- Joined
- Sep 23, 2019
In recent years, a collection of games have been getting a certain label attached to them - the label of Concordlike. This megathread is to collate all the Concordlikes of past, present and future, as well as discuss the underlying causes that lead to them - and, in the future, whether any given game actually counts or not.
What is Concord?
The original Concord was a live service multiplayer hero shooter developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony. Having been concepted in the wake of Overwatch's release, Firewalk studios had gathered industry vets from across the shooter genre, and was striving to make a game with a completely new IP. The game took eight years and allegedly four hundred million dollars to develop, making it the most expensive game Sony had ever released at the time. Internally, it was called the Future of Playstation, with Star Wars-like potential, and was planned to have weekly cinematics throughout its release period.
It flopped. At an almost unprecedented level.
Concord's peak player count on steam was six hundred and ninety-seven players. That's a great number if you can count your dev team on one hand, but it's absolutely apocalyptic for a multi-million-dollar game - let alone something costing four hundred million dollars. For comparison, in the same year Helldivers 2 was also launched by Sony, and it achieved a peak of four hundred thousand. The amount of Helldivers players was closer to the number of Concord players squared than it was to the actual figure.
In spite of industry support, estimates have it that the total number of Concord copies sold was likely only around 25k, making it one of the worst - if not the worst - gaming failures since the crash of the 1980s industry. The game's launch went so poorly that, after launching on August 23rd 2024, Sony switched off the servers on September 6th - only two weeks after release.
As you may expect, the reasons behind this failure are more compelling than the game itself. I won't go into the details here, but numerous people on and off site have detailed the entire lifecycle of Concord. I recommend big boss's youtube video on it for a little bit of storytime on the development; I will bring up some matters when relevant to the discussion, but for now, we only care about Concord as an example.
- Obvious woke pandering
- Guardians of the Galaxy-style 'millenial' writing and humour
- Incredibly heavy amounts of lore for a hero shooter, where lore generally doesn't affect the games much.
- Having very little original or unique qualities in it's genre, despite releasing into a crowded market.
- Charging $40 for entry in a genre dominated by free-to-play
- And last, but definitely not least: absolutely hideous character design.
First Row: Gamer's 10-minute halloween costume, Green Yondu, Manic Pixie Dream Girl's OC, Fat Alberta, Female Doomguy whose armor doesn't fit her anymore, And someone who thinks South Park's Tupperware is peak hero design.
Second Row: Stronk Female Character Model 8000, Michael Jelqson, Crossdressing Thugnificent, Hillary Clinton's self image, and a garbage can.
Daw depicted seperately: one image couldn't possibly fit Daw and everyone else.
The game was a landmark failure for the genre, and an absolutely cataclysmic crash that has hung over the games industry ever since. The game has become a focal point for various issues gamers have had with the industry for years, with many treating it's failure as an inevitable or necessary outcome; the result of game devs completely losing touch with what players want, and the hard shock to the system necessary to get them paying attention again.
But precisely because of those issues being so entrenched, Concord was not the last. A series of games since have shown similar traits and genre blindness, and are likely to face similar results. For such games, Concord hangs over them like a specter - a shorthand to describe any game people believe will be an instant failure.
What Makes a Game a Concordlike?
A game getting compared to concord is inherently something done by the community of gamers, and so there's no strict definition on what conditions apply or how long they need to apply for. Moreover, With that said, as of March 2026 there have been three other games which have been regularly framed as Concord sequels, and they do share some general traits.
Personally, I would define four key traits in determining whether something has lived up to Concord's Legacy:
1: Internally, the Game is believed to be a surefire hit, and receives resources accordingly.
As previously stated, Concord was meant to be The Future of Playstation. Sony really believed that this game would be the flagship of their Live Service push, the standard-bearer to which all it's other games would rally. This resulted in various frankly ridiculous expenditures, with a heavy focus on story for a pvp shooter. Animated Cutscenes were meant to be released every week, with them even securing a slot for an episode in Amazon's gaming anthology series Secret Level (which is suspected to have been meant to kick off a second wave or season of concord, when it limped out December 2024 with an entirely new cast of characters).
