Helldivers succeeded DESPITE Sony, not BECAUSE of it. If anything, they did an excellent job almost killing that game, so it's really surprising to still see it chugging along.
Expectations vs. Reality. They probably expected it to be a "potboiler" live service game while they work on what they thought was the big guns ie Concord. How the tables turn..
Arrowhead really REALLY regret working with Sony now, given the game was not supposed to blow up THIS big as it did Sony is such a weird company for taking away the game from many people
It's PR talk, a corporation saying it is a "passion project" to them usually means the complete opposite compared to when an independent studio declares such a thing.
@@AlexanTheManI remember ZP Yatzhee talking about some game, “this was his baby, and we hasn’t going to cut bits off his baby”. Concord really is the perfect shitstorm of poor choices
He should have been fired immediately the day they decided to pull Concord, but failing that, he should have been fired after he said this. I see zero reason for him to still be employed.
I’m so baffled by this. I don’t get Sony’s obsession for a live service of their own when they get 30% of the profits of every successful one on their platform, with nothing lost for the failures. They should be doubling down on making themselves the premier platform for devs to put their live services on while continuing to make good singleplayer stuff.
These execs are willing to gamble with the jobs and lives of their developers and the future of the company trying to win the live service lottery. It's irresponsible and idiotic.
@ you’re not wrong but they also see a lot of the metrics from their store on live service flops like Suicide Squad and Anthem. They should know it’s a massive gamble and it’s much safer to let other people place those bets and reap 30% of the profits on a win.
Big publishers aren't happy with the golden goose. They want one that shits out pure diamond. Just look at Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, and Warner Bros. WB lost so much money on their god awful live service KTJL and murdered Rock Steady in the process. Leadership's response? "We are going to keep trying to make a live service cash grab." Don't be shocked if the next Hogwarts Legacy game is a live service. Pretty much all the employees that made the amazing Arkham series had left before release because KTJL was such an embarrassment they didn't wanna work on it. Same with all of Arkane Austin's staff before Redfall came out. These publishers/leadership don't give a single shit what they give up if it means having even the tinest taste of that sweet sweet live service pie and its killing them. Though its hard to reflect on your mistakes when leadership doesn't face the consequences but rather push said consequences onto the employees who make their shitty ideas possible. CEO of Destiny 2 spent 2.4 million on cars, flexed them on his employees, then fired those employees two days later. Never mind the fact that Final Shape was beloved by an enraged community and sold like crack. Even when they get the diamond goose it's still not enough.
The decision makers are the marketing people, not the creatives or production. Marketing sees that live service makes the most money, and they never have to make another product as people will just pay monthly for the same one. They don't understand why live service games are any different than a single player game - No different than tooling a candy factory to only make their highest margin candy bar. While the creatives know the "product" has to be new and interesting before anyone will buy it, as anyone who would be interested in just the gameplay already has other options. And the producers know how expensive, time consuming, and risky a live service is. Marketing is just seeing "client pays monthly forever. Why can't you do that?" - they don't see that anyone that would play Concord already has several years invested in Overwatch. Nor that at least a half dozen other AAA companies tried to steal that exact market and failed. The marketers just see a number they want.
I don't consider Helldivers 2 to be a big-budget live service game, and that's probably what saved it. I think it was just a AA title meant to get some initial attention and drop off, which it basically did, but it sold some 10 million more units than expected. If Sony had known initially that it was going to sell that well, they would have made sure to ruin it before launch.
Catching lightning in a bottle, I guess. But Helldivers 2 seems to be one if not the only live service game out there that took a HUGE loss of players and then eventually regained its numbers. I am afraid that ties and suit moneybags will point at this for a long while and think they can do it as if it wasn't a unique case.
Yeah funny you say that, I have been going through my backlog in the last few weeks as I wait for Stalker 2 to come out and some honest reviews to drop (I do not pre-order or buy on release day anymore).
What’s nuts is Sony ostensibly greenlit the titles it thought would sell and cancelled those that wouldn’t. Sony really thought Concord would sell and twisted metal wouldn’t. Let that sink in.
Funny thing is that I could see _how_ they could do a live-service Twisted Metal, but they would absolutely fuck that up had they tried it. It's better to let Twisted Metal lay where it is than have it become a shallow live-service husk ultimately...
It dealt Atari a mortal blow it never recovered from. Acti barely survived. '83 to '85 left the slate empty, free for the taking for the big N and Sega.
A lot of people try to go "Oh, it was caused by an oversaturation of bad games", but it wasn't that the industry was oversaturated necessarily, it was that the dominant platforms were oversaturated and too many units for the game carts were manufactured and not sold meaning that there was no liquid assets to put out something better. It was also vulnerable due to the small size of the industry, how focused it was on a few vulnerable companies, and how small the market for the games were. Third parties basically didn't exist for the consoles so if the console manufacturer wasn't putting out quality they would be come associated with garbage and go under taking their entire share of the industry with them, which is what happened to Atari, Mattel, and Coleco the three of whom were dominant in what could be considered the console war of the time. The crash in the 80s was also a uniquely American affair and outside the USA computer games were more popular and just kept trucking along. It was also a uniquely console affair. Games like Wizardry 3 (a franchise that while technically dead is still somehow trucking all the way up to modern day with a recent Switch port of the original game over forty years after its original release), Elite (yes the one that would later go on as a series to give us Elite Dangerous), Ultima III and IV, The Bard's Tale (A franchise that continues to endure), Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (games popular enough to later be used to create the Wolfenstein 3D everyone knows as the start of FPS), King's Quest (A franchise that endures to this day), and more are all from this era and did amazingly well. To this day basically every company is within a dozen consecutive failures to crashing and burning, with most of the major publishers within less than half that of going under. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo can endure a lot as they get a lot of residual and alternative income from their back catalogues, subscription services, and their cut from other games sold on their platforms and even if their games are shit, the third party Indies/Premium Indies/A/AA/AAA will keep their consoles alive. When it comes to the like of Ubisoft, EA, Take-Two, and other such major western publishers not yet consumed by the megalithic giants of Sony and Microsoft, well they are all within a six failure proximity to going under. When it comes to AA publishers like Focus Home or Paradox they are within three games flopping to go under. Everyone smaller is only more resilient because their investments and losses are so small they don't risk too much at a time, but if someone like Devolver Digital or Team 17 tries to make something big they are in serious risk of dying if it doesn't go over well. Most developers who aren't owned by a publisher are one or two failures from death to contrast. All of this means we're fairly resistant now to another crash happening (but any industry can crash no matter how resistant to such it is), but we are getting about due IMO for a topple of some of the biggest studios and publishers and a roll over as everyone sort of bumps of a tier to fill the gaps.
@@squirrel_killer- it does seem like we hit a "too big to fail" point years ago, in terms of vidjuh games in general. -any one "crash" is going to be offset by other games still performing well elsewhere, & the bizarre reasons games fail today look very different than they did back then (games like Anthem or Concord fail for very different reasons than say that E.T. game we do not speak of).
@@RustinBlack There is no such thing as too big to fail. Anyone who makes too many mistakes can bring ruin to a formerly profitable company. Not even Didnee is immune to this.
"These games cost hundreds of millions of dollars." Yep, and they got crushed by Black Myth Wukong, a game made by a new studio, made up of only 140 people (half the size of the average studio), and cost around $43 million to make. How a company like Sony can't see that is beyond me.
Concord: published by Sony, huge marketing, hundreds of millions of dollars of budget, a technically polished game on release - nobody cares, less than 700 people playing on launch. Deadlock - published by Valve, invite only beta access, no marketing campaign whatsoever(the entire marketing was Valve admitting that it exists), has half done and missing assets - tens of thousands of people playing every day.
If you're Chinese you can work your devs even harder and for much less money than if you're American. I know devs in the West complain of overworking but that's nothing compared to how labour laws (and a lack thereof) are in China.
@@Philip_TaylorI can promise you, that has nothing to do with the final quality and likability of those games. They could have literally worked the concord devs to death, but that would not have made the game any better.
