The Frustrating Contrast Between Concord's Failure & Astro Bot's Success (The Jimquisition)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 พ.ย. 2024
- / jimquisition
bsky.app/profi...
www.thejimporiu...
Concord represents a new low for the "live service" goldrush, lasting only two weeks before Sony pulled the plug. Meanwhile, the same publisher just put out Astro Bot to joyful acclaim! One is a game nobody asked for, the other is a game people clamored for.
Why do companies keep pumping their budgets into the former and neglecting the latter? Because executives and investors are inherently stupid.
#Concord #AstroBot #Sony #PS5 #PC #LiveService #HeroShooter #JimSterling #Jimquisition #StephanieSterling #Games #Gaming #Videogames
![🔴 ฟุตบอลแชมป์กีฬา 7HD แชมเปียน คัพ 2024 [รอบรองชนะเลิศ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zPm8ClLVhoE/mqdefault.jpg)
It's weird how "8 years of development time" and "unreasonable deadlines leading to crunch" can exist in the same phrase, but this is the world we live in.
*Cries in Star Citizen*
Poor management is poor management. It's like giving someone that procrastinates 1-2 extra weeks to do something, expecting them suddenly to become productive and not procrastinate more.
If a game takes 8 years, you can bet there was a lot of re-working, re-booting, re-re-doing there. I'm sure they scrapped a lot of things and started back from scratch and they ran out of time eventually.
Crunch is Inefficient.
@@octavianpopescu4776 Yup, that's usually how it goes.
It's actually shocking how intensely Concord stinks of "focus-tested" in every conceivable aspect. It legit doesn't have an original bone in its body. The characters literally just throw zingers and one-liners back and forth as a substitute for a personality.
This is why you let actual creative people with real creative vision handle characters and world building, and not soulless execs who possess about as much humanity as chatGPT
And who do you think pushed those "focus tests"? Couldn't be HR and marketing departments that are operating under "The message"
@@Aging_Casually_Late_Gamer Piss off, weirdo
what agenda is there in Concord?@@Aging_Casually_Late_Gamer
@@Aging_Casually_Late_Gamer Ah yes. The "message" pushed by the "deep state" at war against "western civilization".
Did I miss a dogwhistle?
Concord from its title to the character, to the art design and concept looks like it was conceived by corporate marketing firm using focus group research data.
You missed the part where Sony's CFO put out a statement about Sony not having enough original IPs to make games with in literally the same timeframe as Astro Bot came out showing off all of Sony's IPs lmao.
Imagine being a game developer and not thinking that you literally have the ability to create new IPs.
It's not even all of them, we're still to see rep from Twisted Metal, Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, and other such PlayStation classics. They're doing a DLC from what I've heard, so that means even more cameos from Sony and Sony-adjacent IPs.
Meanwhile Nintendo just gave a franchise dormant for decades a sequel because a developer poked a Nintendo creative lead(the Metroid game) to write down the idea he had ans not forget it.
...clearly Sony needs someone to poke their creative leads.
(Note, Miyamoto has no.F Zero ideas, poking him won't help there)
They probablly mean that they dont have enough Ip's to make cinematic games with
@@ShenDoodles They don't own Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts.
When I was a smol child and played netball at school, I used to get deeply frustrated watching every other child chase frantically and uselessly after the ball. Netball has strict zones for each position that you can't leave, and the person holding the ball can't move, so if everyone chases the ball then whoever gets it has nowhere to throw it. They had to hurl it into an empty bit of the court, and then all the kids would chase to that side after it.
The games industry chasing what is "popular" and "profitable" really reminds me of those netball games.
Yeesh. What a good analogy.
F*ck netball. Worst sport I was ever forced to play.
@@gokuxsephiroth4505 occasionally, years after I left school, i'll have dreams where someone is blowing a whistle at me and screaming "footwork" because I dared to lift one of my feet or something while holding the ball
What a perfect analogy, im stealing it.
sorry, i meant i'm sampling it and feeding it to my AI and then claiming whatever it spits out as my original work.
Very fitting metaphor. Another I recall seeing in comic form was dozens of small boats on a lake, fishing.
One guy finally catches something, and then every boat goes to that location, casting their line in the same spot.
This game looked like a teen would be playing it in the background of a streaming series drama where the new guy the mom is dating barely pays any attention to her child, but this time, he makes a genuine attempt and asks, “Hey, what are you playing, little guy?”
That absolutely exists in some series nobody watches and you won't convince me otherwise.
YES! Nailed it.
I think Angry Joe said the same thing during the stream of the beta test.
@@mediawarrior5957 I do not watch his streams at all. But you’re stating he said this verbatim?
@@BlackZynfyndel it was him or the other joe
Pretty impressive that they managed to create a hero shooter where everyone looks like a background character.
THIS
Yes *this*
I would not be able identify any of these characters if you threw them in the background of say... any kind of cyberpunk genre media. 😅
This sums it up too perfectly. They absolutely look like they were just snagged out of the background of Cyberpunk 2077
I'll add that near everyone has missed thus far. Hero shooter is referred to ZERO times by Firewalk studios in all trailers, marketing promotions and press releases. The entirety of the character and game design follow a family friendly team shooter. It's everyone else comparing it to Overwatch, etc.
Thus players appear expecting heroic avatars: and receive mall cops/janitors.
Won't go into too much for their design failures. Next to inflicted with vomit inducing colors, beige/ochre environments, similar body types, is how all the characters are structurally male. The motion capture is all closed leg, zero hip waggle running from even the feminine featured characters.
In summary, it just stinks of subversion.
