Concord - robots with pronouns

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Sony's statement regarding Concord that these articles are sourcing. (archive)
After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.   I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.
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As expected, game's not coming back at all.
The PvP first person shooter genre is a competitive space that’s continuously evolving, and unfortunately, we did not hit our targets with this title. We will take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.
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They're doubling down on live-services.
I am a big believer in the benefits of embracing creative experimentation and developing new IP. However, growing through sustainable financials, especially in a challenged economic environment is critical.
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They're probably not going to be greenlighting any more new IPs for a while.

Looking forward to the seeing this same exact memo about "FAIRGAME$" when that inevitably fails, too.
 
There are poeple pretending to be sad for all the studio workers that probably got fired and blacklisted from anything ever, but honestly, if you make a commercial failure THIS big, I don't think you could blame Sony if they burnt the place down and denied all knowledge of ever hearing about them.
 
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Looks like even the official discord is shutting down. Make of that what you will.
 
The speed that the studio was shut down at such expense is mind-boggling. From release to taking the game offline to refunds to the closure of the studio, this is surely an unprecedented failure across all of media and it all happened so fast.

Legalfags, would there have been some kind of contract between Firewalk and Sony saying that the studio would deliver a product of sufficient quality and return for their investment? Are both parties just going to walk away from this with Sony an estimated $400m down? I just can't process the time-frames and budget involved in this disaster.

I've been gaming since the days of the ZX Spectrum and am astounded by the current chaos in the industry. Just let us go back to shooting aliens, racing fast cars and rescuing princesses. It doesn't have to be so complicated.

I hope these recent and impending failures lead to somewhat of a course correction. In the meantime I'll be playing Defender.
 
Interview dilemma: Do you admit you spent the last 8 years working on Concord or just say you were in prison for aggravated assault?
 
Oliver Onions said:
Interview dilemma: Do you admit you spent the last 8 years working on Concord or just say you were in prison for aggravated assault?
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Assuming the company doesn't also do background checks and the interviewer doesn't have that paperwork with them at the interview.
 
Fatsuit Shinji said:
Assuming the company doesn't also do background checks and the interviewer doesn't have that paperwork with them at the interview.
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If I had been involved with Firewalk in any capacity since 2016 I'd currently be moving heaven and earth to erase every trace of my digital footprint.
 
Catboy Ranch Dressing said:
Looking forward to the seeing this same exact memo about "FAIRGAME$" when that inevitably fails, too.
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Oh god I forgot all about that one! When does that leaky boat set sail? I can't fuckin' wait! :story:

Dave. said:
Looks like even the official discord is shutting down. Make of that what you will.
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Oh no! What will those unpaid "community managers" do now?

Programmer Socks said:
The speed that the studio was shut down at such expense is mind-boggling. From release to taking the game offline to refunds to the closure of the studio, this is surely an unprecedented failure across all of media and it all happened so fast.
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Can you just imagine the general mood at that office towards the end? And you're right, this happened so fast. I've rarely seen a big corporation shut down a subsidiary so fast. I wonder how much actual screaming took place during the process. I wonder if any of the little soys had to "endure" any. It would have been an incredible shock in their insulated, sheltered lives.
 
moocow said:
Oh god I forgot all about that one! When does that leaky boat set sail? I can't fuckin' wait! :story:
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The optimist in me is hoping that Concord's colossal failure will convince Snoy to cut their losses and scuttle Fairgames before it even releases a la Hyenas, but alas, this is the real world and they're stupid enough to continue with it.
 
Gog & Magog said:
I don't recall any black people playing this game either. Speaking of, how many people streamed this game? I've never seen anything about Concord outside of this thread and the gaming news sites.
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The only stream I saw (also on this thread) was someone playing it the last couple minutes the servers were online before they went down forever. It looked pretty shit. Totally generic.
 
moocow said:
Oh god I forgot all about that one! When does that leaky boat set sail? I can't fuckin' wait! :story:
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It still has no concrete release date, which is always promising. It's also really fucking annoying to google, so good luck with that SEO on a game everyone keeps forgetting exists, guys.

If you want a proper sensible chuckle, the Twitter account for the game hasn't posted since May 2023.
 
Programmer Socks said:
Legalfags, would there have been some kind of contract between Firewalk and Sony saying that the studio would deliver a product of sufficient quality and return for their investment? Are both parties just going to walk away from this with Sony an estimated $400m down? I just can't process the time-frames and budget involved in this disaster.
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I've never even seen anything like this. It reminds me of the 2000s dotbomb era, where you had things like total vaporware companies that went from having billions in venture capital to fucking nothing that just disappeared overnight, leaving unpaid employees to scrounge for shit to steal from the soon to be vacant offices.

Really unless some creative prosecutor wants to make a criminal case out of it, and I don't see why they would, there's probably nothing to recover. It's just a total dead loss.
Oliver Onions said:
If I had been involved with Firewalk in any capacity since 2016 I'd currently be moving heaven and earth to erase every trace of my digital footprint.
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If I had that shit on my LinkedIn I'd be deleting it and if anyone asked what I did for that period of time I'd just sadly state I was sucking dick for crack.
 