@@tetchedskate3366 They can do it cheaper is what I'm saying. They don't need to provide employee benefits, sick days or the like. They make everything for much less than we can, that's why we buy it from them.
In their eyes, one single successful live service game is worth its weight in gold, so if they have to lose money on their way to that fountain of youth, so be it
And even if the company they're using as fuel to find that magic money fountain burns down, they're c-suits. They can just jump out of the building with a golden parachute and do this all over again. The guy who heads Unity now used to be the head of EA during their worst reputation. And let's not forget Bobbi Kotick
That is true but i just don't think the approach of throwing money at projects and hoping it will become the next fortnite is a realistic money making business.
While it’s true one fornite makes up for 10 failures it’s very risky and I thought businesses hate risks. That’s why they resold the last of us for the 100th time.
15:11 "You have to laugh about it, otherwise you'll cry" This has unironically been my motto for dealing with problems in life. It's worked for a decade.
Another big problem Sony isn't talking about is that money is tough right now. A live service game has two kind of players. The more or less free player crowd, even if they purchase the game, that will spend just hours of their day trying to grind out one thing. And the other are the payers, that will bypass alot of stuff by just paying for it. Free players don't have the time to grind out these games since they are probably working more to make up for the shitty economy, and the payers don't have the spare income to spend it on a triple A game that will probably be shut down a month after launch. Them shutting down Concord so soon shows the players exactly that. Why get invested into a game that Sony will just toss aside in no time?
Sony right now is the company in the big 3 that is desperately gambling the lottery and because they won once (Helldivers 2) it made them even more addicted
@@greebo6799 if they can survive the ps4 days with their smaller titles, they can survive the ps5 days. or that their free competition lead expired and nintendo is the actual lead now, ps4 was LUCKY the wii u and xbox one were very flawed
Executives, not just gaming industry executives, are idiots. Their only skills of note are corporate politics and (generally) metaphorical backstabbing.
That's shareholders talk. They know the truth but in these kind of meetings executives always try justify their obvious mistakes with excuses like bad luck, market flutuations or whatever
I want them to drop another one of these live-service games in the middle of let’s say “not so busy” release time and it still flops. That should set the record straight that players don’t want these games
23:49 Do you know what's so funny: Metaphor re fantazio Was both a new IP and released within days of Dragon Ball: sparking zero. And yet it sold one million copies within the first 24 hours. (And Metaphor went through its own development hell with an 8 year dev time.) The excuses Sony has for Concord's failure are SO hilarious because of how easy they are disproven.
Different type of game. Cant compare the two. :metaphor is not an arena shooter which by its very nature garners hate toward it without anyone even seeing what type of game it’s going to be. Metaphor is a role- playing game which is a genre that people love no matter how many bad games it has
To be fair, Metaphor succeeded because it was coming from a trio of known superstars. On the other hand, it's hard to have your own known superstars when you lay off everyone constantly
@@kevinconley7429Why can’t you compare the 2? If gamers naturally hate arena shooters then why the fuck did Sony get try and make one? And RPGs are DEFINITELY not universally loved, Veilguard just came out.
I mean metaphor was literally persona with a reskin. Obviously not having a name is not the reason concord failed but prior success with an established IP definitely has some help towards sales.
Actions speak louder than words. They did fire the entire studio responsible for Concord. If they truly thought it was a timing issue then they wouldn't have done this. To me, I'm thinking maybe they didn't want to put all the blame on the studio because it might look bad for them
No they fired whoever could be cut off the payroll which weren't pulling weight. That's why that studio that haven't even released a game yet was shot out the airlock along with Firewalk. Both didn't help rake in moolah, and they need the books to look good for the Quarterly report. Bye bye 👋
So their friends can buy them up when they go on sale - A fire sale. People think it's a culture war, when it's really just blatant corporate sabotage. There is a reason why comparative professional sports teams talk all that DEI BS, but don't apply it to how they choose their athletes. An NBA team won't perform well if you start seeing a team of diverse, short idiots, instead of the best performing athletes. A corporation, a game developer, a studio, perform the same as a sports team. And outside forces are incentivizing them to hire the worst, most inexperienced buffoons for the job, and to fill racial and gender quotas instead of skillbased quotas. The tanking gaming and film industry, is the direct and expected results of the DEI corporate sabotage. The goal is to buy em cheap, or just remove them as competition.
@@Thanosdidtherighthingyes, it does. Blackrock loves funding ESG and DEI initiatives. Just because you don’t know about something doesn’t mean it means nothing.
@@Thanosdidtherighthing Blackrock is a big name investment firm, I believe. They're known pretty well for haviny thrown millions at some absolutely godawful projects, such as FTX.
@@borkguy No BlackRock is literally just an investment company worth billions founded 1988. You can scream DEI at the top of your lungs if it makes you feel better but this is capitalism 101.
Funny how Sony is literally burning money hoping one of this live service games actually becomes a hit, but the moment they actually got one being a global sensation (Helldivers 2) they were not prepared to issue updates constantly on top of making stupid decisions like the PSN account requirement
They didn't make Helldivers, just published it. And the devs fumbled even without Sony's bad input. After the first couple of weeks all people were talking about was the devs doing terrible balance updates that made the game less fun.
@@CdotB_PlayStation itself are not the devs but they still own the IP. And yea the studio behind it making unnecessary balance updates was also stupid af
Fairgame makes me think the rich believe when people say "eat the rich" they're saying it because they want to be rich. They miss the point that the people who say "eat the rich" don't want to just make themselves rich, they want that money to be spent on bettering many peoples' lives.
Why on Earth would executives learn _anything_ when they so rarely suffer consequences from their bad decisions? Either you put out the next Fortnite and get paid millions in bonuses, or you fail miserably, fire a bunch of employees and get paid millions in bonuses.
Sony won the console war in the ps4 era. To go from that to this is just absolutely baffling. What's worse is that I feel like Xbox isn't capitalising enough on song's failures either.
@@bobbywrtmhonestly Nintendo is in a market of its own, most people end up with a switch and another console so it’s no surprise the switch sells well! They are also a go to for a lot of young families, the console war is really between Sony and Microsoft and likely only ever will be!
@@bobbywrtmyou're smoking crack. Switch outsold ps4 in 2023... the switch came out in 2017. It took the switch 6 years to outsell ps4.... this is after they stopped MAKING the ps4 once the ps5 came out in 2020. The only reason the switch outsold ps4 is because they legit stopped making ps4's and it still took them 3 years after that to "beat" it
It's not exactly baffling, Sony did not so much "Win" the PS4 generation as opposed to Succeeded over Xbox's complete failure. Did it have some good games? Sure, but had Xbox continued the success of the 360 it would have been a much different gaming landscape. $600 PS3 -$800 PS5 pro discless same mentality 🤷♂️ they genuinely don't think they need to compete as they won.
xbox strategy has nothing to do with selling consoles or having exclusives, what strategy they have? i really dont know, buying studios and relying on game pass is really that profitable?
Sony: Concord is our new revolutionary game. It's just shit overwatch It flops. Sony no more than a year later: Fairgame$ is our revolutionary new game. It's just shit payday. What do we think will happen next?
These companies will never give up, because they're chasing what they see is a golden goose. A game that can last for a long time, drip feeding content to string players along, and rake in all the microtransactions as they can.
the worst part is that the examples are RIGHT THERE with hoyo games, nikke, wuthering waves, love and deepspace, etc. making bank, but noo, instead they make another tone deaf PR yawnfest nobody cares about
Yeah like the guys said above, indie is the way to go for this shit unless it's actually good AAA releases like From Soft titles or any other companies not off the top of my head.
6:30 Not uncommon for Japanese or Korean companies. Take Yamaha for example. They made musical instruments, pianos, woodwind and synths. They also make outboard motors for boats and motorcycles. Samsung is the Korean equivalent. Phones, TVs, Monitors, washing machines, fridges, Smart Toilets.
