I think that’s common in gaming development. You work on a project until it’s done, then pivot to another or get let go.
The game bombing likely doesn’t help but I expect most devs involved expected this.
Comment on Concord is going offline beginning September 6th
chloyster@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I feel like short of making it free to play and having a complete art style rework this game doesn’t have great hopes of ever being relevant. I mean from what I’ve gathered the gameplay itself is decent to good. But yeah they just misfired so hard with this.
Despite it all, I feel bad for the majority of devs who spent so much of their life working on this and who are likely going to be out of a job. Of course I don’t know anything about the inner workings, but I’d be willing to bet it’s not most of their fault’s that sony had been pushing so hard for live service stuff under their former leadership
mosiacmango@lemm.ee 2 months ago
GammaGames@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I heard the project had been in production for 10 years and in active development for 8
SoupBrick@yiffit.net 2 months ago
It is astonishing that the leads on this game didn’t take any notes on the successful parts of other team shooters released during that timeframe.
Faydaikin@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I think they did. As people keep saying the gameplay was fun. It’s everything else that doesn’t work.
AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Make it F2P but charge for cosmetics that completely rework the art style. Almost all the characters look insufferable and I particularly want to punch Lennox in the face every time I see him.
chloyster@beehaw.org 2 months ago
Tbh the fact you even know a character’s name makes you an expert in my book. You know more than anyone I’ve ever talked to! 😅
AdamBomb@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
I had to look his name up myself. 😄 I was going to post a picture of his punchable face, but seeing the whole cast, he didn’t even stand out all that much compared to the rest. They all look like a bunch of bad cosplayers.
Butterbee@beehaw.org 2 months ago
There are DOZENS of people that know at least one character from Concord’s name
HeavyRaptor@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
It’s interesting that they are so repulsive to almost everyone (including me). I wonder what the specific traits are that makes people dislike the cast, I can’t quite put my finger on it.
(Except maybe for the roomba/hoover robot, that one seemed kinda interesting as a concept)
GammaGames@beehaw.org 2 months ago
I was trying to describe it to my partner and went with “the purple monkey, the girl with the gun, and a rainbow”
I’d accidentally combined two characters from the cover art
Faydaikin@beehaw.org 2 months ago
Don’t feel bad for them. Firewalk Studios may only have Concord to it’s name, but the Devs are all from Bungie and Activision. That should already ring some alarm bells.
They knew exactly what they were doing. They are the ones that sold the idea of Concord to Sony. For once I doubt Sony had to push for any of the bad decisions.
They didn’t waste $100 mill+ and 8 years development time on a random passion project. This was designed for a single reason, to make money in ridiculous amounts. To squeeze every penny out of kids and their parents.
I can’t feel bad for anyone that worked on something like that when it fails.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.
If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?
At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.
I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.
This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.
As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.
boundingintocomics.com/…/concord-dev-writes-off-c…
chloyster@beehaw.org 2 months ago
It’s def not a great look but it’s also only 1 former dev. I’m not going to judge the whole team on the words of 1 person who isn’t working there anymore
millie@beehaw.org 2 months ago
This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.
You’d be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don’t really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it’s made with passion and emotion
JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 months ago
Just read the article, id hardly call that a “meltdown” lol. Sure, it was unprofessional, but it wasn’t a rant. This article feels like it’s trying to spin a narrative that doesn’t exist.
The post in question.
Note that this is the only post they’re talking about. It wasn’t like a drawn out thread with name calling.
Again, not saying it’s professional, but calling this a meltdown? Come on now… Y’all are being ridiculous. This is like the tamest fucking tweet.