Mindless Diversions Extra: The Audience That Wasn’t There
(Featured image is “A bomb or an IED” by Alexandre Dulaunoy. Used under a Creative Commons License.)
About 8 years ago, after Overwatch launched to massive fanfare/success, Firewalk Studios began work on their version of the first-person “Hero Shooter”. (That is, a game where different characters have different abilities and different guns and, most importantly, different backstories and personalities. If you’ve played something like Street Fighter II, you’ve got the gist of it. It’s just a FPS this time.)
Another live service game where the idea was that you’d run around blowing stuff up, capturing flags, and teaming up with/shooting your buddies. Overwatch made a FREAKING MINT. I mean, Overwatch is the 7th best-selling game of all time (selling an estimated 50 million copies).
Heck, get a piece of that and you’ve got something. Even a tenth of that audience is 5 million units. So Sony poured an estimated $50 million to $150 million dollars into Concord so they could attempt to make a Hero Shooter of their own.
Here’s the launch trailer:
You get the general idea of the game. Sort of Guardians of the Galaxy kinda vibe with a diverse range of weapons on a diverse cast of characters. They went out of their way to make sure that the players were not fanservice. They wanted the focus to be on fun gameplay and not some weird Rule 34 stuff. Here’s everybody (including their voices):
Well, part of the problem with that is that without a real hook to get players on board, the players won’t be hooked to be on board.
After its release on Friday, August 23rd, the game had an all-time peak of 697 players (on Steam). That is not a typo. Six hundred, ninety-seven players.
It’s such a low figure I’m genuinely trying to figure out if something is technically wrong with the numbers here, but that does not seem to be the case.
Tom Warren, a Senior Editor at Verge, tweeted out: “is the SteamDB data for Concord broken? Surely there are more than 500 people playing it on Steam right now?”
To get a comparison to that number, the generally accepted Worst Game Of 2023 was the laughably awful Gollum (Kotaku called it the “Worst Game of 2023” back in July of that year).
Gollum had a peak of 758 players (on Steam).
Redfall, last year’s game from Arkane Studios, failed to meet its sales targets and Microsoft shut the studio down. At its peak, Redfall had 6124 players (on Steam).
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League is a game that Warner Brothers announced lost $200 Million. It had 13,459 players at its all-time peak (on Steam).
For comparison, at this very minute, Euro Truck Simulator 2, a single-player game released back in 2012, has 15,841 people playing it right now (on Steam).
It is difficult to overstate how badly this game has bombed. Somewhere between $50 million and $150 million for an audience of less than 700 at its peak. Some back of the envelope math shows that, assuming $50 Million, the game cost more than seventy grand per peaktime player.
It has 401 players playing right now as I type this (on Steam, of course).
In happier news, Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese game where the player plays through the story of Journey to the West, released four days ago. It has sold 10,000,000 copies (IN FOUR DAYS!). It has 488,203 players right now (on Steam).
There’s an audience out there. Somewhere.
Double checked the numbers to see if maybe things had changed between now and a couple of days ago.
Concord had 401 players when I checked at the time of writing this post. As of right now, it has 273.
Euro Truck Simulator 2 had 15,841 playing it when I wrote this post. As of right now, it has 31,341.Report
Heh, not my type of game, but I did play overwatch to see what it was all about… and this looks like knock-off brand overwatch. Post Raisin bran, not the good Kellogg’s Raisin bran.
On the needless controversy side, I’d suggest at least one dude who looks cool for your generic shooter.
Besides, didn’t Fortnite kinda redefine the genre years ago?Report
You got me idly wondering.
Fortnite is not on Steam and so the numbers aren’t charted by steamdb.info. But I was curious as to how many were playing what…
And Deadlock has 74k people on it right now (Never heard of it… oh, it’s Valve’s MOBA, still in beta looks like).
Apex Legends has 67k (released in 2020).
Third place is Team Fortress 2 (everybody’s favorite hero shooter from 2007) with 61k.
Then Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege with 55k.
Then there’s a drop off to 33k for Overwatch 2.
Then a *HUGE* drop off to 7k for Call of Duty: Black Ops III.
Battlefield 2042 has 5k.
Paladins has juuuuust under 4k.
Titanfall 2 with 1.8k.
Pixel Gun 3D: PC Edition with 1.7k.
Farlight 84 with 1.3k.
1.1k on Plants vs. Zombies Garden Warfare 2.
And then, starting with thirteenth place, we’re in the dregs of 500ish players or less.
Concord, released last week, is in 18th place with 256 players.Report
Obviously some sort of colossal marketing failure; people like to try the new shiny to see if its better than the old stand-by. Whether the numbers hold-up is a different issue. But 256 players at launch is an anti-pattern. I’d never heard of it (but not surprising, as not my type of game) and I haven’t heard any controversy about it… so somehow a $100M game launched into the void? Weird.Report
Talked to the 14 year-old that we see on Monday nights.
Asked if had heard of Concord. He didn’t think so.
Now, this kid plays Fortnite religiously. He and his buddies have played it for years.
I explained that it was a hero shooter and, of course, he was familiar. He had just never heard of it.
I asked about Black Myth and he brightened, and said yeah. He’s heard it’s really good.
Never heard of Concord, though.Report
Sony to raise PlayStation 5 price by 20% in Japan.
Hey, you gotta keep the lights on somehow.
Though I will say that the PS5’s killer app right now seems to be Black Myth and not a Sony game and Sony brass needs to have a heart-to-heart with the VP of New Development.Report
In vaguely related news: Embracer Group published their interim quarterly report.
I went and checked out the key performance indicators.
Total Game Developers
Apr-Jun 2023: 11,356
Apr-Jun 2024: 6,659
Total Game Development Products:
Apr-Jun 2023: 215
Apr-Jun 2024: 127
It begins.
We’ll see if someone else in corporate says something like “you know money? There’s a lot of ways to not flush it down the commode…” at more companies.Report
Firewalk Studios hasn’t tweeted since August 23rd.
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And there it is. The long weekend is over and the accountants are back in the office.
They are shutting down the Concord servers.
From PlayStation Itself:
An important update on Concord
Here’s the part of the article that had me raise an eyebrow: “While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If you purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to your original payment method.”Report
Okay, I thought that I was going to stop thinking about this but Colin Moriarty has reported that Sony lost $400 Million on this.
My back of the envelope math used $50 million as the budget because I thought that the high estimate of $150 was improbable. Well… someone let the cat out of the bag and it was more than *TWICE* the high estimate.
*NOW* I can stop thinking about this.Report
“They went out of their way to make sure that the players were not fanservice. They wanted the focus to be on fun gameplay and not some weird Rule 34 stuff.”
Yes, well.
I remember someone on Twitter saying “the surest sign that your game’s a loser is when nobody is making non-ironic porn of your characters.”Report
And, finally, one last final final final update:
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https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-says-it-should-have-done-user-testing-and-internal-evaluation-earlier-on-concord
(as the guys at Penny Arcade said, “…they’re saying that they didn’t do that?”)Report