Every multinational corporation these days has financial and insurance divisions. They handle credit payments and the like. Every big car company has them, every big airline, every big tech conglomerate. It's not that they have physical locations like a real bank or insurance company. They mostly handle all the internal financial stuff and also the insurances you can buy as addon when you purchase something from them like a phone or car.
It was really carrying them back during their massive issues in the early-mid 00s. They had to do a lot of consolidation. SOE sold off, Spider-Man merch rights sold (terrible mistake), Vaio sold, I think they sold their editing software off as well.
The worst thing about working in the game industry is clueless execs who get paid orders of magnitude more than you, fuck up, and then get paid a lottery to leave. I hate them.
In a perfect world Jim Ryan would've been fired in a very public letter to the press and the money from that severance package would've been given to the devs at the studio as a sorry and financial help as they're looking for new jobs.
Yeah. Concord had its problems, but execs thought so highly of it that they spent hundreds of millions on development, buying the IP and the studio, only to pull it in 2 weeks. That is who.cost the company tons of money. Even if Ryan was forced out, he will be fine for the rest of his life while everyone at Firewalk is looking for a job when the industry is sheddings jobs.
“Gates” are just review checkpoints essentially. You do gate reviews (or phase reviews is another common term) when you complete a stage of the project and you need to pass the review before moving on to the next. Within each phase there will be bunch of work/deliverables/evidence you complete and provide to the reviewer who is usually fairly senior/experienced and also external from the project itself. Fairly standard in big businesses.
We joke in the past how corpos will look at what people say on social media to gauge their product direction so we can actually successfully psy op them into making crap. Hard to believe it's reality now, except it's not cos people do it as a joke, but the Corpos are a joke listening to the vocal minority who probably don't even play games.
I love that sony somehow did exactly what they were trying to do and struck absolute gold with helldivers and they still managed to instantly ruin that game and tank its quality
This is an insult to Arasaka. Arasaka had the entire world on their knees begging them for business. Sony just blew through nearly a billion with nothing to show for it.
Sony is a mission to destroy their brand: Burns $100+ million on a generic bland hero shooter, shuts down said studio after they purchased it, removes disc drives and stands from $700 product, inserts psn where it shouldn’t, psn shutdowns, inserts ads on their console homepage, stellar blade controversy, complete inability and indifference to prevent scalpers of 30th anniversary edition, cancel games of beloved IPs, closing more studios, abandoning the psvr2, raises prices of hardware and controllers, leaks content of final shape before release, raises price of subscription just for the privilege to play multiplayer, removes game sales from steam in multiple regions, changes how Stars work and now they expire, remasters unnecessary games, raises prices of said remaster game, delists original from steam to force psn on remaster, remasters Until Dawn that runs at 30fps when the original rus at 60fps on the ps5, ignores and holds Bloodborne hostage etc. That's just this year!
They also cancelled the Spider-Verse game. Literally the ONE live-action game they were working on that had a genuine high probability of being the golden goose that they've been chasing for years now, and they just looked the other way...
Im going to be "That guy" but sony is just the publicher for Helldiver 2. Arrowhead has been making HD2 the best it can be despite the meddling from Sony.
As part of the alphabet mafia, this game wasn't made for us either. I see a lot of "go woke, go broke" comments all over the place, but this game was not marketed to me or my peers. It wasn't really marketed to anyone, cost too much, and had bad design. It would have functioned better as a single player campaign; then all those cutscenes (presumably a lot of the budget) would have served a purpose.
Fr I hate when people try to make it like lgbt or ‘minorities’ are the *reason* behind why the game sucks lol. Like no that’s just discrimination. They suck bc the characters and setting is awfully designed. Instead of ‘character who happens to be nb, and look, they’re doing all the shooting just as cool as anyone else’ it’s ‘nb person who happens to have a character’. They’re doing design arse first and it sucks for our community cuz all ppl will take away is ‘minorities or lgbt are lame’ when in reality most don’t even complain or care when it’s done well. There’s always some bad eggs but that’s expected.
@@bhaveshramdaursingh4325 I've heard people say it/read it in comments and I thought it was funny, personally. I mean, it's everything that isn't purely straight/cis and that's a lot of letters. Lol
So true about bad games and bad products in general. If it's bad it's bad it doesn't matter when or where you launch it. Reminds me of when people blamed MKBHD for that AI pin product tanking when in reality it was just a bad product that needed more refining.
Totoki is basically Sony's top hatchet man who has been sent to oversee the PlayStation division cos what they're doing is the opposite of growth. Which also means that the timer has started for Hermen Hulst to turn things around or get fired.
Don’t dislike Luke personally but these videos are ridiculous. Literally a 40 minute rant about how a Sony executive dared not to say that Concord fucking sucked and Sony didn’t read the gaming market properly. Surely that will be reassuring to investors.
@@jorgep7747 Why would you watch this video much less this channel, then? People like you make no sense. No one's forcing you to watch this stuff. It's free. Stop whining.
I think it's just all projection. He's not allowed to say how he really feels about DA Veilguard or be scorned by his peers and journos so something like Concord that's been dead and buried old news months ago is an easy target to vent that frustration.
It’s so sad how much greed ruins games. Was playing BO6 last night with a bunch of friends through gamepass, we haven’t played CoD in years. It was crazy to hear everyone having fun and liking the progression. Saying it felt so much better than previous games and I think it is just because there’s no battle pass or constant adds asking for money right now. I’m sure when S1 drops I think later this week, we are gonna see a lot of that enjoyment get sucked out for the chance to sell us stuff. Just a sad trend and I just wanted to have in writing somewhere that we enjoyed it before the ads are put in.
Imagine all the IPs that could've been resurrected with 400 million 😂 1 concord costed as much as a new spyro game, new twisted metal, and a bloodbourne remaster
They're not going to keep making the same "mistakes". They're going to keep making the same choices. Using the term "mistake" implies they're doing things by accident. These are intentional choices they're thought about and chosen to ignore criticisms related to, so let's please stop using such terminology to where they could play the "We didn't know" type card.
15k isn't a large audience either. Space Marine looks good and I'd love to try it one day, but they need to add more stuff to do. I'm not gonna spend $70 on a game that I play for six hours.
@YasaiTsume I... Wasn't comparing it to an MMO? That would be very "apples and oranges". Instead, look at something like Helldivers. From everything I've seen, space Marine is a good game, there's just no content there to sustain it. Releasing it with only three maps is a bit absurd to me. I wouldn't pay money for it until they flesh it out a lot more. They should've gone the early access route if they only wanted to drop it with three maps to start.
Why don't they start pitching game concepts directly to the players? Like have a show where they show off a bunch of concepts, art, maybe a CGI trailer to demonstrate it, and let the customers voice which concepts they're interested in buying, then develop those ones. Instead of taking blind shots in the dark, just bloody ask your consumers what they'll buy and make it!
I love how Luke was like "I probably didn't get a review code for Veilguard because I bashed Concord too hard" but just continues to beat the horse. Freakin' classic.
It's interesting that Titoki mentions a game's release timing being crucial as it lines up with what Hulst experienced when he was at Guerilla, as Horizon is no stranger to having it's sales momentum cannibalized by other releases (Forbidden West released a week before Elden Ring and Zero Dawn released a couple weeks before BOTW). Just makes me wonder if Hulst has convinced Titoki that that's why Concord failed, which is absolutely the wrong lesson to be learned here, as the audience Black Myth Wukong was targeted to is vastly different to the one Concord was aiming for, meaning that Concord was merely just a bad game that no one wanted to play, like wow, big surprise there!
Nintendo selling life insurance would be worse than regular life insurance Nintendo is known for their games and their ability to sue the shit out of people for minor things
Sony even tried to kill their only live service game that works out for them with the PSN requirement. They’re willing to tank a knee to the face as long as they’ll somehow get their own Fortnite
Any "game as a service" should be a red flag. It's built to generate money, not player enjoyment. Also, in corporate projects, 'gates' are moments in which the decision is made whether or not to continue the project / move to the next stage of the project.
