The Concordverse - Highguard, Marathon, Horizon Hunter's Gathering and other Flopbusters - How Many Times Do We Have To Teach You This Lesson, Old Man?

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I want to add the original Titanfall to this list. Development from Titanfall started rough as the newly founded Respawn Entertainment was going through lawsuits against Infinity Ward and Activision and they needed more funding from a publisher to continue. Hence the Xbox exclusivity.


Titanfall released in a barebones state, missing core multiplayer staples like no private matches or map voting at launch. Even so, it proved to be a modest success with ~10 million sold from October 2015.

When Titanfall released on Steam, it fell victim to internal DDoS attacks which prevented its already smaller population from even connecting to the actual game.

Respawn/EA responded by delisting the original Titanfall from all storefronts, but strangely enough, keeping its servers active for the time being. Nobody is playing it on account of its compromised state and age, so TECHNICALLY it's "playable" where you can launch it, but good luck finding a game.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
It's not really new in gaming, we had many WOW killer, CoD killers, etc. 20 years ago that crashed and burned despite massive investments. The only reason that people only care now is because of it being filled with woke politics.
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Whoever writes an OP like that should make sure to include a spot on Warhammer 40k Fire Warrior when talking about Halo killers, that game was absolute trash from what I heard but that is fitting for a game about filthy xenos.
 
Dagoth AMOGUS said:
The character design is to make money and cheap writing is to save money. The point of these games is to “check” off enough boxes ✔️ for some DEI index. By doing so, private firms give them money based on how gay and brown the game is. The exact mechanics are a closely guarded secret. I’m not sure if having a black trans is 10 points or 15. But that’s largely how it works. Bribing companies with mysterious money to elbow white, normal people from representation.
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Assuming you're being sincere, wouldn't any even-slightly-rigorous analysis show these hypothetical grants and awards to be worth far less than... selling a game that more than 600 people want to play?



Putting that aside, maybe not quite the same, just being a live service game that failed to read the room and died immediately, but I always did enjoy how quickly The Culling 2 speedran its own death. If we're talking about Lawbreakers and Brink, it may also merit a seat at the table.
 
Jace on ice said:
Was Redfall really a live service game? I played a little bit of it at my friend's place because he has poor judgement and I don't remember that game having a cash shop or buyable skins or any of that shit.
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Define live service. Redfall WAS an online-only co-op shooter at launch where an Internet connection was required to launch the damn game. It flopped so hard, Phil Spencer had to apologize for it. Its last update included an offline mode where you could still play it without connecting to the Internet.
 
Taco Shell said:
Brink was mentioned above, but I remember Battleborn failing due to it terrible marketing.
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IMO Battleborn failed because it released way way way too late. If you wanted to capture the console first/third person shooter market for MoBAs you had to move quick. Battleborn launching in 2016 was comically late when Smite had launched in 2014.

Battleborn had way too many kinks, was unpolished, and (as with all shooters) was going to have wild skill gaps that can only be resolved by having a massive player base and ranked (or, gross, SBMM).

Smite had a two year head start, and leveraged it reasonably well. Of course it ultimately lost out to top-down PC MoBAs, but it had its run.
The Last Stand said:
Titanfall released in a barebones state, missing core multiplayer staples like no private matches or map voting at launch. Even so, it proved to be a modest success with ~10 million sold from October 2015.
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Titanfall was too successful to count here. It never really dethroned Cod/Halo, but thats a crazy metric. Its fun factor punched above weight, and the budget behind it was never that insane. And the studio ultimately leading to Apex puts it categorically elsewhere IMO.

Apex is like the redheaded child. They added woke shit in terms of "representation" with canonical troons and they/thems. But the gameplay outshined the weirdo lore shit, since no one cared they just wanted to have fun.

If memory serves, it was super comical to see how EA in its earnings/quarterlies got saved by Apex revenue (which they had low expections) from their disaster of Anthem. While Apex had a shoestring budget (relatively) and launched Feb 2019, Anthem had a massive budget ($120 million I think) and immediately flopped after launching in Jan 2019.

God damn this thread has made me think too much of how awful video games of the last 15 years have been. We fell so far from Eden once it was clear real money could be made from gamers and big corpo got too handsy
 
clever handle said:
Assuming you're being sincere, wouldn't any even-slightly-rigorous analysis show these hypothetical grants and awards to be worth far less than... selling a game that more than 600 people want to play?