Internally, morale is often sky-high, or at least testified as such. Not only do the devs not realise that the game they're making is a turd, they seem to be outright championed by their parent companies as potential trendsetters, and get great resources as a result. Perhaps because of this, these games actually can lack certain usual indicators of a game being a disaster; they can release largely bug-free and in at least a theoretically complete state. They are often a minimum viable product at best, but are seen as ready to take they world by storm by the dev teams that make them.
2: Despite point 1, the immediate reaction is mass rejection.
The universal constant of every one of the mainline Concordlikes is that, once it's out in the open, players instantly, wholeheartedly and utterly reject it en masse. So far, the first two Concords to release have failed to the point that both have been shut down at an incredibly early date - Concord itself only lasted two weeks, and Highguard (which I'll discuss more later) lasted little more than a month. They also both took their studios with them.
The juxtaposition of points 1 and 2, to me, is the quintessential Concord experience. It's the vegan who's fed her cat all the healthy and tasty salads she can think of, only for them to rush at meat at every given opportunity. It's the CEO's focus-tested, carefully designed incredibly expensive prototype toy getting rejected by his own son to play with the packaging instead. It's the cold hard shock to reality of a company whose devs believe they can do nothing wrong, finding out instead they did nothing right.
3: The reason for rejection comes from the Development Team completely failing to read the room.
Game devs in these companies, gaming journalists, and the corporate gaming space in general, largely pull from specific socioeconomic groups. Rather than being representative of the general population, this group trends urban, left-leaning, and generally descend from upper-class families, white collar at the very least.
None of this is a problem in and of itself, as long as it's accomodated for - but many of these groups have done the opposite. Rather than making sure to understand what the general vibe is even if their own offices don't reflect it, over the years they've become increasingly insular and divorced from the gaming populaces wants and needs. Their political leanings in particular, though not always the friction point, have often sparked this change - to the point that whole companies deliberately segregate themselves from the raw opinion of the populace. A strategy that might serve to keep morale up, but it only causes them to drift further away from their audience base - and customers are the ones who are ultimately paying.
So many of these games hit all the usual cultural clashes common to the gaming space - deliberate uglification, millenial writing and humour, manchildren stuff and an overtly combative political stance aimed at pleasing the ever-illusive Modern Audience - but Concord games manage to go even further beyond. They don't even read the room at the most basic level, making games in tired genres with nothing unique or interesting to their gameplay loops, and slapping them full of things gamers just aren't going to care about. They release as yet more microtransaction-laden, live service games, when players either hate the model on general principle or are already too committed to one member of the genre to support a second entry. Not to mention, they're often competing with their own inspirations, yet fail to surpass their base states, let alone what they're at today.
Concord released at $40 in a genre where every competitor was far more established, and free to play. Expecting anyone to hop in at that price is insanity, and the results speak for themselves.
4: The games depend on a thriving playerbase to function, and thus collapse when the players aren't there for it.
Every single game highlighted as a successor to Concord has been a live-service multiplayer game, same as Concord itself. In the context of the other issues, this means that a falling player count can negatively affect the experience of the remaining players.
In an offline game, it doesn't matter whether there's hundreds of other people playing, or only one - your experience is unchanged. But in multiplayer games, less other players means longer queue times, emptier lobbies, and eventually the whole player experience breaks down.
The net effect of this is that these games both fail fast and have no hope of future redemption. The devs can't lay low while purchases trickle in, praying for a random streamer to like the game and trigger a revival. If someone comes back to this twenty years from now, there'll be no way to play these games removed from their original context. Concord and Highguard both are completely gone, and there's no hope they or their IPs will ever be touched again.
...Though that isn't necessarily true of the developers. Several people who worked on Concord have gone on to either Marathon or Highguard, bafflingly surviving the most infamous crash in modern gaming history with their careers unscathed. Which likely ties into the root cause of all of this.