About Fairgam$ - No one says is has to be "ok" to steal - even from billionaires. It can just be a heist game, like Payday, but which has a cheeky in-game, ironic justification. I understand and respect the skepticism, though. Skepticism is good.
Hope you're being sarcastic, because that wouldn't have mattered at all. the game had zero traction, nobody played the beta and public perception was terrible
The only money that is wasted is money that ends up in a rich person's account. The real rich people don't spend money on yachts and such, though the money that goes to yachts is pretty close to wasted too.
This is so sad... Seeing a name that defined most of my childhood, the big S, the console that made me love platform games through the PS1-2 classics, become this corporate gambling machine that will just follow trends and try to "make it" again and again... It's like they got blinded by the fleeting success of Helldivers 2 and instantly forgot all the other failed live service games, then the concord fiasco happens and they just make excuses, rinse and repeat. Let's try with Fairgame$ - AW DANGIT! No worries, Horizon multiplayer will be the big one! - AW DANGIT!
I absolutely despise when a piece of media just uses anti-capitalist themes for solely aesthetic purposes and then bastardizes those same themes. It would be akin to Call of Duty making an anti-war military shooter, you already know it won't be that at all.
Woah woah woah wait a minute. Space Marine in the background AND the Titanic????!!!!! Did we just become best friends? You've got everything I'm into in your office. Subbed for sure.
Jim Ryan was fired for lying to regulators around the world, and humiliating Playstation's reputation worldwide by claiming Sony would never recover from Xbox owning Call of Duty. They couldn't have known how badly their internal live service push would wind up when Jim was fired, but if they had I bet it would have been much more public instead of the saving face they gave him.
Heck, Helldivers 2 would've been an even greater success if Sony didn't ruin it for 2/3rds of the world with their forced PSN accounts. And I'm pretty sure the kernal level anti-cheat used for Helldivers 2 was forced on the game because of Sony as well. Because of that anticheat I have a few friends that absolutely refuse to play the game. Helldivers 2 succeeded DESPITE Sony's influence.
The absurd level of corporate greed to burn it to the ground immediately is just sad. Modern gaming is dead and this really revealed how they feel about the people.
these well-to-do devs that make 6 figures or close to it consider themselves "working class" instead of some of the most privileged people on the planet.
The way to market these games is not to market them. Thats an exaggeration, but you definitely do not create expensive, no gameplay, cg only, trailers. Since these games live and die by their gameplay loop, you release it in early access and let word of mouth build excitement, or lack of user excitement inform your decisions on how to proceed.
If you have an extra $1, consider donating it to the fundraiser on this video! Let's get some good out of the Concord debacle!
ok
Well, I can't spend it on Concord, sooooooo.....
No
Put your glasses back on 🤠😎👓
Bro 1$ in my country is like 10000$ in USA
Helldivers succeeded DESPITE Sony, not BECAUSE of it. If anything, they did an excellent job almost killing that game, so it's really surprising to still see it chugging along.
Expectations vs. Reality. They probably expected it to be a "potboiler" live service game while they work on what they thought was the big guns ie Concord. How the tables turn..
Arrowhead really REALLY regret working with Sony now, given the game was not supposed to blow up THIS big as it did
Sony is such a weird company for taking away the game from many people
The deal is they found an article saying they are still not done trying it. It said we need a PSN account “FoR oUr SaFeTy.”
Sony tried to kill Helldivers?
😂😂😂
You crazy
@@Mohmar2010source: I made it the fuck up
Hermen saying a game is "near and dear to his heart" should be considered a red flag from now on.
It's PR talk, a corporation saying it is a "passion project" to them usually means the complete opposite compared to when an independent studio declares such a thing.
Considering that by the point he got to high ranks with the brand, Concord was old enough to meet him...he's clearly doing PR Talk.
@@AlexanTheManI remember ZP Yatzhee talking about some game, “this was his baby, and we hasn’t going to cut bits off his baby”.
Concord really is the perfect shitstorm of poor choices
His heart is located in his wallet
He should have been fired immediately the day they decided to pull Concord, but failing that, he should have been fired after he said this. I see zero reason for him to still be employed.
"I did not shoot myself into foot, the bullet just happened to fly there when I pulled the trigger. It was all bad luck."
Ah yes.
"I just f***ing shot myself!"
-Tex Grebner
What a classic
bad timing buddy
*in, not into.
"Shit happens" - FNTASTIC Studios, Dec. 12nd 2023.
I’m so baffled by this. I don’t get Sony’s obsession for a live service of their own when they get 30% of the profits of every successful one on their platform, with nothing lost for the failures. They should be doubling down on making themselves the premier platform for devs to put their live services on while continuing to make good singleplayer stuff.
They see the actual money printers that are Fortnite,Roblox, League, every sports game, Valorant and all the Gacha games and want a piece.
These execs are willing to gamble with the jobs and lives of their developers and the future of the company trying to win the live service lottery. It's irresponsible and idiotic.
@ you’re not wrong but they also see a lot of the metrics from their store on live service flops like Suicide Squad and Anthem. They should know it’s a massive gamble and it’s much safer to let other people place those bets and reap 30% of the profits on a win.
Big publishers aren't happy with the golden goose. They want one that shits out pure diamond. Just look at Ubisoft, Sony, Microsoft, and Warner Bros.
WB lost so much money on their god awful live service KTJL and murdered Rock Steady in the process. Leadership's response? "We are going to keep trying to make a live service cash grab." Don't be shocked if the next Hogwarts Legacy game is a live service.
Pretty much all the employees that made the amazing Arkham series had left before release because KTJL was such an embarrassment they didn't wanna work on it. Same with all of Arkane Austin's staff before Redfall came out.
These publishers/leadership don't give a single shit what they give up if it means having even the tinest taste of that sweet sweet live service pie and its killing them. Though its hard to reflect on your mistakes when leadership doesn't face the consequences but rather push said consequences onto the employees who make their shitty ideas possible.
CEO of Destiny 2 spent 2.4 million on cars, flexed them on his employees, then fired those employees two days later. Never mind the fact that Final Shape was beloved by an enraged community and sold like crack.
Even when they get the diamond goose it's still not enough.
The decision makers are the marketing people, not the creatives or production.
Marketing sees that live service makes the most money, and they never have to make another product as people will just pay monthly for the same one. They don't understand why live service games are any different than a single player game - No different than tooling a candy factory to only make their highest margin candy bar.
While the creatives know the "product" has to be new and interesting before anyone will buy it, as anyone who would be interested in just the gameplay already has other options. And the producers know how expensive, time consuming, and risky a live service is.
Marketing is just seeing "client pays monthly forever. Why can't you do that?" - they don't see that anyone that would play Concord already has several years invested in Overwatch. Nor that at least a half dozen other AAA companies tried to steal that exact market and failed. The marketers just see a number they want.
I don't consider Helldivers 2 to be a big-budget live service game, and that's probably what saved it. I think it was just a AA title meant to get some initial attention and drop off, which it basically did, but it sold some 10 million more units than expected. If Sony had known initially that it was going to sell that well, they would have made sure to ruin it before launch.
Yeah, they had to retroactively do it *after* launch for that one.
@@MrSnaztastic preach brother 🙌
Catching lightning in a bottle, I guess. But Helldivers 2 seems to be one if not the only live service game out there that took a HUGE loss of players and then eventually regained its numbers. I am afraid that ties and suit moneybags will point at this for a long while and think they can do it as if it wasn't a unique case.
Helldivers 2 was intend to be a Live service every sony game released on pc and console at the same time is trying to be a live service
@@robertally5608 Yes, but not a massive investment.
Let em keep fucking up. My backlog will get cleared out and I'll save money. Literally a win-win situation 😂
You have just a year before GTA 6 😎
A couple years*
(Needs to get out of console beta first)
You act like thats goingbto be any better lmao@niksobil
@@niksobil good one I almost fall for it but them I remembered that luffy still hasnt found the one piece
Yeah funny you say that, I have been going through my backlog in the last few weeks as I wait for Stalker 2 to come out and some honest reviews to drop (I do not pre-order or buy on release day anymore).
