General gaming discussion

Surprised they didn't try putting it on Plus first.

I think the whole push they were going for was you pay for the game and there's no battlepass or microtransactions etc like the other similar games. I'm sure further down the line there would start to be a few cosmetics etc dropped in, but I think this is how they were trying to distinguish themselves from all the other F2P games, so starting off on Plus would have taken a huge chunk out of that.

Unfortunately it also meant that people weren't willing to pay to try the game when there are so many F2P alternatives. Plus the beta appeared to be pretty lacklustre and didn't draw much attention.

Concord also had the misfortune to launch around the same time as Marvel Rivals had their beta (and they have the selling point of having Marvel characters) which got a decent reception, and Deadlock being announced and having their beta (and they have the selling point of being a Valve game and Valve can make absolute bangers and will obviously have a huge push on Steam). So even players who are looking to jump from Overwatch, Apex, Valorant etc, now have other options with new games coming out soon.

It's why Jim Ryan's whole push for live service games is so flawed; by the time your game is ready to come out so many other devs have already gotten there first, and you're chasing a saturated market.

Three little letters are the elephant in the room - DEI. It's possible that developers have leaned a little too hard in to it and are chasing an audience that simply doesn't exist, and if they do, they are so miniscule as to be utterly irrelevant. 3 very clear examples of this in action recently.

See Concord, Dustborn, The Acolyte for recent examples. Not a very convincing counterpoint you make.

You can surely refute it without the labels? Dustborn took 4 years of development, got funding from the EU and managed to sell an amazing 83 copies on launch day and that was it. Concord decided to throw the character design brief to a man crippled with white guilt and a virtue signalling complex and that's also done amazingly well - 8 years development, approx 200 million and it's gone less than 2 weeks after launch.

It's not a stretch by any means or "rightwing virus bongtalk" when the proof is right there in front of your face that maybe, just maybe, nobody wants to play games with this stuff included in them.

Confirmation bias at its finest.

The Acolyte failed because it was boring as shíte and everyone was sick of sub-par Star Wars stuff. I watched it and I hated it because it was boring as hell. Concord failed because the release strategy was an incredible and poorly thought out failure in an already oversaturated market. Can't speak to the other one as I'm not familiar with it.

I could mention dozens of games that have diverse characters or relationships. Baldurs Gate 3, Last of Us Pt.2, Life is Strange, Tchia, etc. etc.

The Acolyte and Concord failed because they sucked.

I'll leave this one to Jason…

Even ignoring TLOU2, Overwatch is one of the most successful games in the genre and has made hundreds of millions, possibly even billions in profit. Huge array of LGBTQ+ characters.

But that doesn't count, I guess....

"As game as big as Concord with Sony behind it should never simply fail" is a sure sign of someone who has been neglecting their video game history :) Bigger games have crashed and burned. Hell think back to ET, there was a game that almost destroyed the entire industry.

Business analytics would say that any game being released will come with an element of risk. Some less than others sure, but no game is guaranteed success. Fallout was a beloved game series, Fallout 76 was a bomb on release. Remember Battleborn by Gearbox? It was an absolute disaster that was getting sold for a fiver within weeks of release. Anthem had a ridiculous campaign behind it for marketing and it died a death.

The reality with games is that there is a number of elements behind success, avoiding a saturated market with an effective clone is one, innovation is an element but not a silver bullet. The pricing strategy is another. As others have pointed out, Hi Fi Rush was a massive success, but no doubt it's presence on gamepass was an element of that.

Representation has never been identified as a reason for POOR performance but it was identified as a potential reason for the success of movies, shows and games.

This is not to say you aren't entitled to your opinion, you are fully entitled to be unimpressed with the presence of individuals of a certain type in games and to therefore avoid them. Same as my lack of interest in soccer and therefore any fifa game. I'm not going to say it's a terrible game because I don't like it, but I can say it's a terrible game FOR ME.

With all the concord stuff going this is an interesting take on Astrobot

https://www.thegamer.com/astro-bot-isnt-a-celebration-its-a-graveyard/

Im going to go ahead and wipe that from my memory for tomorrow. Think I'll just enjoy the nostalgia as I play. What a downer article to be putting out 2 days before Astro Bot launches.

Happy I gave up so quick so! Without knowing who the writer is, if they're spoiling the game so soon to release then they're a dick.

I suppose Dragoon does need some company there, happy Bloodborne is filling that gap!

Ah, I got ya now. Yeah, I'll be doing a nostalgia run, ain't nothing gonna bring that down! Weird view to take from it tbh, seeing it as a jaunt through a graveyard...

You say Acolyte. What was the DEI reason Madalorian season 3 was poorly received? Or Book of Boba Fett?

Could it be that the stories they were telling weren't very good, or interesting?

I thought Obi Wan, centred on a white male lead was crap. Cause the acting was poor, the direction poor.

I thought Andor was really good though, with a good story and direction.

Starfield didn't set the world alight. Whatis the DIE reason for that? Is it not just that traversal was poor, game play mechanics poorly implement and a lifeless universe?

Did Madame Web do badly cause of DIE? If so, what is the excuse for Morbius? I thought the Harley Quinn movie did well and was well received. But with a bunch of female leads I have to assume no one wanted to see it and it bombed?

I didn't play Concord. I don't care about the character designs. I didn't buy a PVP only game that showed it had very little public interest cause I felt there was no future in its player counts. I thought from the first trailer it didn't look great. But at no point did I attribute it to a character design. And the only comment I would make on it now is that the charater design is boring, rathen than 'diverse'. The female character with the space helmet… just looks boring.

I don't understand why people keep attributing the failure of poor movies or games to 'woke' rather than… just not being good. Though I suppose i do see that in the failure of The Marvels - as people were review bombing that before it even came out for, imo, having Brie Larsson as the lead. I thought it was a fun movie (though I hated the musical part).

I think it's also very likely that the number of people who knew the characters in Concord had their pronouns on the character select screen is probably even less than the number of people who played Concord (which is already a low number).

People can't be put off DEI stuff in a game they didn't play and didn't know there was any type of DEI stuff in the game. Unless of course they're just constantly listening to the grifters who propagate nonsense about DEI and blame it for everything because they know negative commentary gets more attention and therefore makes them more money.

I just hope we don't start getting Sony Game films, like Jak & Daxter starring Jack Black as Daxter, or Ratchet & Clank starring Jack Black as Clank, or Bloodborne starring Jack Black as the Doll….