GamesFPSConcordAfter Redfall and Suicide Squad, Concord’s failure must be the nail in the coffin for the industry’s failed live-service gold rushWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesFPSConcordAfter Redfall and Suicide Squad, Concord’s failure must be the nail in the coffin for the industry’s failed live-service gold rushWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Firewalk)
Concord is dead. After being in some form of development for eight years,Sony’s first-party hero shooter lasted just 11 days before the announcement thatit would be pulled from sale, with refunds handed out to anyone who purchased it. There’s potential for it to return, but Concord remains the product of nearly a decade’s work at the behest of the biggest company in the industry. It has next to nothing to show for it.
This should be an unprecedented disaster: a gaping black hole on Sony’s 2024 balance sheet, a wholesale rejection of the company’s live-service strategy, a failure to crack four figures in the game’s concurrent player count on PC. But this isn’t an unprecedented disaster, because in the past 12 months we’ve already seen this happen time and again.
The trend is obvious, but also easy to buck. In the midst of these failures-to-launch were two multiplayer games that went truly stratospheric.Palworldrose to temporarily become the second highest-played game in Steam history.Helldivers 2has wavered in the face of its massive success, but is still drawing in more players on a random weekday months after release than Suicide Squad did at launch.
Failure to launch
(Image credit: Rocksteady)
There’s no one reason for the success or failure of any of these games, but contributing factors abound. Redfall reportedly struggled to hold onto staff who’d joinedArkanekeen to work on the immersive sims it was famous for, and launched in a very rough state. Suicide Squad was the unfortunate casualty of a poor initial reveal and general superhero fatigue. Concord’s bland character design has taken a lot of flak for its poor reception, and Sony’s somewhat lacklustre marketing campaign has clearly also failed to ignite players. But there’s a core theme running through all of these big wins and losses.
The live service push exists because major studio executives want the guaranteed income streams that come with major hits. The likes of Fortnite, GTA Online, League of Legends and several more of the biggest multiplayer games out there literally print money for their owners, and major publishers want their own slice of the pie – a game that players continue to invest in long after they’ve paid the $60 entry fee.
Lords of the Manor(Image credit: Slavic Magic)Manor Lords publisher says game devs and big corpos don’t get on because making games is “fundamentally unpredictable”
Lords of the Manor
(Image credit: Slavic Magic)Manor Lords publisher says game devs and big corpos don’t get on because making games is “fundamentally unpredictable”
(Image credit: Slavic Magic)
Manor Lords publisher says game devs and big corpos don’t get on because making games is “fundamentally unpredictable”
The issue is that that pie was sliced up years ago, and now only a few morsels remain. If you’re a regular player of Fortnite, GTA Online, or League of Legends, there are only so many hours in the day to play something you’re already invested in, and it takes something special to get you to reinvest that sunk cost into a new game. Palworld and Helldiverswerethat something special - unique enough to avoid treading on the toes of an established juggernaut, cheap enough to encourage investment in the attention that unique twist brought them, and lucky enough to garner massive word-of-mouth support.
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