Concord ran so Fairgame$ could fly.........into the ground.
Fairgames and Marathon, two games for Sony that will collapse within the month of release.
You mean Concord sank so that Fairgame$ can crater.
@goufr3540 I would be excited for marathon if it wasn't a pvpve extraction shooter. Just give me my pve goddammit
@@mcbill7352 even worse, made buy current year Bungie. Their track record sonce they left Activision does not inspire hope to say the least.
The question is "At sub, super, or hypersonic speed?"
🤪
What’s nuts is Sony ostensibly greenlit the titles it thought would sell and cancelled those that wouldn’t. Sony really thought Concord would sell and twisted metal wouldn’t. Let that sink in.
As a huge Twisted Metal fan, I would not have touched a live-service version of it.
@@LordJarohnever played it but it looks dope as fuck and ya don't let Sony get ahold of anything they literally turn gold to shit
I have the feeling Twisted Metal is too brutal for the "modern audience"
@@AnotherGuyTheXone I doubt that. It was more likely they didn't have a way to monetize it properly.
Funny thing is that I could see _how_ they could do a live-service Twisted Metal, but they would absolutely fuck that up had they tried it. It's better to let Twisted Metal lay where it is than have it become a shallow live-service husk ultimately...
I've heard the video game industry crash in the 80's was due in large part to "oversaturation of low quality games". Nothing ominous there . . .
It dealt Atari a mortal blow it never recovered from. Acti barely survived. '83 to '85 left the slate empty, free for the taking for the big N and Sega.
There's not an oversaturarion, the market is decentralized.
A lot of people try to go "Oh, it was caused by an oversaturation of bad games", but it wasn't that the industry was oversaturated necessarily, it was that the dominant platforms were oversaturated and too many units for the game carts were manufactured and not sold meaning that there was no liquid assets to put out something better. It was also vulnerable due to the small size of the industry, how focused it was on a few vulnerable companies, and how small the market for the games were. Third parties basically didn't exist for the consoles so if the console manufacturer wasn't putting out quality they would be come associated with garbage and go under taking their entire share of the industry with them, which is what happened to Atari, Mattel, and Coleco the three of whom were dominant in what could be considered the console war of the time. The crash in the 80s was also a uniquely American affair and outside the USA computer games were more popular and just kept trucking along. It was also a uniquely console affair. Games like Wizardry 3 (a franchise that while technically dead is still somehow trucking all the way up to modern day with a recent Switch port of the original game over forty years after its original release), Elite (yes the one that would later go on as a series to give us Elite Dangerous), Ultima III and IV, The Bard's Tale (A franchise that continues to endure), Castle Wolfenstein and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (games popular enough to later be used to create the Wolfenstein 3D everyone knows as the start of FPS), King's Quest (A franchise that endures to this day), and more are all from this era and did amazingly well.
To this day basically every company is within a dozen consecutive failures to crashing and burning, with most of the major publishers within less than half that of going under. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo can endure a lot as they get a lot of residual and alternative income from their back catalogues, subscription services, and their cut from other games sold on their platforms and even if their games are shit, the third party Indies/Premium Indies/A/AA/AAA will keep their consoles alive.
When it comes to the like of Ubisoft, EA, Take-Two, and other such major western publishers not yet consumed by the megalithic giants of Sony and Microsoft, well they are all within a six failure proximity to going under. When it comes to AA publishers like Focus Home or Paradox they are within three games flopping to go under. Everyone smaller is only more resilient because their investments and losses are so small they don't risk too much at a time, but if someone like Devolver Digital or Team 17 tries to make something big they are in serious risk of dying if it doesn't go over well. Most developers who aren't owned by a publisher are one or two failures from death to contrast.
All of this means we're fairly resistant now to another crash happening (but any industry can crash no matter how resistant to such it is), but we are getting about due IMO for a topple of some of the biggest studios and publishers and a roll over as everyone sort of bumps of a tier to fill the gaps.
@@squirrel_killer- it does seem like we hit a "too big to fail" point years ago, in terms of vidjuh games in general. -any one "crash" is going to be offset by other games still performing well elsewhere, & the bizarre reasons games fail today look very different than they did back then (games like Anthem or Concord fail for very different reasons than say that E.T. game we do not speak of).
@@RustinBlack There is no such thing as too big to fail. Anyone who makes too many mistakes can bring ruin to a formerly profitable company. Not even Didnee is immune to this.
"These games cost hundreds of millions of dollars." Yep, and they got crushed by Black Myth Wukong, a game made by a new studio, made up of only 140 people (half the size of the average studio), and cost around $43 million to make. How a company like Sony can't see that is beyond me.
Concord: published by Sony, huge marketing, hundreds of millions of dollars of budget, a technically polished game on release - nobody cares, less than 700 people playing on launch.
Deadlock - published by Valve, invite only beta access, no marketing campaign whatsoever(the entire marketing was Valve admitting that it exists), has half done and missing assets - tens of thousands of people playing every day.
If you're Chinese you can work your devs even harder and for much less money than if you're American. I know devs in the West complain of overworking but that's nothing compared to how labour laws (and a lack thereof) are in China.
@@Philip_TaylorI can promise you, that has nothing to do with the final quality and likability of those games. They could have literally worked the concord devs to death, but that would not have made the game any better.
@@tetchedskate3366 They can do it cheaper is what I'm saying. They don't need to provide employee benefits, sick days or the like. They make everything for much less than we can, that's why we buy it from them.
@ and once again, not having to provide employee benefits would have in no way made concord a better game.
In their eyes, one single successful live service game is worth its weight in gold, so if they have to lose money on their way to that fountain of youth, so be it
Sacrifice devs and studios to find the precious fountain of youth just to make a tenth of the profit 😂
And even if the company they're using as fuel to find that magic money fountain burns down, they're c-suits. They can just jump out of the building with a golden parachute and do this all over again.
The guy who heads Unity now used to be the head of EA during their worst reputation.
And let's not forget Bobbi Kotick
That is true but i just don't think the approach of throwing money at projects and hoping it will become the next fortnite is a realistic money making business.
While it’s true one fornite makes up for 10 failures it’s very risky and I thought businesses hate risks. That’s why they resold the last of us for the 100th time.
They basically have a mindset of a teenage crypto investor
15:11 "You have to laugh about it, otherwise you'll cry"
This has unironically been my motto for dealing with problems in life. It's worked for a decade.
Another big problem Sony isn't talking about is that money is tough right now. A live service game has two kind of players. The more or less free player crowd, even if they purchase the game, that will spend just hours of their day trying to grind out one thing. And the other are the payers, that will bypass alot of stuff by just paying for it. Free players don't have the time to grind out these games since they are probably working more to make up for the shitty economy, and the payers don't have the spare income to spend it on a triple A game that will probably be shut down a month after launch. Them shutting down Concord so soon shows the players exactly that. Why get invested into a game that Sony will just toss aside in no time?
Sony right now is the company in the big 3 that is desperately gambling the lottery and because they won once (Helldivers 2) it made them even more addicted
Didn't you know that 90% of gambling addicts quit right before they're about to hit it big? I think Sony are taking this meme a bit too seriously.
@@greebo6799 if they can survive the ps4 days with their smaller titles, they can survive the ps5 days. or that their free competition lead expired and nintendo is the actual lead now, ps4 was LUCKY the wii u and xbox one were very flawed
This is really what it is, it's literally a gambling addiction.
I don't think they even think of Helldivers 2 as a win 😅
They got their 4 minutes and 11 seconds of immortality and thought they could extend it a little bit more by putting all their cards in
Executives, not just gaming industry executives, are idiots. Their only skills of note are corporate politics and (generally) metaphorical backstabbing.
Oh c'mon, they also are incredibly skilled in unearned arrogance!