0: Toxic Positivity and Sunk Cost Fallacies
I don't count this among the main reasons, because it's sort of an undercurrent throughout them rather than something that can be meaningfully used to seperate Concordlikes from non-Concordlikes. But every one of the main four Concord qualifiers comes back to the same underlying reason; a culture of Toxic Positivity.
For those who are lucky enough not to know, Toxic Positivity is very self-descriptive - it describes when being optimistic and trying to see the bright side of things rather than focusing on the problems becomes a problem in itself. In the context of gaming, it's usually used to describe studio cultures that ignore or downplay issues until they become absolute disasters, or treat those who raise issues as the problem rather than the problem itself. While it's intended to keep morale high, it can easily have the opposite effect - those who notice and worry about these problems find themselves with no outlet with which to express their worries and frustrations... to say nothing of what happens when the 'it's totally perfect' game in the eyes of the people paid to make it is put in front of people who are expected to put money in, rather than take money out.
Both Concord and Highguard suffered from this immensely. Concord threw good money after bad, spending ludicrous amounts on animated cutscenes to be released weekly, despite being a multiplayer shooter where the character's backstories had little effect on the actual gameplay. Meanwhile, many of the decisions that ultimately sunk highguard came from sunk cost fallacies, working on top of already-made bad decisions rather than ever rebuilding a part of the game from scratch and fit for purpose. And yet, when asked about why the games failed, developers and journalists alike would treat it like a random act of cruelty on the part of players. At the very most, they'd say their marketing 'failed to resonate with players', if they didn't just act like they'd been arbitrarily chosen as a sacrificial lamb for the lols.
The idea that the games were targeted, rather than being failures on their own merits, is both a symptom of toxic positivity providing no avenue to admit fault and why devs have managed to fail and yet get into the next game consequence-free. Until it's recognised for the root cause it is, games will continue to suffer from this mindset. At least the disasters will be on epic scale.
The Three Concord Successors: Highguard, Marathon, and Horizon HG.
Since Concord, three games have been crowned with it's thorny moniker most of all: The 2025 Game Awards Closing Act Highguard, The Bungie Extraction-Shooterfied Reboot Marathon, and The Monster Hunter-esque Spinoff Horizon: Hunter's Gathering. Each of these fell flat on their faces when first announced, and one has already crashed and burned at release.
Each one deserves a little time of it's own here - with Concord dead and buried, it's these games and any future ones that will make up the bulk of the discussion from here on out, and each successor has differents ways in which it carries the legacy. I'll go over them in order of release, as that's when their Concord status is truly put to the test. Starting with the first true heir to the crown, Highguard, and Geoff Keighley's public execution.
The Ghost of Concords Past: Highguard, the Fake Indie Game
You can thus also imagine the disappointment and confusion when Joff revealed that the final act was Highguard, a bland-looking fantasy shooter from devs who worked on Apex Legends and Titanfall. This trailer made it clear it was some kind of hero shooter, but not much else. It seemed utterly generic, devoid of much that gave it a clear identity of any sort - leading to immediate confusion and derision from players.
And then Highguard went dark. From it's announcement date to it's release, no new marketing material was released - leaving players and journalists to spar over whether the signs boded well or poor for the game. The original strategy had been to shadowdrop the game, but they had taken Geoff's offer to show their trailer in the premier spot of the game awards in defiance of that strategy - it has since been revealed that the studio's release date was ultimately decided by when their funds ran out, so they probably felt they had to take the opportunity when they could.
A post made by Mr. Keighly two days before release. This either aged like milk in a moldy box, or like a fine wine in the context of the movie's story.
Highguard got 97,000 peak players on steam at launch; within a week, that number was struggling to pass 10k. Those who came in found a fundamentally flawed game - a 3v3 on maps more sized for Battlefield's 100v100 matches, with a significant portion of each match dedicated to looting chests and mining rocks in complete safety for underwhelming, boring weaons and armor. The game's biggest sin, however, was that it was the epitome of 'mid' - so safe and ordinary that it completely failed to attract anyone. The contents didn't even attract any political controversy, except by the fact that the fault between Concordlike Accusers and Defenders largely already exists on a political boundary.
