In gaming, people are talking about the end of the hero shooter Concord (Steam, PS5) as if it had hit an iceberg and sunk. There is talk of a “megaflop”. Sony allegedly paid 250 million US dollars for the game and Concord failed because it wanted to be too “woke”. It relied on diverse and overweight characters and that was the wrong approach. What is the truth in this?
This is the story of Concord in brief:
Concord has been developed since 2018 by “Firewalk” in Seattle. They belong to Probably Monsters. The company emerged from a spin-off of Destiny in 2016: The lead designer of Concord is the former weapons expert from Destiny 1, Joe Weisnewski.
Under the umbrella of this company, employees build several AAA multiplayer games in separate studios and sell these studios to interested customers.
Sony bought Firwalk and their game Concord in April 2023 for an undisclosed sum. Concord was to be part of an initiative to develop twelve live service games for PS5 by 2026. Helldivers 2 also emerged from this initiative.
Concord launched on PS5 and Steam on August 23. It flopped and had so few players that matchmaking didn’t work. Sony announced on September 3 that it was shutting down the game and refunding buyers their money.
Concord: ‘The Stars Are Ours’ Cinematic Vignette Season 0: Episode 0
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How many million dollars did the flop Concord cost Sony?
Did Sony really pay $250 million for Concord? No. We don’t know how much money Sony paid to buy Firewalk. We also don’t know the production costs of Concord. Saying the game cost $200 million is a somewhat malicious estimate that assumes that many well-paid employees worked on the game for 6 years as of 2018.
The $250 million comes from another corner: The parent company behind Firewalk, Probably Monster, raised that much money for all of its projects in an investor round in April 2022 (via gamesindustry , at the time there were 3 AAA multiplayer projects.
However, it is not possible to draw conclusions about the production costs of Concord or the purchase price of Firewalk from this figure.
It is safe to assume that Sony lost many millions with Concord – the exact amount is unknown. More conservative estimates are around $100 million.
“Concord flopped – because it’s too woke”
Why do people say it died? On social media, the “ugly characters” were blamed for Concord’s flop. Images of overweight characters were repeatedly shown on Twitter and YouTube as proof that such a game can only flop.
This is where the idea of “go woke, go broke” comes into play, which is often spread. The idea is that anyone who focuses on diversity and equality is wasting their resources in areas that no one cares about. Developers should focus on making a better game instead.
But that’s just an easily digestible and catchy reason that allowed people to criticize the game without looking into it in more detail. One picture is enough and everyone immediately has an opinion and can then easily say: “Ah, sure. That’s why it had to die. Sony must be crazy to release a game.”
In fact, the characters may have been partly responsible for the failure, but other games – such as the successful Overwatch – also have a deliberately diverse cast and “strong characters”, but they were successful.
This argument could have been made in some form in Overwatch as well – but it wasn’t.
Analyst says: Concord got long-term things right – short-term things wrong
What do experts say it died of? Analyst Daniel Ahmad has listed the reasons for Concord’s failure in detail. He says that Concord did many things right that are often criticized in other hero shooters after a long time (via Twitter):
Concord may have been polished, with a rich story and many features, but it missed everything else and focused on the wrong things, fulfilling the long-term goals before addressing the short-term goals of giving reasons to play the game in the first place.
The marketing campaign also failed completely, so no one saw the point in paying $40 to test the game.
Wrong genre, at the wrong time, at the wrong price
This is added: The “hero shooter” genre is similar to MOBA.
Many developers believe that there is a lot of hype surrounding the genre and that they want a piece of the pie themselves and develop a successful hero shooter with exciting characters and new mechanics. But so far only the two top dogs, Overwatch and Valorant, have been really successful – just as in the MOBA category only LoL and DOTA 2 are successful.
All other hero shooters like Paladins, Lawbreakers, Battleborn, Paragon and Crucible from Amazon have failed and in some cases have flopped terribly.
The problem is: players invest a lot of time in a game like Valorant, learn the game, the characters, build an account, grow fond of their skins and are happy about what they have achieved.
To give up all of that just to “learn a new game” where you start from scratch, players have to be offered a lot. Essentially, a new game like that has to look like the “next big thing” for people to even consider switching to it.
So far, only Valorant has managed to make people really say: “This is my future, I’m definitely switching to this game.” Among them is MeinMMO shooter expert Dariusz.
Nobody was actually waiting for any of the other hero shooters. New hero shooters make an offer for something for which there is little demand. Anyone who likes the genre plays Valorant or Overwatch, has built up their account there over the years, learned the games and invested a lot of money and time in them.
There’s little incentive to switch to a new game that wants $40 and is already being mocked all over social media.
Another problem is the “Battleborn/Evolve” problem: A high-profile game comes out and the developer hopes for a big success. For players, however, it looks like a free2play title because it has been established in the genre that titles are free2play. When players then see that they have to pay money, a catastrophic flop occurs: I never fully recovered from my trauma with the monster game “Evolve”.