They aren’t idiots, they are sociopathic circle jerkers. It’s a lottery where the losses are people’s careers and their housing.
They know how to swallow sausage as well
@@megamandrn001 And greed, if that even counts as a skill lol
They only know to milking company to raise their bonus, usually by lay off normal workers who actually doing the real work
That's shareholders talk. They know the truth but in these kind of meetings executives always try justify their obvious mistakes with excuses like bad luck, market flutuations or whatever
I want them to drop another one of these live-service games in the middle of let’s say “not so busy” release time and it still flops. That should set the record straight that players don’t want these games
In that scenario, they'll just blame the gamers, like every other company.
@@Antek_S true, but it will prove us right at the same time.
@@rebellious_red7123Dude, we already know that we're right. These companies will never admit it though lol.
@@Antek_S lmao oh I know. They will continue to lose money, and we will support games that are worth our time
If concord didn’t set the record straight already, nothing will
23:49 Do you know what's so funny: Metaphor re fantazio Was both a new IP and released within days of Dragon Ball: sparking zero. And yet it sold one million copies within the first 24 hours. (And Metaphor went through its own development hell with an 8 year dev time.)
The excuses Sony has for Concord's failure are SO hilarious because of how easy they are disproven.
Different type of game. Cant compare the two. :metaphor is not an arena shooter which by its very nature garners hate toward it without anyone even seeing what type of game it’s going to be. Metaphor is a role- playing game which is a genre that people love no matter how many bad games it has
To be fair, Metaphor succeeded because it was coming from a trio of known superstars. On the other hand, it's hard to have your own known superstars when you lay off everyone constantly
@@kevinconley7429 gotta admire the effort to create bait without getting cash for it
@@kevinconley7429Why can’t you compare the 2? If gamers naturally hate arena shooters then why the fuck did Sony get try and make one? And RPGs are DEFINITELY not universally loved, Veilguard just came out.
I mean metaphor was literally persona with a reskin.
Obviously not having a name is not the reason concord failed but prior success with an established IP definitely has some help towards sales.
Actions speak louder than words. They did fire the entire studio responsible for Concord. If they truly thought it was a timing issue then they wouldn't have done this.
To me, I'm thinking maybe they didn't want to put all the blame on the studio because it might look bad for them
No they fired whoever could be cut off the payroll which weren't pulling weight.
That's why that studio that haven't even released a game yet was shot out the airlock along with Firewalk. Both didn't help rake in moolah, and they need the books to look good for the Quarterly report. Bye bye 👋
That other studio was working on a mobile version of Concord. Goes to show how much they expected of it.
Blackrock inspires companies to love the smell of burning piles of money.
So their friends can buy them up when they go on sale - A fire sale. People think it's a culture war, when it's really just blatant corporate sabotage.
There is a reason why comparative professional sports teams talk all that DEI BS, but don't apply it to how they choose their athletes. An NBA team won't perform well if you start seeing a team of diverse, short idiots, instead of the best performing athletes. A corporation, a game developer, a studio, perform the same as a sports team. And outside forces are incentivizing them to hire the worst, most inexperienced buffoons for the job, and to fill racial and gender quotas instead of skillbased quotas. The tanking gaming and film industry, is the direct and expected results of the DEI corporate sabotage. The goal is to buy em cheap, or just remove them as competition.
Does that mean anything or is Blackrock one of the culture war buzzwords ? 🌝
@@Thanosdidtherighthingyes, it does. Blackrock loves funding ESG and DEI initiatives. Just because you don’t know about something doesn’t mean it means nothing.
@@Thanosdidtherighthing Blackrock is a big name investment firm, I believe. They're known pretty well for haviny thrown millions at some absolutely godawful projects, such as FTX.
@@borkguy No BlackRock is literally just an investment company worth billions founded 1988. You can scream DEI at the top of your lungs if it makes you feel better but this is capitalism 101.
Funny how Sony is literally burning money hoping one of this live service games actually becomes a hit, but the moment they actually got one being a global sensation (Helldivers 2) they were not prepared to issue updates constantly on top of making stupid decisions like the PSN account requirement
They didn't make Helldivers, just published it. And the devs fumbled even without Sony's bad input.
After the first couple of weeks all people were talking about was the devs doing terrible balance updates that made the game less fun.
@@CdotB_PlayStation itself are not the devs but they still own the IP. And yea the studio behind it making unnecessary balance updates was also stupid af
I read your comment with Archer's voice.
Whats crazy about the games industry is that the more A's they add the lower quality it seems to get
Fairgame makes me think the rich believe when people say "eat the rich" they're saying it because they want to be rich. They miss the point that the people who say "eat the rich" don't want to just make themselves rich, they want that money to be spent on bettering many peoples' lives.
Why on Earth would executives learn _anything_ when they so rarely suffer consequences from their bad decisions? Either you put out the next Fortnite and get paid millions in bonuses, or you fail miserably, fire a bunch of employees and get paid millions in bonuses.
Dude I need to be an executive. I get to do whatever I want and be a moron until the company pays me millions of dollars to leave lol
Absolutely correct
Yup… there’s no personal risk. It’s easy to take big swings when you know you can’t personally strike out.
We should just all be executives.
Sony won the console war in the ps4 era. To go from that to this is just absolutely baffling. What's worse is that I feel like Xbox isn't capitalising enough on song's failures either.
Nah, if we talking about the same generation, Switch beating PS4 sales and Nintendo is winning this gen console war
@@bobbywrtmhonestly Nintendo is in a market of its own, most people end up with a switch and another console so it’s no surprise the switch sells well! They are also a go to for a lot of young families, the console war is really between Sony and Microsoft and likely only ever will be!
@@bobbywrtmyou're smoking crack. Switch outsold ps4 in 2023... the switch came out in 2017. It took the switch 6 years to outsell ps4.... this is after they stopped MAKING the ps4 once the ps5 came out in 2020. The only reason the switch outsold ps4 is because they legit stopped making ps4's and it still took them 3 years after that to "beat" it
It's not exactly baffling, Sony did not so much "Win" the PS4 generation as opposed to Succeeded over Xbox's complete failure. Did it have some good games? Sure, but had Xbox continued the success of the 360 it would have been a much different gaming landscape. $600 PS3 -$800 PS5 pro discless same mentality 🤷♂️ they genuinely don't think they need to compete as they won.
xbox strategy has nothing to do with selling consoles or having exclusives, what strategy they have? i really dont know, buying studios and relying on game pass is really that profitable?
Sony: Concord is our new revolutionary game.
It's just shit overwatch
It flops.
Sony no more than a year later: Fairgame$ is our revolutionary new game.
It's just shit payday.
What do we think will happen next?
These companies will never give up, because they're chasing what they see is a golden goose. A game that can last for a long time, drip feeding content to string players along, and rake in all the microtransactions as they can.
the worst part is that the examples are RIGHT THERE with hoyo games, nikke, wuthering waves, love and deepspace, etc. making bank, but noo, instead they make another tone deaf PR yawnfest nobody cares about
"Your baby is dumb and is going to die" 😂
i miss when developers were making shit like jet set radio and crazy taxi when they were desperate for sales
Just play indie games
Yeah like the guys said above, indie is the way to go for this shit unless it's actually good AAA releases like From Soft titles or any other companies not off the top of my head.
6:30
Not uncommon for Japanese or Korean companies.
Take Yamaha for example. They made musical instruments, pianos, woodwind and synths.
They also make outboard motors for boats and motorcycles.
Samsung is the Korean equivalent. Phones, TVs, Monitors, washing machines, fridges, Smart Toilets.
Not to mention Daewoo, which at one point produced construction vehicles, VCRs and firearms.
Don't forget Samsung have their own construction and military equipment branches.
And they both also male airconditioning units i think
Can't forget about Hitachi, with their excavators, military vehicles and magic wands
I think an American equivalent might be General Electric.
You taught me something new bro, I legit didn't know that Sony has a life insurance company and a Bank company as well. That blew my mind.
Yeah they are like Arasaka Corp in cyberpunk.
