When the game came out back in 2024 it barely surpassed 1000 players on steam, eventually the servers were shut down a fortnight after it was released: so the game didn’t even last that long. Development costs were not cheap either, since Sony invested $400,000,000 into the project for it to fall apart upon release, talk about a waste of investors money. Have you played it at the time? If so, what made it a shit game that’s forgotten?
It’s not that hard to understand, really.
it’s yet another hero in an ocean of hero shooters, with pretty much no unique points.
the gameplay Is pretty much a worse Overwatch, with half the skills ripped directly from Destiny.
it’s a worse Overwatch, except Overwatch is free and concord was 40 bucks
the character design was crap. Half of them are basically shapeless blobs that look the same with a badly done colour swap. And the aesthetic was all over the place.
The advertising campaign was terrible. It took 8 years to make, but they kept quiet pretty much till 6 weeks before release.
a shitload of money went into full mocap videos to form some sort of “Concord Universe”, but it wasn’t actually interesting at all, because nobody knew shit about Concord. That sort of thing should be a second step, not a first step.
small side note, but look up the terrible character sign combining so absolutely horribly with the mocop videos. It’s amazing how nobody realized these blobs don’t animate well.
So, it cost more, did less, was extremely derivative and had pretty much nothing going for it. It was bland and mediocre, but came with 400 million dollars of expectations.
Out of all these points, the key one is that it was $40 in a genre where the median price for entry is $0. That really deserves to be front and centre above everything else.
Everything you’ve said is completely accurate, and describes why Concorde failed, but the key to why it failed as hard as it did is the decision to slap a price tag on it.
To get away with being a $40 game in a free-to-play genre, they would have to have something so compellingly unique that it could not only stand out in the crowd, but stand head and shoulders above it.
Concorde was still destined to fail even without that decision, because, as you said, there was nothing unique about it. Forgettable, boring characters battling for unclear stakes in generic arenas with generic powers. No differentiation at all. But released as a free to play game it might at least have gone maybe a year before it collapsed.
But the sheer arrogance of taking this boring, also-ran, generic hero shooter clone and deciding that it was so special that it deserved a $40 price tag… That’s what turned Concorde into the greatest failure in the history of video games.
That’s not really a reason to fail. Other genres have similar games in a crowded competition and still sell well, even if they are not very special different. And I even argue that there are not many hero shooters in the style and gameplay of Ovewatch. So I / we are in dire need of more alternatives. Compare this to other genres, where vast amount of different games are available. There are many reasons why Concord failed, one of them being ugly characters in example. Also it depends who makes those games. Nobody asked Sony to do this, as every Sony fan was expecting single player games. Having “too many” hero shooters in the type of Overwatch is not the reason the game failed (there aren’t many).
Other genres are different. These always-online pvp games have massive player buy-in. For something like Call of Duty, or StarCraft, there comes a point where most players will be mostly done with the game and are looking for something new. These games are constantly updating, releasing new content, and work incredibly hard to keep players locked in.
So, if you want to take market share in the newest soccer game, all you need to do is gather up the available players with something new, because they’re already looking. To get market share in this genre, you need to actively pry players away from their current game.
So even if you’re a bit better, you still need to beat the attachment players have to the other game, where they have a hundred levels, 62 special skins and 300 achievements. If your game is just as good, but people have no attachment, you’re going to lose.
And Concord was not remotely as good.
It’s a perfectly valid reason to fail, and that’s because Concord was an always-online multiplayer PvP title. Games in that genre are kept alive by the players. If they can’t maintain a critical mass of players to maintain the multiplayer playerbase, the game dies.
Concord entered a saturated market with nothing special to offer. Just being a good game today isn’t enough. You need something special to attract players from other games; their “home” games, where they have experience, friends, competitive ranks and prestige, and probably spent money on cosmetics. If you don’t have that something to raise interest, and then maintain a healthy playerbase, your multiplayer PvP game will not survive. Highguard at least had “we made Titanfall (allegedly)” to hype itself and it still ate shit once players realized they’d been handed a lemon. Compared to that, Concord has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and players had no reason to even consider it.