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

[Absolutego]

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.

I don't know how you can dismiss it as a reddit thing when Concord developers specifically credited a textbook toxically positive environment as being behind the asinine creative decisions, upper management's decision to push forward with a whole multimedia promotional campaign for the game, and how zero expectations were tempered from the poor initial pre-release reception of the game, leading to its immediate flop and the publisher intervening.
Highguard (IMO the only easy, no wiggle room, followed its track record on all points that matter successor to Concord) had a dev completely crash out about people having it out for the game in a way that suggests an equally toxically positive environment at that studio. Sure, that game failed more for poor game design reasons than the ugly aesthetic, but failing to read the room is failing to read the room.
It may be a reddit thing in your mind, but when all these developers are hardcore redditors, well, that's where the reddit mentality can burn a cool couple hundred million dollars, easily.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

I feel like a chud could make a "Concord-like" game, market it as such, and it would do far better than the original Concord.

 

[Jace on ice]

I feel like a chud could make a "Concord-like" game, market it as such, and it would do far better than the original Concord.

Concord lost 400+ million dollars so that one shitposter on Steam who made Tyrone Vs Cops and George Floyd Simulator has technically made more money than Sony even though his games cost 99 cents.

 

[30+GameOvers]

Concord lost 400+ million dollars so that one shitposter on Steam who made Tyrone Vs Cops and George Floyd Simulator has technically made more money than Sony even though his games cost 99 cents.

They also look more pleasing to the eye, despite being literally just /pol/ caricatures

 

[Pale Empress]

The only solution to this problem is to make investors disintered in this industry again. I want them to stop investing all money entirely, fuck the stock market. Let's make videogames niche again, normies are not fucking welcome in my hobby.

I know this is a joke, but the industry (at least the AAA industry) can and will get worse in the coming years. Saudis and Chinese are throwing billions around and buying up anything that isn't nailed down, and the current trend seems to be greenlighting dozens of short term high risk, low reward live service slop titles in the hopes that one of them achieves viral success and pays for all the other failures many times over. It's not so much strategy as it is playing the lottery.
Companies like Sony are trying to emulate this tactic, but the problem is that they don't have nearly the same amount of capital, which is why their failures are so much more public and egregious. Not that there are any consequences, though, at least not beyond shuttering subsidiary studios and continuing to double down on their losing strategy.

This quote is from the CEO of Wildlight, taken from an interview he did right before Highguard launched, and it sounds like something some market analyst or consultant told him and he's just parroting it back,

"There's this narrative that it's a crowded space. There's so much fatigue in it. That's true, but if you look at what's actually happening and transpiring it's that there's more players playing, more engagement, more games, and so and so. We have a great opportunity to find our audience with Highguard,"

"The shooter space has only continued to get larger. It's the rocket fuel that continues to propel the entire gaming segment. Shooters are five out of the top 10 games in terms of MAU [monthly active users] on PC. So all the metrics and the KPIs, the CAGR [compound annual growth rate] in the five and three year category—growth in shooters is incredible. It continues to go at a 5% pace, et cetera."

source

If attitudes like this are propelling the industry, the hits really will just keep coming.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I don't know how you can dismiss it as a reddit thing when Concord developers specifically credited a textbook toxically positive environment as being behind the asinine creative decisions, upper management's decision to push forward with a whole multimedia promotional campaign for the game, and how zero expectations were tempered from the poor initial pre-release reception of the game, leading to its immediate flop and the publisher intervening.
Highguard (IMO the only easy, no wiggle room, followed its track record on all points that matter successor to Concord) had a dev completely crash out about people having it out for the game in a way that suggests an equally toxically positive environment at that studio. Sure, that game failed more for poor game design reasons than the ugly aesthetic, but failing to read the room is failing to read the room.
It may be a reddit thing in your mind, but when all these developers are hardcore redditors, well, that's where the reddit mentality can burn a cool couple hundred million dollars, easily.

On the production side having toxic positivity is so common for flops that it's meaningless, especially when dealing with big names in the industry. It's either that or everyone fighting everyone for 90% of the cases.

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

 

[The Last Stand]

It may be a reddit thing in your mind, but when all these developers are hardcore redditors, well, that's where the reddit mentality can burn a cool couple hundred million dollars, easily.

You can take a man out of Reddit, but you cannot take the Reddit out of a man.

 

[Null]

If you want a very early example of this that I was familiar with look up APB. The beta of that game was perhaps the most fun I ever had in a video game besides space station 13. They rushed a bunch of horrific last minute changes before launch and the game died in a month despite being an MMOFPS. I remember its budget being enormous for the time as well. It's still around but it got sold to some no name dev that keeps it a zombie.

 

[POWER IN MISERY]

very good thread; makes me think about how all this flies in the face of the stop killing games campaign and really evokes an image of gaming jonestown. what could the next stage in making shitty games be?

edit: fuck dude APB was fun as hell back in the day and could have lasted if the game itself didn't get caught in china's hungriest lathe.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

APB was fun as hell but progression design was retarded. The grind for even small upgrades was absurd, and you were brutally punished for making even slightly suboptimal decisions, with the right ones often being deeply counterintuitive.