I've seen much more interesting background characters.
basically it failed because
A) poor marketing
B) awful character designs
C) oversaturation of hero shooters
D) an entry fee when other hero shooters were free
How much was the entry fee anyway?
Said it before, will say it again. Concord broke the most important rule of an action based competitive video game. Something we've known since DotA. Something that the likes of Valve and Blizzard perfected with their team shooters.
Character. Designs. Must. Be. DISTINCT. You have to be able to tell what you're fighting against in the blink of an eye. Distinct weapons, body types, sizes. Not Concord. Concord made most of the cast... Generic human shape with gun. That tells you nothing about what you're fighting at a glance. They don't have special stances, their animations aren't unique or stand out enough, and they all look the goddamn same. TWO characters stand out. TWO! Chaingun lady and walking trash can.
The designs themselves, in a vacuum? Fine, I guess. But fine doesn't help if you want to compete in the genre.
I mean. Look at Overwatch's tanks. Each one plays considerably different, and each one LOOKS considerably different at a glance. You know exactly what you're getting into when you see a giant hammer instead of a gorilla.
it is like they made paladins and everyone is victor
@@Sauvva_ that's exactly it
I think is just to show how higher ups are so out of touch with games in general for far too long... I bet the poor devs tried to warn them for years this was a bad idea
@@TheDoomBlueShell Oh absolutely. I feel so so bad for the people involved. The game obviously has a lot of love put into it, but it just... Yeah.
Nobody listens to the people actually doing the work, and this is what we get.
Jim Ryan deserves a fair amount of blame for Concord. His push for more live-services has done significant harm to Sony's first party stufios
Sony also liquidated Japan Studio to fund Concord. They worked on Bloodborne, the Ico games, Parappa the Rapper, Vib Ribbon, Ape Escape, Demon Souls, Shadow of the Colossus, Okagi, Gravity Rush, Ghosts of Tsushima, and so many more amazing games. I will never forgive Sony.
The few survivors of that liquidation got merged into Team Asobi. Who developed Astro Bot.
...Well that explains roughly half of the cameos in Astro Bot.
What a tragedy! They made so many great games.
Ghost of Tsushima? But that was sucker punch
Sony has completed its transformation into a soulless Western AAA publisher.
This is the forst time I read this and it's absolutely heartbreaking.
It just keeps happening. The latest trend is copying Overwatch; in the past it was everyone trying to copy Call of Duty, and before that everyone trying to copy World of Warcraft. And even more before that which I probably am not familiar with. Always without considering that people already had that game and wouldn't be interested in a game that does all the same stuff without any meaningful changes or hook to appeal otherwise.
Doom before WoW, yeah.
I mean, do you have any idea how many Sonic clones there were? It's a lot
Yup trend chasing is built into the industry and culture in general. Remember when Sonic became big back in the mid90s? You had a dozen different anthropomorphic animal mascot platformers being shovelled out. Captain Claw, Zool, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel, Titus the Fox, Quik the Thunder Rabbit, Bubsy the Bobcat etc. Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot was popular so you saw some of the surviving studios trying to push their old animal mascots into a 3D platformer. Then, like you mentioned, we had World of Warcraft (MMOs), League of Legends (MOBAs), Minecraft (even the Yogscast tried to make a voxel based Minecraft knockoff) and many more 'trends' that big studios have chased and failed to capitalize on once the trend is firmly set by someone else, I mean do you remember the absolute flood of Battle Royale games?
Even the indies follow suite, Vampire Survivors created basically its own genre and suddenly everyone and their mother is releasing a 'Survivorlike/Bullet Heaven', Roguelike Deck builders seem to be blasted out at such pace and frequency you can literally play a new one every week.
To show it's not JUST in video game, during the late 80s/early 90s you also had the 'crime fighting anthropomorphic animal team' kids cartoons boom and bust, Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles led to other companies trying to copy it with Street Sharks, Biker Mice from Mars, Dinosaucers etc.
Actually we're a few trends past copying Overwatch - that was more a thing in late 2010s. Concord was super late to that party.
All those match-3 Games.
All those mediocre rpgs and Point and click adventures trying to ape the good ones.
It has always been thus(ly?). We just don't remember the failures.
If people don't like Concord, I'm worried how they'll feel about Lexington.
Wait, Concord's a game?!
Look, people shit on the Minutemen, you really think they'll like Lexington?
Wait, the Minutemen were also a group in Fallout 4!?
Was. Concord *was* a game.
Personally I prefer green grapes.
Wait, we're not talking about grapes?
As a MA native, Lexington is better than Concord. It has a Qdoba.
I'm still wondering where this contrast between a game and a plane with a pointy nose that was shutdown decades ago is.
I just learned the other day, tabletop board games are a boom industry, even though everyone figured they'd fizzle out as soon as the pandemic was over. Which I think says everything anybody needs to know about it: it's 2024, we have endless entertainment in our pockets, supercomputers 1000x more powerful than the ones they used to go to the moon to play our games, and an endless variety of streaming services to cater to every whim... but all the industries just keep producing so much crap that most of us are just like "Meh, let's just play a board game instead."
We really have hit total entertainment saturation. You could vow right now to never experience any media made past 2024 for the rest of your life and you would still never run out of things to watch, read, play, or listen to in your lifetime. It generates far more interesting questions and implications than any of the media itself.
Board games have been having a renaissance and most recently a resurgence in recent years. I’ve been having a blast playing them.
There is one big difference between the tabletop industry and the video game industry. A lot of the companies in the tabletop industry aren't publicly traded companies (or owned by one) that have spineless CEO's and ignorant shareholders trying to constantly earn higher and higher profits from year to year. For most of them, as long as they make enough to pay the bills and afford to release new products, they'll keep going for years and even decades.