What did attract controversy was the funding. While initially framed as and heavily defended throughout as something independent and free of corporate oversight (a difficult sell when it seemed like the most corporate game in existence), Highguard was in fact funded by and received supporting development from Tencent, the Chinese game development company generally seen as one of the most powerful gaming corporations of the modern day. It's likely that this was essentially an experimental title for them, with the connection obscured to protect their reputation. If Highguard succeeded, they could formally or informally adopt it as a public face - and if it failed, they could walk away and ideally wash their hands of the wreck. They also have a member of staff on the board of The Game Awards, leading to speculation that they pulled strings to get Highguard top billing.
In the wake of Highguard's failure, some have taken to blaming Geoff, for 'pushing' Highguard into showing the trailer. While I'm no fan of the guy, I firmly believe that in terms of sales, Joff is the only reason it got to five figures in the first place. Without such high-value marketing, Highguard likely would have quietly released and died not much later. So don't blame Jyff for the game's failure - instead, we should thank him, for turning a quiet, wet fart into a glorious public excoriation of corporate slop.
The Ghost of Concords Present: Marathon, Bungie's Last Hope
Marathon (2026) is the first new game Bungie has released in the past nine years, having leant on Destiny 2 for that whole period essentially solo. It is a new entry into the Marathon series, whose last release was in 1996; this 30-years-later game is largely seen as unconnected to the original series.
Bungie was acquired by Sony in 2022, as part of the console company's plans to pivot hard into live service titles. Of the 12 games they initially announced as part of this push:
- One of them was Concord, which I believe is an excellent tonesetter
- Seven have been cancelled,
- Two are still in development,
- Helldivers 2 has been it's one and only clear success story
- And Marathon 2026 makes twelve. By the fact that two thirds either never got through the door or are now synonymous with failure, you can guess how this is going for everyone involved.
To make matters worse, since the acquisition Destiny - the sole title on which Bungie has been resting - has been dropping off. The game is decaying from a decent, stable equillibrium into a slow collapse. Where once a new release would bring the game just shy of 2 million daily online players, the most recent release doesn't peak at even a third of that.
For more details about Bungie's everything, I recommend this excellent post by @Rodeo Roadrunner for the breakdown. Suffice it to say, they are desperate for Marathon to succeed, and there is a lot riding on the game.
The biggest problem? Marathon's art style. A picture's worth a thousand words, so brace yourself and click the spoiler link when you're ready.
Supposedly, Marathon's art style draws inspiration from Mirror's Edge and Ghost in the Shell. To say that it has failed to live up to it's inspiration would be the understatement of the year - where Mirror's Edge looks clean, sleek, and striking, Marathon looks like the results of getting high on street corner mushrooms and having a bad trip in a construction site port-a-potty.
Mirror's Edge, for comparison... and palate cleansing.
And if that wasn't enough, Marathon's art style isn't just a parade of blocky neon vomit, either; it's also plagiarised. Transgender Artist N² on X accused Bungie of Plagiarism, providing several screenshots of assets stolen and recoloured directly into the game.
People were even able to find details the original artist mentioned years beforehand. And just as a cherry on top, people discovered that Marathon's Art Director had been following them for years before this moment.
Bungie has had multiple issues with plagiarism in recent years, but this was now dominating discussion of what was meant to be their lifeboat. This lead to an abrupt cancellation of the game's beta, while they scrubbed it of N²'s assets. The artist themself would later claim the issue 'resolved to their satisfaction' (In the final release, they're now credited as a Visual Design Consultant).
On top of all this, it's an extraction shooter - not a genre known for large playerbases thanks to it's punishing pvp looting mechanics. And with it releasing to similar but not quite as high numbers as Highguard, the future looks bleak for Marathon.