Every multinational corporation these days has financial and insurance divisions. They handle credit payments and the like. Every big car company has them, every big airline, every big tech conglomerate. It's not that they have physical locations like a real bank or insurance company. They mostly handle all the internal financial stuff and also the insurances you can buy as addon when you purchase something from them like a phone or car.
Ha ha, ye should see Korea's Samsung: ~20% GDP, Financial Service, Healthcare, Hospitality, _Military_
What _don't_ they have a hand in over there.
It was really carrying them back during their massive issues in the early-mid 00s. They had to do a lot of consolidation. SOE sold off, Spider-Man merch rights sold (terrible mistake), Vaio sold, I think they sold their editing software off as well.
The people who buys their console and games are the bank. If we still buy overpriced stuff like the PS5 Pro, we are basically free money for them.
I'll be honest, that whole Fairgame$ thing... I actually thought it was Ubisoft's. It looks like even worse Watchdogs Legion.
The worst thing about working in the game industry is clueless execs who get paid orders of magnitude more than you, fuck up, and then get paid a lottery to leave. I hate them.
In a perfect world Jim Ryan would've been fired in a very public letter to the press and the money from that severance package would've been given to the devs at the studio as a sorry and financial help as they're looking for new jobs.
Yeah. Concord had its problems, but execs thought so highly of it that they spent hundreds of millions on development, buying the IP and the studio, only to pull it in 2 weeks. That is who.cost the company tons of money. Even if Ryan was forced out, he will be fine for the rest of his life while everyone at Firewalk is looking for a job when the industry is sheddings jobs.
Devis and overall’studios employée are also thé problème not’only thé executives
“Gates” are just review checkpoints essentially. You do gate reviews (or phase reviews is another common term) when you complete a stage of the project and you need to pass the review before moving on to the next.
Within each phase there will be bunch of work/deliverables/evidence you complete and provide to the reviewer who is usually fairly senior/experienced and also external from the project itself.
Fairly standard in big businesses.
"Learned nothing": can also described as:"Top management didn't suffer enough for it".
Looking at Fairgame$ I can only think that maybe they're misjudging gamer culture. A little bit.
They're marketing it to a fringe group that believes itself the majority. Hollow people that are too busy with tiktok to even touch videogames.
We joke in the past how corpos will look at what people say on social media to gauge their product direction so we can actually successfully psy op them into making crap.
Hard to believe it's reality now, except it's not cos people do it as a joke, but the Corpos are a joke listening to the vocal minority who probably don't even play games.
"People aren't remotely interested in our next game that we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, but we're optimistic."
“Your baby is dumb, and it’s gonna die” hilarious out of context
I love that sony somehow did exactly what they were trying to do and struck absolute gold with helldivers and they still managed to instantly ruin that game and tank its quality
Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee-hee-hee
They're doing it on purpose for a reason.
@@jonpapi_2247I’m inclined to agree
We no longer have legitimate business people making these big decisions. We have high stakes gamblers in charge of everything.
Sony is literally IRL Arasaka from Cyberpunk 2077.
With no savviness and the terrorist is themselves to their own finances 😂
This is an insult to Arasaka. Arasaka had the entire world on their knees begging them for business.
Sony just blew through nearly a billion with nothing to show for it.
THIS! All the ceo bros think cyberpunk is a utopia instead of a dystopia.
Nah arasaka is like Apple
@@wlot28 eh they are all the same thing basically.
Sony is a mission to destroy their brand:
Burns $100+ million on a generic bland hero shooter, shuts down said studio after they purchased it, removes disc drives and stands from $700 product, inserts psn where it shouldn’t, psn shutdowns, inserts ads on their console homepage, stellar blade controversy, complete inability and indifference to prevent scalpers of 30th anniversary edition, cancel games of beloved IPs, closing more studios, abandoning the psvr2, raises prices of hardware and controllers, leaks content of final shape before release, raises price of subscription just for the privilege to play multiplayer, removes game sales from steam in multiple regions, changes how Stars work and now they expire, remasters unnecessary games, raises prices of said remaster game, delists original from steam to force psn on remaster, remasters Until Dawn that runs at 30fps when the original rus at 60fps on the ps5, ignores and holds Bloodborne hostage etc.
That's just this year!
So just like every other gaming company out there
@@kevinconley7429No just Sony
They also cancelled the Spider-Verse game. Literally the ONE live-action game they were working on that had a genuine high probability of being the golden goose that they've been chasing for years now, and they just looked the other way...
Im going to be "That guy" but sony is just the publicher for Helldiver 2. Arrowhead has been making HD2 the best it can be despite the meddling from Sony.
1:24 They're gonna double down? Good, I'm gonna steer clear from Sony then.
Honestly them requiring psn for even single player games makes me more likely to just pirate them. Especially with them charging full price for a port
As part of the alphabet mafia, this game wasn't made for us either. I see a lot of "go woke, go broke" comments all over the place, but this game was not marketed to me or my peers. It wasn't really marketed to anyone, cost too much, and had bad design. It would have functioned better as a single player campaign; then all those cutscenes (presumably a lot of the budget) would have served a purpose.
Alphabet mafia lmao
Yeah, it was truly a game for nobody.
Fr I hate when people try to make it like lgbt or ‘minorities’ are the *reason* behind why the game sucks lol.
Like no that’s just discrimination. They suck bc the characters and setting is awfully designed. Instead of ‘character who happens to be nb, and look, they’re doing all the shooting just as cool as anyone else’ it’s ‘nb person who happens to have a character’. They’re doing design arse first and it sucks for our community cuz all ppl will take away is ‘minorities or lgbt are lame’ when in reality most don’t even complain or care when it’s done well. There’s always some bad eggs but that’s expected.
@@bhaveshramdaursingh4325 I've heard people say it/read it in comments and I thought it was funny, personally. I mean, it's everything that isn't purely straight/cis and that's a lot of letters. Lol
@@baggedapplesgaming3207 imma use it from now on. It's hilarious
“How many times do we have to teach you old man?” Quote is overused but very accurate in this case
helldivers 2 was a success and sony still managed to fuck it up with sony BS
So true about bad games and bad products in general. If it's bad it's bad it doesn't matter when or where you launch it. Reminds me of when people blamed MKBHD for that AI pin product tanking when in reality it was just a bad product that needed more refining.
Sonys basically a mega corp from cyberpunk, give it 10 years and we’ll be in the corpo wars
Totoki is basically Sony's top hatchet man who has been sent to oversee the PlayStation division cos what they're doing is the opposite of growth. Which also means that the timer has started for Hermen Hulst to turn things around or get fired.
PlayStation died the day it moved its headquarters to the US.
Concord is not a tragedy. It's a comedy, and a damn good one at that.
Sony wastes money on Concord, refuses to learn from it, then raises the price of their new Pro console. What a great move.
Another edging session in the books! Thanks for making this luke ❤
Okay wtf 😂
Don’t dislike Luke personally but these videos are ridiculous. Literally a 40 minute rant about how a Sony executive dared not to say that Concord fucking sucked and Sony didn’t read the gaming market properly. Surely that will be reassuring to investors.
@@jorgep7747 Why would you watch this video much less this channel, then? People like you make no sense. No one's forcing you to watch this stuff. It's free. Stop whining.
@@StratumPress It is kind of a long video format for something he has already covered plenty of times. Or maybe not enough new points were made idk
I think it's just all projection. He's not allowed to say how he really feels about DA Veilguard or be scorned by his peers and journos so something like Concord that's been dead and buried old news months ago is an easy target to vent that frustration.
It’s so sad how much greed ruins games. Was playing BO6 last night with a bunch of friends through gamepass, we haven’t played CoD in years. It was crazy to hear everyone having fun and liking the progression. Saying it felt so much better than previous games and I think it is just because there’s no battle pass or constant adds asking for money right now. I’m sure when S1 drops I think later this week, we are gonna see a lot of that enjoyment get sucked out for the chance to sell us stuff. Just a sad trend and I just wanted to have in writing somewhere that we enjoyed it before the ads are put in.