Could've been awesome otherwise.

 

[Kofi Drinka]

If you want a very early example of this that I was familiar with look up APB. The beta of that game was perhaps the most fun I ever had in a video game besides space station 13. They rushed a bunch of horrific last minute changes before launch and the game died in a month despite being an MMOFPS. I remember its budget being enormous for the time as well. It's still around but it got sold to some no name dev that keeps it a zombie.

I played that too. It was fun and it's a shame it didn't take off. It was GTA5 before GTA5.

APB reloaded still has 200 players on steam. It's not entirely dead.

 

[Null]

APB reloaded still has 200 players on steam. It's not entirely dead.

The game is dogshit now. I can't really overstate how perfect the balance was pre-launch and how fucking tortured it was post-lauch. They had something real special, then they added progression and p2w and just raped it to death in the cradle.

 

[Hagrid2]

*just Ubishit things*

At this point I'm convinced the Fr*nch would sooner stop eating baguettes and sipping champagne than cease loving niggers. A terminal case of shitlibbery.

+1 to OP from me too for the great thread idea. Seeing as the average lifespan of these sorts of games are somewhere between a stillborn baby and a couple of months of vegetative persistence on a ventilator, it's better to have everything consolidated in one place. A nicely maintained, catalogued graveyard of sorts.

>lawbreakers mentioned

Another evergreen meme that applies to every post-Lawbreakers shitshow:

 

[Jarch6]

The original "overhyped multiplayer shooter that was meant to be the next big thing" crown goes to
View attachment 8667086
I looked it up for the first time in a decade for the image, and apparently it still has servers running? Incredible.
Although it did make money so I guess it's disqualified.

It was obviously a failure but I remember that there were some people who liked it (e.g., TotalBiscuit (RIP) I think). I remember their follow-up FPS Dirty Bomb

Which was f2p. Didn’t play it much but I remember it being OK, much preferred Blacklight Retribution at the time.

I am going to drop nearly all of these as a rule. This is just every suggestion people have given for things that should be here.

I think what becomes clear from this is that everyone agrees more or less what the core concords are, but when you go looking back some people think a concord is “any game I don’t like”.

Concord-like ought to be live-service and multiplayer, preferably a shooter. Woke art style and ridiculous budget are the other common traits. Other astronomically overhyped failures are TORtanics. Small, mostly singleplayer, wastes of taxpayer money to promote woke shit are Dustborns (though I’d prefer Forspokens for the memberberries, they were chucking those steelcases in the dump in Brazil or some shit).

 

[Shitpiss Babylord]

If you want a very early example of this that I was familiar with look up APB. The beta of that game was perhaps the most fun I ever had in a video game besides space station 13. They rushed a bunch of horrific last minute changes before launch and the game died in a month despite being an MMOFPS. I remember its budget being enormous for the time as well. It's still around but it got sold to some no name dev that keeps it a zombie.

Oh shit, you were in the original APB beta? Same here, we mighta killed each other. I remember at one point in the beta you could one shot people with the shotgun and sniper rifle. As a shotgunner I kinda missed them changing that. But yeah, loved the beta, only managed to stick it out in the full release for a few weeks, I didn't even last to the shutdown announcement.

 

[Buckaroo]

Concord like has to be specifically woke IMO. A big budget, multiplayer woke game that targets no actual audience but gets massively hyped up. The woke thing is important because they always try to be competitive shooters, which is a market full of people who actively hate and push back against woke stuff. It's the disconnect between game design and presentation that makes it Concord like.

I don't think it needs to be, but the required level of delusion tends to be involved in woke slop.

 

[DickMain]

I was one of them people that said Brink suked ass back when it was released

I knew it would simply because a friend in the group would not shut up about it being the next big thing. Said the same thing about the Ouya too

 

[Toxic BRAAAAP Mask]

2. their historical experts being hacks - one a Jew that fabricated everything about Yasuke and then used the same books he authored as citations on the Wikipedia article, who has now gone underground and has been stripped of his historical credentials in Japan, and the other being some Asian fujoshit woman that writes books about Buddhist monks and their lust for little boys;

Lol I happen to frequent a server with one of the shitbag wikipedia editors, Theozilla, that got blasted on twitter for continually reverting changes to the Yasuke page. Him and other spergs went back and forth for months until the libs won out and samurai'd the nigger before locking the changes for a while. Even Grummz was shitting on him. I did eventually phonebook him for my own enjoyment since he has shit opsec. Never posted it though.

 

[big pauper]

This quote is from the CEO of Wildlight, taken from an interview he did right before Highguard launched, and it sounds like something some market analyst or consultant told him and he's just parroting it back,

If attitudes like this are propelling the industry, the hits really will just keep coming.

i think they've overdosed on marketing so much that they've lost the forest for the trees. they're deciding on a race and an age bracket to appeal to and then building games to appeal to those demographics with totally arbitrary industry metrics. they're doing it backwards, instead of just going "hmm, there aren't any racing games releasing this year, we should make a boat racing game or something nobody has done that in a while" it's just straight to the open world third/first person shooter/brawler staring BLACK TEEN in COLONIAL HAITI