Yea, there's Games Workshop (publicly traded) and Wizards of the Coast (owned by Hasbro), and you can easily find plenty of complaints about how they treat their games and customers. But there's a lot of other modest sized tabletop gaming companies out there that have been in business for a long, long time. Ones that listen to their customers, frequently before big decisions become financially irreversible, and aren't worried about a bunch of clueless investors that demand more profits each year.
the only games i play on my phone are emulators, gba and ds have way better games than android and can actually run on my cheap phone
They are not, nearly everyone in TTRPG publishing struggle.
... oh my god. Does anyone remember that episode of the Simpsons where Lisa's science fair project was proving that Bart was dumber than a hamster? There was a scene in there where a cupcake was left out for Bart, but when he grabbed it, it gave him a mild electric shock, but he kept grabbing it over and over until "*bzzt* Ow!" was all that could be heard in the house?
Bart is a video game executive.
(Also, Disney, if you use that, I want my Story By credit and all the rights and royalties that come with it, understood?)
Story by KingOfDoma by the Simpsons.
That $200 million could've been spent on 40 games in different genres with a $5 million budget to find out what actually sells well and build upon in the future. It's infuriating how relevant your "Perfect Pasta Sauce" video is even to this day.
400*
I dont know how they thought this game was gonna make money when it had basically zero marketing and charge 40 bucks when the competition is free to play
People keep pulling the "it wasn't free to play" as if that was an issue, when it isn't. It being free to play wouldn't have solved any of the problems and wouldn't have made the game better (actually worse, since free to play games are all filled with invasive microtransactions, battle passes, etc) or made it popular. It having a fixed priced isn't an issue as Helldivers 2 proved to you this year.
The model was NOT the problem, the marketing and the game itself was.
It has marketing it just looks like ass
@@suplextrain it sure didn't help tho
more like the marketing were absolutely forceful and obnoxious to the point that people avoid them like the plague. They marketed it as the next big thing and even have an episode spot in the upcoming Secret Level animated series that featured worlds from various "well loved and popular" games.
I'm pretty sure the first thing I heard about the game is that it was failing.
“Singleplayer is dead” [my eyes roll back in my head and i begin levitating] Astro Bot. Baldur’s Gate 3. Alan Wake 2. Tears of the Kingdom. Stray. Control. I can keep going.
Like exactly one of those is worth playing lol
To be fair, Baldur's Gate 3 has optional multiplayer.
@@lnsflare1 Isn't it a co-op thing?
You are using a normal reading, in corpo speech "Singleplayer is dead" mean "Multipleplayer games can make more money so I shouldn't invest in Singleplayer games".
However, it does assume that your multiplayer games is going to be successful which is way way harder to do.
I like how exec and investor got brain rot and can only think in simple terms and concept.
@@muizzsiddique I mean, barring some sort of very dextrous multiple personality disorder situation, co-op is a type of multiplayer.
I love how the concept of Concord is so boring that Laura Kate Dale left it spelled as "Convord" in the subtitles at one point. It's a "fuck it" of a game.
More like BORING-CORD am I right? I have my way with words, that's why I can come up with the best words. Call me the word smith 🌈😗
Claims to be a "Live Service"
Dies anyway
"The message here is that everyone should make mascot platformers constantly and turn them into live services, right?" - Captain Executive
MBA, Dumb & Dumber School of Economics.
And if your a Ubi Exec, ”Double down on the Live service! And add only Microtransactions!"
8:10 this is also known as "The Matt Groening Rule"
A character should be recognisable by their silhouette.
That was a very important part of the TF2 character design.
@@thrillhouse4151 & in general character design overall! Something that's somewhat 'deliberately' omitted
@@Metalisalearning77makes sense
Concord failed not because of diversity, but because it lacked diversity.
It's also why the Bad Apple music video is so great
Finally, i can learn what all the fuss is about concord grape jelly.
Yeah, this is pretty much the only outlet I trust for gaming news, since every other gaming youtuber would just say "wokeness bad" as the reason something failed.
Oh i just completely missed everything about this game. I only heard about it after it failed and hoped that my favorite game industry journalist would explain what it was.
This is great xD need jellies and jams
@@NamelessInternautExcept for the explicitly "anti-woke" TH-camrs, who don't give a crap anyway, people seem to very clearly avoid mentioning the so-called "wokeness" of the game.
@@NamelessInternaut Bellular News is very good as well, and there's Second Wind despite the controversy.
After talking to some business people in the industry I realized that they don't really care that most of their live service attempts will fail because one single mega success will make 100 failure worth it, and they want to make sure that mega success happens to them and not their competitors because whoever take that pie first will get to keep it for a very long time. They'll have no choice but to keep trying because their competitors will keep trying too. And they have no clue which game will be the next big thing because the data shows no clear pattern, the only strategy they got is to keep firing at the dark just for the off chance that they hit something.
Great, game publishers are turning into venture capitalists like softbank. What a mess
Run those slot machines or someone else will win the jackpot! You might be millions in the hole now but it will all be worth it if... /once/ you win.
A Spyro and Crash Sequel / Crossover game got shot down by Activation Blizzard because they demanded a live service game instead.
They had a motivated and creative team ready and excited to make their Astrobot, but managment put a bunch of them on COD and they where asked to make the failure that is Crash Team Rumble instead.
Fantastic management...how dumb can you get
Yup, still weeping for Toys for Bob. Them were done dirty by.
In the 80s, you could bang out a copy of a popular game in months.
In the 90s, you could get a Mario or Sonic clone out on a year.
Yes, they'd still mostly fail, but sometimes you got a Rocket Knight Adventures or a Joe & Mac.