Imagine how many people 400 million could feed
It didn’t cost 400 million though.
Starving kids in Africa could have eaten that development team
@@Thanosdidtherighthing It cost more than $400m.
Imagine all the IPs that could've been resurrected with 400 million 😂 1 concord costed as much as a new spyro game, new twisted metal, and a bloodbourne remaster
@@Thanosdidtherighthing recent estimates are over 400 million my guy
They're not going to keep making the same "mistakes". They're going to keep making the same choices. Using the term "mistake" implies they're doing things by accident. These are intentional choices they're thought about and chosen to ignore criticisms related to, so let's please stop using such terminology to where they could play the "We didn't know" type card.
Sony really did went to crap when they moved out of Japan, seriously how can you be this brain dead in corporate decisions?
If Nintendo started offering life insurance plans then they'll probably sue you for making claims.
All of these AAA live service games failing meanwhile Space Marine 2 just chilling at 15k with 3 multiplayer maps and no microtransactions lmao
15k isn't a large audience either. Space Marine looks good and I'd love to try it one day, but they need to add more stuff to do. I'm not gonna spend $70 on a game that I play for six hours.
@spencercorpuz 15k concurrent is pretty robust for a non MMO
It's not matching giants like LoL DotA CS or WoW but it's a good healthy size.
@YasaiTsume I... Wasn't comparing it to an MMO? That would be very "apples and oranges". Instead, look at something like Helldivers. From everything I've seen, space Marine is a good game, there's just no content there to sustain it. Releasing it with only three maps is a bit absurd to me. I wouldn't pay money for it until they flesh it out a lot more. They should've gone the early access route if they only wanted to drop it with three maps to start.
@@spencercorpuz> 15k isn't a large audience either
Relative to what, exactly?
Concord: Project success, PRODUCT FAILURE. That executive talking about PROJECT problems shows they have the wrong perspective.
Why don't they start pitching game concepts directly to the players? Like have a show where they show off a bunch of concepts, art, maybe a CGI trailer to demonstrate it, and let the customers voice which concepts they're interested in buying, then develop those ones. Instead of taking blind shots in the dark, just bloody ask your consumers what they'll buy and make it!
I love how Luke was like "I probably didn't get a review code for Veilguard because I bashed Concord too hard" but just continues to beat the horse. Freakin' classic.
20:57 "Your baby is dumb" 😂😂
Right when I think I'm done watching Luke Concord vids for good he PULLS ME RIGHT BACK IN
It's interesting that Titoki mentions a game's release timing being crucial as it lines up with what Hulst experienced when he was at Guerilla, as Horizon is no stranger to having it's sales momentum cannibalized by other releases (Forbidden West released a week before Elden Ring and Zero Dawn released a couple weeks before BOTW). Just makes me wonder if Hulst has convinced Titoki that that's why Concord failed, which is absolutely the wrong lesson to be learned here, as the audience Black Myth Wukong was targeted to is vastly different to the one Concord was aiming for, meaning that Concord was merely just a bad game that no one wanted to play, like wow, big surprise there!
Nintendo selling life insurance would be worse than regular life insurance
Nintendo is known for their games and their ability to sue the shit out of people for minor things
Sony even tried to kill their only live service game that works out for them with the PSN requirement. They’re willing to tank a knee to the face as long as they’ll somehow get their own Fortnite
Any "game as a service" should be a red flag. It's built to generate money, not player enjoyment.
Also, in corporate projects, 'gates' are moments in which the decision is made whether or not to continue the project / move to the next stage of the project.
Everyone: "Your game sucks"
Game studio with infinite resources: "No you!! :,("
I was somewhat excited when I first saw Herman Hulst take over just because I used to really Guerrilla Games and his name has been around for so long.
We could’ve had Killzone and Resistance remakes multiple times over with Concord’s budget. Think about that.
Sent $5, love your content and perspective and happy to support. Have a good weekend y'all
10:16 I was listening to this in the background, and when you said John Elden Ring, I was _sure_ you were talking about Miyazaki at first
My Sony pony friend lost respect for Sony after I showed him this video
About Fairgam$ - No one says is has to be "ok" to steal - even from billionaires. It can just be a heist game, like Payday, but which has a cheeky in-game, ironic justification.
I understand and respect the skepticism, though.
Skepticism is good.
Yes, The timing of concords release was bad luck. We should have released it in the fifth quarter, during the 16th month. No competition there!
Hope you're being sarcastic, because that wouldn't have mattered at all. the game had zero traction, nobody played the beta and public perception was terrible
@@wlot28 of course I’m being sarcastic, there isn’t a 5th quarter or 16th month
that's good to see you're doing deep analysis video of sort after a long time regarding this big corporate companies....
the only thing they learnt about is losing 400 MILLION DOLLARS
It didn’t cost that much though.
@@Thanosdidtherighthing It cost more.
They didn't learn shit because they're about to do it again! Lmao
The only money that is wasted is money that ends up in a rich person's account.
The real rich people don't spend money on yachts and such, though the money that goes to yachts is pretty close to wasted too.
Re-release it Sony, we actually loved it...honest!
Just like we loved Morbius, you should re-release that one too!!! It was just a bad time!
Sony burning cash also in the movie industry releasing really bad Spider-man spin offs just to keep the Spider-man license
Their entire entertainment sector is just a dumpster fire right now
This is so sad... Seeing a name that defined most of my childhood, the big S, the console that made me love platform games through the PS1-2 classics, become this corporate gambling machine that will just follow trends and try to "make it" again and again... It's like they got blinded by the fleeting success of Helldivers 2 and instantly forgot all the other failed live service games, then the concord fiasco happens and they just make excuses, rinse and repeat. Let's try with Fairgame$ - AW DANGIT!
No worries, Horizon multiplayer will be the big one! - AW DANGIT!
I absolutely despise when a piece of media just uses anti-capitalist themes for solely aesthetic purposes and then bastardizes those same themes. It would be akin to Call of Duty making an anti-war military shooter, you already know it won't be that at all.
Woah woah woah wait a minute. Space Marine in the background AND the Titanic????!!!!! Did we just become best friends? You've got everything I'm into in your office. Subbed for sure.
Jim Ryan was fired for lying to regulators around the world, and humiliating Playstation's reputation worldwide by claiming Sony would never recover from Xbox owning Call of Duty. They couldn't have known how badly their internal live service push would wind up when Jim was fired, but if they had I bet it would have been much more public instead of the saving face they gave him.
Heck, Helldivers 2 would've been an even greater success if Sony didn't ruin it for 2/3rds of the world with their forced PSN accounts. And I'm pretty sure the kernal level anti-cheat used for Helldivers 2 was forced on the game because of Sony as well. Because of that anticheat I have a few friends that absolutely refuse to play the game. Helldivers 2 succeeded DESPITE Sony's influence.
The absurd level of corporate greed to burn it to the ground immediately is just sad. Modern gaming is dead and this really revealed how they feel about the people.
"the internal conversations are very positive"
Yeah, like Concord? Lol
Sony taking the ‘Throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks’ approach.
Fairgame$ literally already died once as a game named Hyenas
these well-to-do devs that make 6 figures or close to it consider themselves "working class" instead of some of the most privileged people on the planet.
I swear all executives are gambling addicts who get a high off of losing a ton of money, and then get an even bigger high getting ONE hit out of 12.
With this much money on the line it's basically the highest stakes game of high risk high reward ever, so yeah that tracks
I wouldn't be surprised if the Last of Us online game was actually good, since the internal reviewers at Sony seem to have no good judges of quality.
Don't be ridiculous! They clearly learned the lessons, they're just not going to change despite learning the lessons 😂
The way to market these games is not to market them. Thats an exaggeration, but you definitely do not create expensive, no gameplay, cg only, trailers. Since these games live and die by their gameplay loop, you release it in early access and let word of mouth build excitement, or lack of user excitement inform your decisions on how to proceed.