granblue gacha to finance an action rpg and a fighting game, etc.
They serve as a safety net, we lost mimimi last year, I don't think anyone would say they made bad games, but they just didn't sell enough so they closed.
You just made me realise I'm a gamer, not a Fortniter. But I probably should've realised that based on my Steam "years of service* and disgustingly large catalogue.
I'm a proven guaranteed money pot, publishers! Make me something good and I give the moneys!
The challenge is that requires creativity. Creativity isn't a stable investment.
Viva La indie game studio!