Now? By the time you've started your fad chasing game, we'll be two fads past that by the time it's out. We've gone from hero shooter into battle royale, and now people are getting tired of those, too
I remember Totalbiscuit once saying, "You dont become a leader by following."
Innovating and coming up with something new is hard. And it may still fail.
But it's better than spaffing $100 million up the wall, making a worse version of something we already have!
Robert E. Lee for "stupidly" is an excellent choice, well done.
To be fair to the cracker, he was at least opposed to the glorification of the confederacy, which makes him less supid than most modern conservatives... Doesn't change the fact that he fought for the confederacy and was a certified cracker though.
I hope Stan Lee is used for 'creatively' and a Dodge Charger for 'generally'.
The worst part about Concord is thinking about some poor dev who devoted years of their life to something that was available for less time than the overtime they spent working on it.
they could've thought about the massive fuel consumption on "faster than sound" flights way before starting to develop that plane.
Gamers are not responsible for funding the bad life choices of developers
I don't feel bad for them, at least they still got paid. This is one of the few videos I've seen that's so harshly criticized the actual gameplay. As far as I can tell the devs made a perfectly serviceable shooter, and they can be proud of that at least. I'm sure they will land somewhere soon to work on their next project. The people you really need to worry about are the ones who designed those God-awful characters.
Yeah. It was the first thought when heard about this. I just hope people changed workplaces during the development to get some credits for things that actually succeeded and not tank their whole career by sitting with this for 8 years.
I fully do not have sympathy as this was not made to succeed in the first place. No optics, marketing consultation, or even basic awareness predicted this as a success. Blatantly meant to oppose the "toxic gamers' out there even though the market is mostly composed of those supposedly "toxic gamers". Like trying to sell beef to pure vegans, it was a dumb idea.
As someone that used to work in the video-game industry decades ago (that the Gods I got out), this copy-and-paste development strategy of someone else's success isn't new. It plagued us then and its only gotten worse. I cannot tell you how many times management wanted us to replicate 3 years of someone else's development time/money/resources in 6 months or less on our side of things
It isn't exclusive to gaming either, the same has been seen countless times in movies or music. Everyone's always trying to cash in on popular trends, usually completely ignoring what made the given thing popular in the first place.
Edit: typo
City of Heroes was not a pretender! It came out before WoW and only died due to it not making enough money, even when it was still making profits :(
Agreed! That game still means so much to me!
Sadly I couldn’t afford it when it was out, but damn if I didn’t imagine dozens of player concepts when I saw the premise.
@qwinlyn you can play on private servers still if you just want to mess around in the character creator. Search for city of Heroes homecoming
Not sure if Steph meant it in this way, but “pretender” can also just mean aspiring to get to the top (e.g. a pretender to the throne) rather than an imitator or faker.
WoW was already kinda late to the MMO craze that really kicked off with Everquest, blizzard's success just took it to another level. same with overwatch actually...
Astrobot looks like a game that we used to be drowning in during the PS2 era. Then publishers stopped making them. Probably because they weren't making all the money. Now, when they get released, they sell pretty well because the demand was still there. It just hasn't been supplied in years.
This feels like the tomato sauce problem every time. There is only so much demand for the "trends" the executives and shareholders are chasing. They keep thinking something is dead. When their committee made slop doesn't sell. When it is because the market is already satiated with what they currently have and the slop isn't anything new. Then the market starves for years or decades. Only to flare up again when someone's passion project finally feeds the demand.
I'm with Steph on this. It's really tiresome and tedious to watch the same bloody mistakes over and over again.
To watch the same mistakes repeated while nothing it is being learned. You always know the outcome in ever single case because it has already happened.
As in the games industry, so in every other... Not to mention government. 🫠
@@Ahrpigi Shortsightedness is all over the place, yeah.
They learned they can make themselves money. Keep their jobs and fire the studio and then do it again. They are learning the same lesson that always happens. Game fails? Not my fault even tho it was. Game does well? Take all the credit. Game does so-so? Take the credit AND sack the studio.
Same as it ever was when making profit to themselves is the goal, not making a good product.
"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything, tee hee hee" - Yahtzee Croshaw
I'm not. I'm laughing.
Saving money has never felt so good.
The industry activists and devs constantly said "its not for you!" And now I'm being blamed for every failure. Lol
I mean it was bloody obvious when it was revealed. It’s just incredible how quick it was. The termination coming the same week as the fantastic success of Astro Bot is bloody brilliant. Lessons will need to be learned. But I bet Sony learn the wrong message. How long till they announce a Astro Bot live service and it kills Team Asobi?
It should be a no brainer to look at statistics, pick the genre that has the least product recently released or in the works and let a small team with a reasonable budget make a lower price game. The low budget lowers the risk if it fails, the low price makes it more likely for people to pick it up on a whim and since there are only few products competing, the customers who wants games like this might be a bit more forgiving.
This strategy would also allow the studios to establish new ip's with little risks, check if there is interest in old ip's or if there is interest in different genre spinoffs of established ip's.
Those smaller projects probably are also a good way to train new employees, develop now features and mechanics that could then later be ported into larger projects.
Also in regards to development hell for Concord, supposedly the character design is design by committee and was forced on the developers/designers from higher up.
I mean when was the last time we had a good, if campy, RTS game? Like come on EA have been dropping the ball for years with Command and Conqueror, the last good one was Red Alert 3, surely there's someone out there that could hire B list actors, stand them infront of a green screen and talk nonsense for a while and have a competent RTS with it.
The silhouette test was definitely taught to me and my class in art school. It's pivotal for making strong character designs and checking to see if your character was recognizable no matter what pose they're in. It's not an easy thing to pull off.
