Mindless Diversions Extra: The Audience That Wasn’t There

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.

Forbes’s Paul Tassi remarked:

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.