Putting that aside, maybe not quite the same, just being a live service game that failed to read the room and died immediately, but I always did enjoy how quickly The Culling 2 speedran its own death. If we're talking about Lawbreakers and Brink, it may also merit a seat at the table.
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the last 20 years of corporate media creation has been an accounting nightmare of getting tax breaks and grants from governments and balancing those requirements against the requirements of the product. tons of games have the Made In Georgia sticker during the opening sequence for a tax break. most of these things are not that opaque though and people have been getting privy to how many of those back room deals weren't in the player's favor
 
MrMM said:
Titanfall was too successful to count here. It never really dethroned Cod/Halo, but thats a crazy metric. Its fun factor punched above weight, and the budget behind it was never that insane. And the studio ultimately leading to Apex puts it categorically elsewhere IMO.
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I read through OP's criteria; you're right. Titanfall was not rejected per se, just abandoned and left to rot. If memory serves, Titanfall did better than Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, the latest CoD out at the time.
 
One of my favorite OneyPlays moments is when they were playing Saints Row 2022 (arguably could be added to the category of this thread) and the character creator had a lot of DEI options, so the boys decided to make their character look as retarded as possible for the lols.

Screenshot 2026-03-07 151553.png

And then Dustborn came out and there's actually a character that looks like the retarded character that they made as a joke. Meme magic.

Edit:
Forgot to show the comparison shot:
Screenshot 2026-03-07 153205.png
 
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MrMM said:
IMO Battleborn failed because it released way way way too late. If you wanted to capture the console first/third person shooter market for MoBAs you had to move quick. Battleborn launching in 2016 was comically late when Smite had launched in 2014.
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Trying to capitalize on trends (one of the go-to strategies for MBA types) doesn't work very well when the turnaround time for your product is 2-5 years (or more!).
 
Thread could just be renamed to 'games for the modern audience' which basically encapsulates the slop summarized here.

Either way, good OP, well written and there will surely be more to follow.
 
Once you realize that these games are being funded by government grants to promote DEI slop -- literal free money, as opposed to investments which carry an expectation of ROI -- you stop asking "what were they thinking". These games are not meant to succeed, the sales are not important, it's just a way to get taxpayer money.

It's literally the same thing as socioeconomically disenfranchised women squeezing out a kid nobody asked for or cares about in order to qualify for government assistance.
 
wtfNeedSignUp said:
It's not really new in gaming, we had many WOW killer, CoD killers, etc. 20 years ago that crashed and burned despite massive investments. The only reason that people only care now is because of it being filled with woke politics.
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If it was just about gaming flops, I might agree, but a concord-like is a heady mix of massive budgets, DEI bullshit, and toxic positivity. (It's why I think Last of Us 2 deserves a spot.)
 
Judge Dredd said:
If it was just about gaming flops, I might agree, but a concord-like is a heady mix of massive budgets, DEI bullshit, and toxic positivity. (It's why I think Last of Us 2 deserves a spot.)
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Toxic positivity is more of a Reddit thing, just about every popular series has its diehard fans that try to justify the time they wasted with fake positivity, be it woke slop or gacha slop. DEI is more of a common thread but just about every corporate project, including films and TV is over budgeted DEI shit.
 
Judge Dredd said:
If it was just about gaming flops, I might agree, but a concord-like is a heady mix of massive budgets, DEI bullshit, and toxic positivity. (It's why I think Last of Us 2 deserves a spot.)
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And immediate, catastrophic financial failure. Last of Us 2 was too successful, it even got a remaster and 2 seasons of a Netflix show. It's just a bad game.

Like mentioned in the Highguard thread, it's probably worth distinguishing between multiplayer failures (Concord-like) and single player failures (Dustborn clones).
  • Concord-likes are notable because their predicted lifespan is cut dramatically short by player disinterest, dooming the core of the product, no matter how good it actually is. You don't actually need to be bad to fail this way; Highguard and Marathon are widely reviewed as mid.
  • Dustborn clones are notable for how bad the game is, but doesn't need an ongoing playerbase to thrive, just regular up-front sales. They're notable for that lack of interest juxtaposed against the game journo praise they get, or the devs emerging from their toxic positivity boxes to cry about toxic gamers ignoring their creations.
A Dustborn dev could plausibly cope that its small player base actually was the exact audience they were aiming for. Art for art's sake, community over profits, etc. But a Concord dev can't pretend the same thing, they were literally banking on mass popularity, without doing the work to achieve it.

They're both schadenfreude events, but for different reasons, with different mechanisms.
 
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