Looks like Concords design team needs to go back to school.
Sony's CEO complained that Sony doesn't have enough original IPs, but my dude... the reason we don't have Bloodborne 2 is that Sony owns the rights to it and refuses to do anything with it.
The only think that frustrates me about Concords failure is that now there’s a flood of videos about how “pronouns” and “diversity” was made Concord fail. 😣
Edit: totally agree with the end of your video 😅
God, these people are insufferable. There are a million reasons why Concord failed, but they had to choose one that doesn't exist.
@@resileaf9501people don't like ugly characters, who could have guessed?
@@Professor_Utonium_ People like ugly characters well enough. Just look at Roadhog and Junkrat in Overwatch. What they don't like is *uninspired* characters.
@@resileaf9501 There is something to be said there that Junkrat and Roadhog are dudes. Gamers get mad about "ugly" WOMEN and queer characters cause they can't jack off to them. And they admit as much more often than not!
@@resileaf9501 I see your point on that. But what if they ALL looked like those two in particular? I think that's half of Concord's issue. Good point
I have ONE criticism of this video, daring to put a gem like Club Penguin next to firefall should be a punishable crime
City of Heroes also did nothing wrong and was released before WoW.
Here's my most worrying concern...... investors and executives aren't going to look at Concord........ *They're gonna look at Deadlock.* Because deadlock has peaked at over 150k and it's not even released.......
It's honestly hilarious. They look at games like BG3 and Elden Ring and say shit like "it's too risky," meanwhile Concord makes history as the biggest financial failure in games history. Amazing.
It's extra frustrating that they will look at Deadlock and not take the ACTUAL proper lessons from it. I've liked all I've seen in Deadlock and it's so insane that after it comes out and will as it currently sits "do well" none of that will matter because other companies will just think they can copy and paste and success will follow. They are going to repeat the same problems the MMO craze had, the same problems with Battle Royale craze had, the same problems will continue to happen with each popular release because everyone else will sell the lie that copying will bring success and that's it. F the people in charge, they are such pathetic leeches on our market anymore.
See Warner Bros, Hogwarts Legacy the top selling game of its year, Suicide Squad and what WB decided to follow
That game benefits from being FTP from a publisher that owns the defacto PC storefront monopoly. Even there, I suspect that it might pull players from their existing TF2 game. Though considering how little Valve cares about that game, they probably welcome it lol.
@@jessicahansen1288 When executives say "It's too risky," what they actually mean is "there's no chance of it giving us all of the money." They don't want a near-guaranteed success that will sell many copies and turn a substantial profit, they want to gamble on the lottery win of having a gold mine of a live service that prints obscene amounts of money for them. They've got enough contingencies protecting them if their lottery ticket loses, so chasing that big win is more profitable in the long run than contenting themselves with more modest successes.
16:58
What's funny as well is back in the day, mascot-platformers were the trend game companies were chasing relentlessly (google a list of game mascots from the 90's if you want to go down a fun rabbit hole). It really goes to show that not only are there still audiences for those types of games, the successful ones all have a unique vision drive the development instead of chasing the trend
Concord: so-called because one critical failure ultimately gets the whole enterprise shitcanned.
Concord crashed quicker than the Concorde in Airport '80.
Maybe devs can go back to making fun games instead of thinly veiled gaming addiction sims
See, that's their mistake. No Droop Snoots.
@@Elwaves2925 See I find the comparrison to the Concorde aircraft kind of...well it just doesn't work. Concorde was innovative (Concord is not), it did (after fixing the teething troubles) achieve it's goal of being a Supersonic passenger jet (Concord didn't achieve anything beyond being shut down fast), it lasted several decades in service (Concord didn't last a month) and it was seen as a highly prestigious thing to fly on Concorde (nothing was prestigious about Concord).
@@luketfer You are correct but I wasn't making that type of full, across the board comparison. It also wasn't to the real Concorde. I was simply comparing the game to the fictional version of Concorde in the film Airport '80. Maybe you didn't get that reference as it is quite old nowadays. but in short, both ended up crashing shortly after take-off. 🙂
I certainly hope that this is the beginning of the end for the prominence of "Live service games".
We'll know it's dead when Konami releases one 5 years after everyone else stopped
Nope. The trend won't end until Fortnite stops making billions every year, which is a long way off.
Not a chance. Did you miss the "never learn" part?
@@thescrewfly "Lets all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee-hee-hee"
We've gotten to the point where aiming for widespread success is actually a sign of probable failure. And that means game executives have totally lost touch with what makes games good. Not that they ever knew that to begin with.
Game developers might care about customer happiness, but game executives only care about investor happiness. Because game executives don't get paid millions to worry about customers, only about investors.
The word corporation describes a resource-based dictatorship. Authoritarianism not just unethical, its incompetent. If you ever wonder why the world is like this, remember that basically all the world's resources are not managed by democracy.
Don’t say resource when you mean money
@@shinobicl I mean, don't they monopolize both?
you were there up until you believed that democracy does anything or has a sustainable model when the same corporations are responsible for telling you that democracy exists and works
To quote Kim Stanley Robinson's sci-fi novel Blue Mars:
"If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter the workplace? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue-control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism."
@@20xdee6 Yet, corporations end up fighting against democracy: either trying to erase it and install a dictator who would pander to them, or trying to corrupt it till votes are replaced by money spent
Sony the same company that is complaining about not having IP's while they reject a pitch from the original creator of "Wild arms" for a new one, Only for the Kickstarters for spiritual successors like "Armed fantasia" & "Ratatan" to be super successful.
In the mid-2000s I worked in several toy stores that also sold video games. In a roughly two year period, I must have had to put together displays for at least half a dozen MMORPGs that were expected to compete with World of Warcraft.