Herman hulst needs to be fired. He's a smarmy cunt who can't run a studio, let alone Playstation. The hate campaign against Jim Ryan was paid for by Hulst, make no mistake. That cunt will continue to run playstation into the ground and provide us with endless laughs.

PS5PRO will be a bomba.
 
Bog-standard Poster said:
Herman hulst needs to be fired. He's a smarmy cunt who can't run a studio, let alone Playstation
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He also actually used the term 'sunset' to describe shutting down Firewalk, which up until this point I thought was an Internet-exclusive colloquialism for suicide. My point is if he's a secret shitposter trying to crash Sony with no survivors I say let him cook.
 
Oliver Onions said:
He also actually used the term 'sunset' to describe shutting down Firewalk, which up until this point I thought was an Internet-exclusive colloquialism for suicide. My point is if he's a secret shitposter trying to crash Sony with no survivors I say let him cook.
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Sunset, to me at least, refers to gently and nicely winding down a department, business or product. Not a forcible stop, just one that people know about well in advance.
"John's Socks will be sunsetting their Feety(tm) range of socks next year" IE buy them while you can.
Concord was not sunset. It was nuked; a flash followed by total destruction and salted earth.

Hulst cancelled Jim's plans of a TLoU Gaas; Factions, based on the very popular multiplayer mode of TLoU. He has cancelled 9 other games and has funded zero studios or pushed them for IPs.

What he has done, is fund a remaster of an 8 year old game that his studio made. Force-bundled Horizon 2 with everything, made a Horizon VR game while not supporting VR in any other franchise, and has ported Horizon to both PC and Switch.
I've no doubt the guy has an Aloy sex doll with a cut-out of his face taped over it, so he can fuck it while loving his own genius.

He is Phil Spencer, Todd Howard and the worst of Peter Molynieuax, rolled into one.
 
Programmer Socks said:
The speed that the studio was shut down at such expense is mind-boggling. From release to taking the game offline to refunds to the closure of the studio, this is surely an unprecedented failure across all of media and it all happened so fast.

Legalfags, would there have been some kind of contract between Firewalk and Sony saying that the studio would deliver a product of sufficient quality and return for their investment? Are both parties just going to walk away from this with Sony an estimated $400m down? I just can't process the time-frames and budget involved in this disaster.

I've been gaming since the days of the ZX Spectrum and am astounded by the current chaos in the industry. Just let us go back to shooting aliens, racing fast cars and rescuing princesses. It doesn't have to be so complicated.

I hope these recent and impending failures lead to somewhat of a course correction. In the meantime I'll be playing Defender.
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They don't owe the government anything, Sony doesn't seem to think the people running the studio just embezzled the money from them, and there wasn't any kind of investment fraud going on. Even if there were some sort of contract for Firewalk to produce something that isn't trash, Sony would spend a bunch of money fighting in court to squeeze money out of nothing.

If the estimate of only selling 25k-35k copies was even remotely close, then it only makes sense to just shut it down and liquidate everything. Barely made over a million when the thing launched and they refunded that, so what they spend another 10 million redeveloping it into being some f2p turd to re-release in another year hoping they'll get their hundreds of millions back later? No way. I can actually think of a game that was launched, and repeatedly re-launched to fail over and over again, Hellgate London. That shit failed in 2007, got bought and relaunched in 2011 by a korean dev and failed again, then was relaunched by another studio in 2014 and failed again, then got relaunched yet again in 2018 and failed after the korean publisher passed it around to multiple studios. And that game still launched originally and in 2018 better than fucking Concord while having a fraction of the bad press to go with it.

There isn't anything left to do with that studio or the IP other than continue to waste money.
 
Programmer Socks said:
Legalfags, would there have been some kind of contract between Firewalk and Sony saying that the studio would deliver a product of sufficient quality and return for their investment? Are both parties just going to walk away from this with Sony an estimated $400m down? I just can't process the time-frames and budget involved in this disaster.
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I'm not a core legalfag but I'd say it breaks down like this.

- You can't guarantee a Return on Investment or a Sufficient Quality, because quality is subjective. You would have to prove (if you wanted to make a case about it) that the studio intentionally created a bad product, which is very hard to prove. (See the drama around Gearbox and SEGA, for example). It's pretty clear that the people making it thought it was going to do well and while they were super wrong, they thought they were right.

- Sony as the investor loses the money, but even in a reality where they could - Firewalk was a subsidiary studio, so it would be like trying to sue yourself. On top of this, even if there were a case to be made, Firewalk is "judgement proof" - as in they don't have the money to pay, even if they lost the theoretical case in the first place.
 
Lucas Silva #4903141 said:
Concord chads react on reddit (r/concordgame)
Lot of quipping, with some coping fans and stupid slapfighting. Didn't actually seem interesting, but I figured it would be worth archiving. The subreddit might die too, for all I know.
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Will the subreddit get locked like how The Day Before's one was? (It was recently unlocked when the developers tried to attempt another scam game) Or will it just be abandoned and forgotten like with other dead game subreddits? Or will it even get made private, just to try to hide the stink of this game?
 
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