PlayStation’s Concord, a game reportedly in the works for eight years trying to break into the hero shooter market, has launched with sub-700 concurrent players on Steam
I was watching a livestream of this game's reveal trailer. The chat was excited at first during the cinematic trailer. Sure, it looked like a Malt-O-Meal Guardians of the Galaxy, but it still looked like it could be fun. Then as soon as they said "5 v 5 live service game" there was a giant, collective "oh nevermind lol" from the chat.
From what i saw from the game it just looked super bland and boring. No one looked interesting at all, it didn't pop, if someone told me it was a passion project from a 3 man dev team i would've totally believed it.
Why should it leave? The most successful games are all live service. No matter how many people buy a single-player game, the total lifetime revenue of love service dwarfs other models in comparison.
There is a direct conflict of interests between gamers and producers. Producers want as much sales for as little time and money and they will damage games if it feels it makes them more money.
There are a ton of gacha games if released as a standard 1 time pay model would have been very profitable, but 'very' isn't profitable enough. Some of those games are ridiculously high grossing, have a shitton of played hours, yet STILL would be better games without predatory monetization.
I measure the success of a game by how respectful they are to their customers. Anti-consumer behavior is rotting AAA game houses from within.