Funny thing about the silhouette test: it's not just a matter of aesthetics, it's a vital element of a roster-based game's mechanical design. When playing a shooter, you need to process information rapidly, and skins will change the color of your targets to such an extent as to make it non-informative. Having a consistent and recognizable silhouette conveys tactical information to other players by informing them at a glance what character they're looking at, so having them pop up not only against others in the same game but in general is a gameplay hygiene factor. Indeed, character memorability as a whole helps with learning the game by giving you a good reference point for all the ability information you need to remember.
Which is to say, "just cosmetics" can help you git good at roster games, and if they suck then that will impact the mechanical core of the game.
As I said before: the "woke" angle of Concord was not a problem, but it sure as hell was a symptom. Because as willing as the Firewalk Studios rep was to come off as a dick about it, in the end pronouns in the character selection screen and shit were all blended together in the same cauldron. Not because of representation, but rather because "oh hey, wokeness seems to be all the rage nowadays".
In other words, exploitation as the natural consequence of trend-chasing. Thankfully Sony execs thought the single player, fun platformer drought being the cause of many a gamer's lament was also a "trend" (it wasn't) and thus we got Astro Bot. Wow, a game that reminded players what made Sony great in the first place turned out to appeal to nostalgia for good, 90's-inspired platformers and generally good games of yesteryear! Who knew?!
Long live Astro Bot.
it was the main problem honestly, every problem it has roots back to it
he just doesn't want to admit the obvious like so many journos and journo adjacent people
Good use of the word "ouruboruos" there. I'm over 60 and that's the first time I've heard it pronounced. Thank you.
"Characters should be recognizable from their silhouettes." is an old rule from cartooning. It worked so well for Disney that, for most of the past century, they have basically owned the concept of two circles partially overlapping a third underneath them.
You're forgetting, Steph. These companies aren't actually thinking about the future. They're not thinking of years down the line; Hell they're not thinking about months down the line. They're only thinking about the burst money they can make short-term. That's always the most important factor.
The sad part is that now that Astro Bot is a commercial success, we already know it's essentially sentenced to death. Be it by "live service" or by executives having their way with it. It's like being the attractive one of the room. The attention is nice, but that person knows they're doomed to have to deal with creepy people.
City of Heroes having a gravestone.
Meanwhile the undead body broke free and became City of Heroes: Homecoming.
Superheroes staying dead? When the day still needs to be saved?
Ha! 😛
Can't wait the the game industry to learn absolutely nothing from Concord's failure and Astro Bot's success
Astro Bot will be called a fluke, and we won't see another one.
I've actually seen people saying "If you didn't buy Concord, you're a Bigot and don't belong in my community." Which I find absolutely ridiculous. It was a Bad game that cost 40 dollars where the vast majority of other games in the genre are free.
You haven’t seen that
nah you fuckin didn't mate
We literally witnessed history with Concord. It's quite possibly the biggest failure gaming has ever seen and probably will ever see.
And they'll learn nothing.
Assume nothing. Someone else down the line will surpass said failure.
remember that Callisto Protocol cost $160mil... and Fable Legends cost $100mil & never even released
@@Downhuman74 you could say... let's all laugh at an industrie that never learns anything, tee hee hee?
The biggest failure in gaming... So Far!!!
A goddamn Bucky o' Hare reference in 2024? Moment she said Willie DeWitt, it was like an ancient tomb was unearthed in my brain of a show I'd forgotten I absolutely loved.
8 years in development, which puts the start of development solidly after the release of overwatch in may 2016.
Sony literally saw overwatch and decided to jump on the bandwagon and by the time they got their competitor product to market nobody was even interested in overwatch anymore.
Tale as old as time.
At least Concord will be remembered for one thing, the fastest shut down of a live service game.
*SO FAR* anyway. A hard record to beat, but a gay black samurai in ancient Japan ... well, it's not impossible.
@@AdLockhorst-bf8pzAC Shadows isn't live service.
@@jlev1028 I used to like AC games ... but got ever more bored with them. To me the final straw was the Chinese woman in the Viking settlement in Britain. Stacking stones on eachother is why I stopped playing those games.
That said woman sends a letter IN ENGLISH to her family IN CHINA makes no sense, that an answer IN ENGLISH arrives for her the next time you visit the Viking settlement - literally from the other side of the world - is just beyond absurd. I mean, the ROYAL MAIL did not exist back then and sailing to the other side of the world ... the long way around (no canal in Egypt or Panama) ...
Willing suspension of disbelief has its limits.
Not that I think Concord is even slightly a hill to fight for, but, seriously, why should we support any game we love if the development team is all going to be fired the second they’re no longer of use to their evil overlords?
Love Steph’s content! One of the most important voices in gaming, and too often overlooked. Great video.
More like black listed. Sterling has always been an excellent journalist.
The character silhouette is literally game design 101. Failing at that is just inexcusable
Concord's character designs in the select screen are like if you spent generations trying to master realistic graphics all just to emulate the stiltedness and complete lack of costume budget of a 3DO FMV game.
And the art direction of "remove all distinguishing marks, we don't want to get sued by whoever (I can't recall) we copied."
Concord is weird for me, I've been a gaming hobbyist for 30+ years and my preferred console line is PlayStations, and I never even heard of the game until it was called the biggest flop in gaming history. That's weird, like no advertising or marketing at all? They knew it would flop at some point in development and would've preferred to bury it, but all that money was sunk into the project, so they couldn't afford to bury it. What a mess.