Despite everything, of the three main games listed as Concord's successors it is the one where the title is most hotly debated.
Two weeks have now passed for Marathon. It doesn't seem to display the typical Concord trend - rather, it's fallen largely in line with other extraction shooters, having somewhat of a niche appeal (the numbers are still trending downward, currently having dropped from an 88k peak at launch to now fighting to stay above 50k at peak hours, but that's miles better than Highguard, which went from 97k to 10.5k in it's first week). This is not significantly better for the studio; Bungie was purchased by Sony to deliver multiple Destiny-level successes, and even the most generous of reports make it unlikely Marathon has made even 100 million dollars (the lower estimate for it's budget).
While it might be surprising, it should be noted that Marathon was the first game to receive the title of Concord 2, being announced in the relatively close wake of the original. Perhaps it's not surprising that it's not reached the same level of failure as the others, having been given the title somewhat hastily. Instead, it's unique - albeit niche - design appeal and generally solid bungie gunplay are helping it slowly fade rather than crash and burn.
The Ghost of Concord's Future: Horizon: Hamburgers Gathering
It's a series with a scifi yet still grounded setting, generally focused on being restrained and realistic. So releasing Horizon: Hunter's Gathering, a cartoony multiplayer game which seems to be following in Monster Hunter's footsteps was always going to be a hard sell. They only made matters worse for themselves by releasing with a trailer full of the same cocky smirk on eight supposedly wildly different characters. Not to mention that one of these eight was a roughly spherical one-legged woman with toothpaste for hair, in a society where the toilet leaf is a reasonable piece of home equipment. To say this went over poorly would be the understatement of the year.
In a society without fast food where one is forced to fight giant robots to survive, the only way to achieve such an incredible high score on salad-dodging is to be absolutely, revoltingly greedy and selfish, yet the game wants to present Big Mackenzie over here as a plucky survivor like the rest of them.
By the way, it's another member of Sony's Live-Service dozen, which means that the Concordlike group is 75% Sony by weight.
This thread hasn't had anyone from the lucky 561 show up - in fact, at time of writing I'm fairly sure the Hunter's Gathering playtest is news to the thread despite it happening nearly a month ago - so if anyone has any details, please do let us know. In the meantime, at least the innumerous puns on the names of previous titles are always a joy to read.
Honorable Mentions
A few games have some of the stink, but fail to truly qualify as Concord's successors in most people's eyes. A list of some standout examples follows:
Hyenas
The most expensive game ever developed by Sega, Hyenas was to be a hero-based extraction shooter, similar to Marathon. Despite it's high price tag, the game would be canceled in 2023, never even releasing to be judged by the public. I think the character designs for this game speak for themselves.
Yes, a Sonic Cosplayer is part of the team. No, I'm not surprised this didn't even get released either.
It's story ended before Concord's truly began, but even if it hadn't, the level of self-awareness on Sega's part to cancel it proves that the company is not quite as far gone as it's contemporaries. We are in a time period when Sega's top brass are among the more competent executives in gaming; if that's not a sign of the End Times I don't know what is.
Fairgame$
A Payday-Style Extraction shooter with themes of 'Robbing the Rich to rebalance the scales'. This premise has never been particularly compelling from corporations thanks to it's obvious hypocrisy, especially as their devs become ever more Champagne Socialists and end up making the 'good guys' look more privileged than most of the 'bad guys'. To say nothing of how it's premise even taken literally is one big crabs-in-a-bucket metaphor for the criminal activities coming from it.
The makeup reminds me of an old family photo of a younger Disc absolutely covering himself with stamps.
It's yet another member of Sony's Big Dumb Live Service Push, and is still apparently in development. If any of these Honorable Mentions are going to be considered Concord 5, I'd put my money on this one if it returns to the spotlight.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League
A Looter-Shooter set in the DC Universe, which features some of the franchises' biggest stars like Superman, Green Lantern, and the Flash... being brainwashed only to be shot down and disrespected by a bunch of random d-list criminals nobody cares about. Made by Rocksteady and officially claimed to be a sequel to the Arkham games, this shitshow took one of the most beloved interpretations of the Batman and had the character, in his VA's final role, get shot on a park bench by Mass Murderer Harley Quinn ranting about the terrible traumas Batman inflicted on the poor, innocent butcherers and rapists of Gotham.
