Secret Level's producer can't fathom why Concord ended up failing: 'There was no nicer, more invested group of developers than the team on Concord'
Secret Level's producer can't fathom why Concord ended up failing: 'There was no nicer, more invested group of developers than the team on Concord'
Unfortunately, nice doesn't shift product.
Three big reasons imo
- No iconic characters. Every character I remember looked kinda ugly or sidekick'ish at best.
- Charging for a game archtype others are giving away for free.
- Nothing new done in that archtype.
I don't think point 3 is quite fair. There were some new ideas thrown into the game.
The issue is those ideas were not fun, or very badly implemented. I believe it was the ranked mode, where if you won the round you were then locked out of playing that character again. They also had you build out a collection of characters to pick from before the game started.
There were some new ideas, I just don't know of any that were good and added to the game. The only ones I know of seemed bad(or at least badly implemented) and took away from what enjoyment people had with the game.
It's a mystery how a paid multiplayer team hero shooter with microtransaction, featuring uninspiring character design, launched and compete with other good f2p multiplayer game, and won't sell. Can't crack the code, sorry.
Generally speaking, games don't fail because of the decisions made by the developers. That's usually caused by people higher up the food chain, you'd think a film/tv producer would know all about that
It wasn't the developers that were at fault.
Well, the developers could be at least partially at fault. Higher up positions may not be the only ones to blame, as the they may have delegated roles to the lower positions that could have included creative control.
We don't know whether the developers share any responsibility for what happened.
I also think that the artists could have easily created better designs for the characters, so why they made the designs so uninspired and unappealing really makes me reconsider if some of the development team may be partially to blame as well.
At least the game didn't seem to have bad gameplay bugs, but the game was around for less than two weeks and I didn't play it, so I can't sntirely confirm that. But the engineers and programmers probably arent to blame for the games failure. People didnt seem to complain about the game on a technical level.
The main complaint I've seen is that it's generic at best. It can't even be good at being bad.
There's no one accusing that Concord died due to lack of investment!
We made a game that nobody wants! Why does nobody want it? We explicitly told you to!
Let's see, Sony is whining about not knowing what their players want...
They want Bloodborne Remastered, ported to PC. They don't want to sign in to PSN to play on non-Sony hardware.
Want to print money? Do that...
I don't think people shrugged off on Concord because poor quality such as bug or inconsistency. Concord was a fine Overwatch-wannabe that went for hard-sci realism (not as interesting as stylized/cartoon as TeamFortress2 and Overwatch). Pubg had realism, but it was the original trendsetter. CoD aside (which has its own historical fellowship) how many other multiplayer GaaS went successful with that sort of realism as Lawbreakes.
Also, blue water/red water problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ocean_Strategy