There was plenty of marketing. There was also a lot of non-marketing coverage in the media after its State of Play trailer last summer felt like such a cock tease. As an older gamer, you're probably just not in the sphere that marketers target anymore and so you won't hear about much of what's going on if you're not actively following the hobby.
Club Penguin among those graves is a bit unfair. It was a massive sucess on it''s time with 10 - 14 years old teenagers, and it's sorely mourned in Brazil, with many people still hoping for something close to it. Those people did'nt play WoW, and many never cared for it even after being able to afford it- but give us Ragnarok Online or Club Penguin. Only the Tibia guys prosper.
On the positive side, using the Total Recall mask lady saying "Two Weeks"? Chef kiss... That movie is sucha an abundant source of memes.
Edit - at the end comentary, calling those weird guys as Tyranids, of course, I agree, makes sense. More specifically, they should be GENRE STEALERS.
Concord took 4 years to make. The studio was formed 6 yeard ago. The 8 year number is from a misunderstanding, according to the devs on Twitter.
I'd say that's arguably worse as it means they decided to begin chasing the Overwatch trend 3 or 4 years too late
4 years...for all the difference that makes.
Which is still embarrassing when Astro Bot took 3 years with a team of 60.
@kamurotetsu4860 and Sony likely didn't dump as much money on it as they did on Concord.
You know what's really funny (or sad)? Sony's execs said they basically don't regret Concord's massive failure and will announce ANOTHER ~live service~ game.
Gaming execs are just gambling at this point.
You'd think they'd learn when they bought bungie to figure out what their secret to success was and it became immediately apparent that bungie mostly just got fucking lucky.
They are gambling yes. The highest payout for live service games is way high and they all think they can hit the next big thing.
I remember the bureau.
I remember it specifically because it was cheaper to buy a bundle of xcom *and* the bureau.
They fully paid me to buy the game alongside xcom.
People who already have Overwatch, TF2, Apex Legends and other options were not leaving them in favour of another new title with nothing new to offer, specially if the ticket will cost them 40 bucks. Heck, Marvel knows this and is releasing their attempt at it for free.
No matter how well Astro Bot performs, Sony will never bring back any of their old IPs that were featured in the game.
No thought at all how several small games could cover for Concord tanking. Wukong's third party revenue and ASTRO Bot can't plug that 2## mil hole
[Concord] i sleep
[Astro Bot] Real shit?
[Bucky O'Hare] *_ascended_*
Having a clear silhouette is fundamentally important in character design- especially superhero character design.
"Mascot Platformer," _that's_ what you call those games! Forgot the term, wasn't sure how to describe them in short-hand. The main-line Mario games, Jak and Daxter, Banjo Kazooie, those old Spongebob games, and "game where you run, jump, fight, and grab floating objects" don't really roll off the tongue as well.
Thank god for you, Stephanie.
In all the time its been out, astrobot is the first time my family has even discussed getting a ps5. We have a ps3 and ps4, and felt no need to get a ps5 cause nothing appealed or seemed worth how expensive it is. But....i want to olay astrobot so bad.
Sidenote: i cant believe you mentioned bucky o'hare. I had a compilation video tape of it growing up so much, but never knew anyone else who had even heard of it. That theme is throwing me right back
In all those 8 years, did nobody in the office at any point go "Hey, don't you think this is a bit shit?"
Yeah, and then the executives who have probably never played a video game in their life because cocaine fills all their dopamine desires without any need to get some form of of basic competency first went, "What? No, the kids will totally think that this game is the cats pajamas. Now do some more mandatory unpaid overtime, serf."
I bet folks were very aware and made a point of telling people, but the wrong people were incharge of greenlighting milestones and werent allowed to fix what was locked in.
Managers and executives didn't care. The execs already got the investors onboard so they were getting massive bonuses either way. And the managers got paid big salaries for 8 years of doing basically nothing. Trust me, the folks that got paid don't think of this project as a failure. To them, the stocks and high salaries are the product, not the game.
@@dangerousdays2052 " To them, the stocks and high salaries are the product, not the game." Holy shit that's a great way to put it
@@dangerousdays2052 That's an excellent way to put it
i 100% though astrobot was a holiday release till you reminded me it existed.
I thought somebody typoed Astroboy.
Should mention, ignoring the cost to develop it in the first place and accounting for inflation, it STILL cost more to make the game Concord than it took to build a Concorde supersonic passenger jet. And even though it was technically also a failure in the long run, the passenger jet at least actually flew regularly, was a thing of pride for two nations AND got bootlegged by other nations (IIRC Russia had an equivalent).
I literally never even heard of Concord until people started talking about how it had failed. The first mention of it I remember seeing was a thumbnail of one of Arlo's videos labeled "MEGA FLOP" with the title "Concord is Flopping Harder Than Even I Expected", and I just remember thinking "...what the fuck is Concord?"
8:09 -- By the way, not sure if you're already aware of this, but having a recognizable silhouette is one of the principles of animation, one of the first and most important things you learn when studying animation. Granted, it's more for poses and movement than character design, but it's the same idea. If the audience can't tell what the character is doing just by their silhouette, then you've done something wrong.
You might not need a business degree to know that chasing trends in a crowded industry is a recipe for disaster, but you do need a business degree to think you can beat the odds.
No offense to ASTRO but it's more telling of the video game industry as a whole that the turn of the century was defined by titles such as System Shock 2, Bioshock, Deus Ex, and Fallout while 2024 is just happy when something isn't terrible.
I hadn't even heard of Concord until it failed.
Met too! Games like that need publicity so we can easily see the budget was really really low. So, some exec knew this was going to flop and decided not to put money promoting it but then still decided to keep working on it anyway. That really a weird decision there.
You and everyone else.
