Paul Lives!
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 30, 2023
Is it really funny that eight years of development culminated in character designs that could have been achieved by prompting midjourney with "tumblr gay overwatch pastiche" and then removing the extra thumbs? Yes.
With that said, I hope people aren't mistaking that as the reason Concord flopped and missing the wider point about GaaS and the fickle, inaccessible demographic that has been carefully cultivated to sustain it. Firewalk's target audience, along with everyone else that's trying to launch the Next Big Thing, generally already has a forever game that they can clock into night after night with their friends/coworkers in the hopes of getting some sort of response from their now totally ravaged dopamine receptors. They'll sink thousands of hours into their second job of choice, dropping fifteen bucks here and there for a content pass or cat ear cosmetic for the privilege of being able to play for "free". The hopes of anyone being able to unseat an already well established IP that has a stable population of spenders mainlining their shit are bleak to begin with. You are one negative news cycle or less than enthusiastic playtest from those hopes being totally dashed as hardened GaaS veterans all simultaneously smell a failure and realize that it isn't worth jumping ship from the game they have probably poured more time and effort into than raising their own misbegotten children. It's how D2 has been able to rather easily survive multiple hated expansions, disappointing seasonal content reskins, and straight up deleting paid content from the game. "You've been on this ride for x years/y hours, where are you going to go? And it's all been freeeee*!"
The industry is now in a pickle where there's a clear playbook for laying a golden egg but it's expensive and requires mapping out and executing at least a year's worth of post-launch content before you even know how what you have at launch is going to be received. There is no such thing as a moderate success, only striking it rich or falling flat on your face, and the same design playbook you are beholden to has built in guardrails that have already turned your target audience into slavish devotees of one of a handful of other games. I doubt that the forty USD gate fee for Concord was a miscalculation. It was probably a desperate attempt to recoup something in light of everyone on the inside realizing some time ago that the game had no legs. The character design mockery might have been Concord's bad press moment that doomed a game that would have otherwise been a big hit, but my gut says that it's more of a product of existing live service games already having total control over the market and Sony leadership being asleep at the wheel. Even with a kickass art direction and non-weirdo office culture there is only so much room for more Games as Jobs, only so many people with so many hours to devote to a new style of videogame that demands you to always be logging into it, playing it, or watching someone else play it. Sony is probably going to go back to focusing on pumping out AMC melodrama-tier ledge climbing sims and be fine, but I wonder where a lot of the "too large to be profitable making $20 faux indie titles, too small or financially unstable to take a shot at unseating Fortnite" developers are going to be pivoted to in the next decade or so.
With that said, I hope people aren't mistaking that as the reason Concord flopped and missing the wider point about GaaS and the fickle, inaccessible demographic that has been carefully cultivated to sustain it. Firewalk's target audience, along with everyone else that's trying to launch the Next Big Thing, generally already has a forever game that they can clock into night after night with their friends/coworkers in the hopes of getting some sort of response from their now totally ravaged dopamine receptors. They'll sink thousands of hours into their second job of choice, dropping fifteen bucks here and there for a content pass or cat ear cosmetic for the privilege of being able to play for "free". The hopes of anyone being able to unseat an already well established IP that has a stable population of spenders mainlining their shit are bleak to begin with. You are one negative news cycle or less than enthusiastic playtest from those hopes being totally dashed as hardened GaaS veterans all simultaneously smell a failure and realize that it isn't worth jumping ship from the game they have probably poured more time and effort into than raising their own misbegotten children. It's how D2 has been able to rather easily survive multiple hated expansions, disappointing seasonal content reskins, and straight up deleting paid content from the game. "You've been on this ride for x years/y hours, where are you going to go? And it's all been freeeee*!"
The industry is now in a pickle where there's a clear playbook for laying a golden egg but it's expensive and requires mapping out and executing at least a year's worth of post-launch content before you even know how what you have at launch is going to be received. There is no such thing as a moderate success, only striking it rich or falling flat on your face, and the same design playbook you are beholden to has built in guardrails that have already turned your target audience into slavish devotees of one of a handful of other games. I doubt that the forty USD gate fee for Concord was a miscalculation. It was probably a desperate attempt to recoup something in light of everyone on the inside realizing some time ago that the game had no legs. The character design mockery might have been Concord's bad press moment that doomed a game that would have otherwise been a big hit, but my gut says that it's more of a product of existing live service games already having total control over the market and Sony leadership being asleep at the wheel. Even with a kickass art direction and non-weirdo office culture there is only so much room for more Games as Jobs, only so many people with so many hours to devote to a new style of videogame that demands you to always be logging into it, playing it, or watching someone else play it. Sony is probably going to go back to focusing on pumping out AMC melodrama-tier ledge climbing sims and be fine, but I wonder where a lot of the "too large to be profitable making $20 faux indie titles, too small or financially unstable to take a shot at unseating Fortnite" developers are going to be pivoted to in the next decade or so.