If Fairgame$ is the likely candidate for Concord 5, I would argue Kill the Justice League is Concord 0; Every single hallmark of the Genre is there, from completely misreading the audience to falling flat on it's face at launch, but because it's ultimately par for the course in Modern DC to treat Harley Quinn like the best character ever while shitting on Bats, and it had just enough players to finish off a barebones live service life cycle, it never became the headline act like Concord did. The Suicide Squad would have been a badass and fitting name for the genre, though.
Foamstars
A 4v4 'party shooter' created by Square fuckin' Enix of all things, Foamstars was a very obvious knockoff of Splatoon, exchanging it's paintball-inspired ink mechanics for physical foam that would amass in the arena. It also incorporated Hero shooter elements, by tying kits to discrete characters with their own backstories. If I had to describe the art style, I'd call it something like a korean knockoff of anime - which is in some ways impressive, because SEnix is still at it's core Japanese.
With it's foam mechanics never managing to mesh as well as Sploon's squid kids, and being trapped on Playstation systems, the game was honestly doomed from the start. Why something that would most logically appeal to a base largely already brought to Nintendo would ONLY launch on sony's hardware, rather than also on the switch or at least the Steam Demilitarized Zone, is honestly completely beyond me. At least the music is generally strong enough that people will be wandering in, finding it, and asking 'WHY WAS THIS GAME NOT GIVEN A CHANCE' for all eternity.
MindsEye, and Everywhere
Everywhere is an upcoming game creation engine/Roblox-like(?) ...built by Build A Rocket Boy, a studio founded by Leslie Benzies, the producer of GTA 3 through 5 and it's Online mode. Having been forced out of Rockstar North due to disputes with other studio heads, Leslie's new studio decided to advertise it's upcoming Everywhere system using an intended 'GTA Killer' as their pilot, called MindsEye. In practice, even sponsored streamers were breaking down in laughter at how absolutely terrible the story is.
Leslie Benzies, however, does not see it that way. Leslie Benzies is perhaps the single most paranoid and delusional man in Western gaming right now (and considering the whole genre of Concordlikes is spawned from mass psychosis, that's already saying A FUCKING LOT). He's currently on a which hunt to find saboteurs from an unknown competitor's company, who supposedly spent 1 million undermining MindsEye's success. Anyone who happens to possess eyeballs tends to agree that any money actually spent trying to undermine MindsEye was pointless, when even the sponsored people couldn't resist shitting on it.
Lawbreakers ft. Cliff Blezinski
The Concord before Concord, Lawbreakers was developed by Cliff Blezinski, of Unreal Tournament and Gears of War fame. A Hero Shooter which had the misfortune of releasing shortly after Overwatch, Lawbreakers was intended to be a billion dollar IP - and instead flopped dead, launching with only 7500 players on steam.
While the game itself is mostly the classic generic gimmick-shooter type (this one revolving around gravity mechanics), it's perhaps most notable for the infamously dumb antics of it's director, Cliff Blezinski. Watching him talking about the game, it's almost like he has a trash-talking-specific brand of tourettes; he literally can't resist mocking people, whether they're asking legitimate questions about the game's design decisions (like not including XBox, where basically every IP Blezinski helped with had it's home or sole base) or comparing it to it's logical competitors. I highly recommend Crowbcat's video on the matter; the man just can't resist denigrating everyone who even slightly disagrees with him, even when you can tell he realises it's a bad idea afterwards.
What also makes Lawbreakers so fascinating is that if it released today it would absolutely be labeled a concordlike - but instead the game was released in August 2017, more than half a decade before Concord became the Hindenburg of gaming. Many of the concordlikes do indeed have their roots around this time as well - perhaps lawbreakers is an early bud of the debilitating weed-like mindsets that have gone on to infest the gaming industry.