Well, there was that trailer from The Game Awards that showed no gameplay and had no indication of even what genre the game was.
Same.
the only reason most of us had is because it took up like a third of the last playstation direct and we were all very bored and annoyed by it.
You nailed it on the head. This publisher idiocy stopped being funny, and has become ruinous.
I’m immediately suspicious how Concord was made in 8 years and umpteen millions of dollars, because *Did they really conceive this game to be a live service hero shooter? Or was it something else entirely before live service mechanics were mandated to its design?*
Whatever comes of any news about Concord, or Firewalk studios will be worth watching with **Extreme Interest.** from here on out.
The 4 horseman of gaming. Famine-Live Services, Pestilence-Microtransactions, War-Online/Mobile gaming, and Death-Day One DLC.
Just saying if you just simply avoid anything online enabled. Only play a fully playable SP game. Then you only have to deal with dlc. Which of you wiat a year. You can get all the dlc and most of the big fixes for half the price of launch. Avoiding them completely. That why so many of us now play older games.
Really sympathetic with the developers on this one. Wasted such a tremendous amount of time in order for it to become a mark on you and its legacy to just disappear is painful, all because of the very few in charge of the stuff that people are upset about. Saw some dude who worked as a lighting artist and they got a mountain of trash thrown at them just for being related to the development of the game. One of the reasons I'm myself hesitant to join any AAA studios, as some people will definitely throw some flak with like "yo the game's characters are shite go flush yourself", and I'm just an engine programmer. But hey, it pays, at least for a short while before you're sacked for the investors... sad times : (
im glad this man talked about this exact duality. it's such a baffling thing to exist at all in 2024
That total recall clip was MADE for this exact story
TWWWWOOOOOO WEEEEEEEEEKKKKSSSZSZ
My daughter and I are loving Astro bot, I genuinely wish this kind of game was more the standard than the exception
I just knew this would be the topic this week.
What I did NOT expect was Titus giving birth to a Nurgling at the beginning of the video.
BROTHER! IT HAPPENED AGAIN! OH EMPEROR WHAT HAVE I DONE!?
@@Crocogator BROTHA I AM CONSTIPATED HERE!
Concord Heroes just Look AND Sound GENERIC AF!! Plus, charging $40 in an OVERSATURATED Genre when there's F2P options that have been around for years is INSANE!!
Fancy Graphics will NEVER replace Bad/Generic Aesthetics!
It's also worth mentioning that the multiplayer in Space Marine 2 is just an extra game mode in a game that already has a great campaign. Concord didn't have anything else but that multiplayer design-by-committee disaster.
Turns out it's really hard to chase trends when it takes 8 years to make a game
21:50 Hey Steph! That's not nice! Tyranids are just hungry, hungry bugs they don't really have much mallice AND are capable of, even driven by adaptation, Something the antiwoke brigade finds anathema.
Having the games industry crush all passion for video games as art has saved me a lot of money on luxuries : at least a DVD will still work in 5 years and the movie won't be retroactively made terrible lol
Very true. I've been digging way back into the retro catalogues and have been having more fun than ever
What crazy about concord is that someone should have pulled the plug way way sooner than this on the project.
Can't tell you how much I loved the reference to Peace saying "bad" in Ralph Bakshi's Wizards.
People calling this the biggest failure ever. They never played culling 2 or all the other games that were dead on release and died afterwards. Let’s not forget “the day before” either
Was concord even advertised? I admit i'm not as in tune with new releases these days, but i swear i didn't hear anything about it until i saw headlines about it's failure.
This is one of the biggest reasons it failed. They did a horrible job advertising it if they even did. I never heard of it either.
there was an extended "story trailer" at one of the game shows earlier this year. it looked like how an ai would try to explain guardians of the galaxy, with zero understanding of what makes it work.
@@what.5693 cant sony put advertising when you launch the ps5 just like steam does ? i remember some ps2 games had demos of other games
It was. It had a trailer with some of the best visuals I've ever seen in a video game cinematic. That's apparently where the entire fucking budget went though.
Honestly, The Bureau had a decent storyline and a twist that was right up there with Bioshock on a narrative level - the whole "Yeah, you were controlling the alien inside the main character's body this whole time, which is why anything you did wasn't necessarily what *he* would have done if given the agency to do so" was a genuinely fun idea!
I got all the way to the final mission of The Bureau before chucking the towel in. Fascinating plot just couldn't quite overcome the half-baked derivative gameplay that eventually became too irritating to put myself through.
You mention something in your old videos that i have genuinely found to be absolutely correct..game companies dont just want some of your money they want it ALL
Honestly this trend chasing thing is going to get way worse when GTA 6 comes out. Old enough to remember when GTA 3 came out everything whether it made sense or not became GTA 3. And then when GTA online came out with Grand Theft Auto v everything had to be designed like Grand Theft Auto online to the point where even Rockstar stopped making actual games. Afraid whatever unique thing that GTA 6 will bring to the table will get xeroox to death by every single God damn company within the span in the first 8 months when it comes out. Fucking hate this. Feel that even movie Cinema is now more unique and creative than most of this industry.
Now, that’s sickeningly bad when even cinema remains more creative than video games.
"Astro Bot is the fun mascot platformer like we haven't seen in forever!"
Mario and Kirby: "Ex-fucking-cuse me?"
To be fair Mario Odyssey came out in 2017 but yeah.. Kirby and the Forgotten Land was only 2 years ago :x
she said "in the AAA space" even though Sony themselves released a new Ratchet and Clank not long ago...
@@cyco7229 And that supposes that Nintendo doesn't count as Triple-A anymore.
@@Darklordjadow1I don't know if the exclusion is a compliment or insult
Mario Wonder?