Dustborn (+ Ex Voto and Relooted)
As Concord was shaping up to be a historic disaster for AAA Gaming, AA/'indie' gaming had it's own, smaller equivalent. Dustborn, a heavily politicized story-based brawler, featured their protagonists fighting against the 'fascism' of John F. Kennedy's America with the superpowers of... gaslighting and verbal abuse. No, I'm not kidding, that's actually what their superpowers are - psychically augmented verbal abuse is the way forward for the 'heroes'.
Where Concord failed to crack 4 digits, Dustborn failed to crack 3 - most of the game's all-time peak of 83 players were right-leaning streamers dunking on this disaster of a game. Many who've played or watched the game believe it works better as right-wing propaganda than left, being so utterly divorced from it's counterculture that it falls into all the worst stereotypes of it's own.
With that said, it's not a part of the Concord series. While it certainly is a failure of comparable scale, it has a variety of different traits about it, and is more an example of a seperate genre of games plaguing the gaming industry than part of Concord's lineage. It's not live service, it's not corporate - arguably to it's own detriment - and it's heavy-handed political nature mean that this, and the other members of it's gang, are probably worthy of a thread dedicated to them specifically, rather than sharing space with a fundamentally different group.
Every Concord Has A Silver Lining
Whenever people begin dunking on a game as a Concord (and long before the term was even coined), certain defences always come up. Most of these blame the game's failure on the players - treating them as acting in almost random cruelty, failing to understand the game's apparently-obvious merits, and guilt-tripping them on the idea that, if players don't buy the game, the developers will be laid off.
Blaming the players never works, not to bring them back and make the game succeed. When confronted with this accusation, gamers will trend to one of two seemingly conflicting responses whose undertones are actually the same:
- You want to blame me for this? No, it's obviously because of all the stupid decisions the devs and execs made. If they're not going to listen to the audience and release games they actually care for, that's on them.
- If you're not gonna make a game I actually like, then guess what?
Concord and all it's successors, like I said before, come from the same ultimate root cause; an industry hinging every big game on the audience's proactive ongoing support while completely ignoring what the audience actually wants. As long as devs treat the gaming community as both an endless money spigot and an enemy to be silenced, they will keep producing these expensive, greedy, moronic games and failing miserably because of it. And every time they do, the specter of Concord will be there to judge them.
In some ways, Concord is both the absolute nadir of gaming and an incredibly good thing for the industry to experience. It's the line in the sand where players have said that enough is enough, and they won't be pushed farther. It's the point where game devs finally have the chance to realise what they've been doing wrong, and start making games in leaner, more inventive and more sustainable ways.
And if execs are going to keep ignoring what players want? If Game Devs are going to keep pretending that the audience should just listen and obey them? Then players want them fired and out the industry. We don't want to support companies that treat us like crap, and we don't want to support devs or journos who'll treat us like the bad guys for having standards.
Brutal and Manipulative Microtransactions, Overt and Spite-Filled Political Pandering, Beaten-Down Corporate Blandness, Deliberate Uglification, Partitioned Content to Keep You Trapped, Spite-filled Developers and Corrupt Media Defenders. These games and their creators disrespect you, manipulate you, and blame you for refusing to engage with their bullshit. You don't owe them a single damned thing, let alone a career where they get a platform spit their bile at range, and don't let these bastards ever try to tell you otherwise.
Concords will never be gone for good. Even if we earn ourselves a reprieve, they will eventually return again, in the fullness of time. But Concord - and it's failure - signal a turning point for the industry, a fork in the road where game studios will either finally get their shit together or be dumped by the wayside like the worthless trash they are. Either way, this thread will help bring this corner of the gaming community together to warm ourselves by the bonfire of the gaming industry - and to keep an eye out for what rises from the ashes.
Now let's talk about some really shitty videogames.
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