@@DrPumpkinzI don’t know, so not gonna knock their experience. The main issues were that there is f2p alternatives already and that concord didn’t really stand out. Basically, it might have been fun, but there just wasn’t enough to pull an audience away from competitors.
And the best part of all of this, is that the guy who poured unfathomable resources into this project and touted concord as being "the future of playstation", the guy who's an objective failure in every metric... He's gonna get a raise this holiday season and probably buy a yacht. This industry is truly amazing
Remember, in the past we used to find people that did stuff like this and break their bones so they get the idea that it’s bad 🙂 CEOs and big business people will continually do this until they face some sort of repercussions because they have enough money to not care if the game doesn’t sell. They have investments and other streams on income… only one set of knees though.
You're just describing Capitalism, but yea. Been loving Comrade Arlo's multi-year long descent into publicly hating investors, CEOs and the whole framework of profitmotives, it's been awesome
I can't believe that after all of this, Sony has the audacity to say that they want to double-down on support for live service games to "make them better". This is exactly like Microsoft shutting down their smaller studios, then saying they want more games like the ones those studios made. Disgusting.
at least I hope this means they won't put any more of their "they them" woke crap and see if that will make their next live service sell a little bit better than this one
Gonna miss all those memorable characters: Trash can guy Green alien person Monkey thing The girl with the powers The sniper character The straight ripoff off character from another game
The executive that wanted Concord to be "the next Star Wars" closes Firewalk & gets to stay at Sony. He's just gonna try again with some other IP & studio. The next live service fresh off the conveyor belt is gonna get "the Concord treatment" & we can watch that one die too.
I don't think it was trying to be the next Star Wars that killed it. People still love Star Wars and like getting new shows. Guardians of the Galaxy was going for that rag tag crew feeling too. Not enough people wanted another hero shooter. The people that like those games already have a favourite with preferred characters, a community, and already unlocked stuff. They didn't want to pay full price on the same game without those perks. Concord could have worked as a single play action RPG, or a Telltale adventure, or some kind of multi-player heist. It's just those aren't easy to monetize so they made a game in a genre that was 8 years late.
@andrebrynkus2055 it probably was the largest contributor to the budget spiraling out of control, everything about it was based of "WHEN" it succeeds, not "IF" it succeeds. Rather than make a game, thry tried to launch a multi media franchise, but without any foundations.
@@thatdanjamesguy.330 oh wait that's still coming along? I could have sworn he said he was working on his review a few weeks back but I haven't been able to find where I read him announcing it in the community comments, on the fan arlo reddit, or his twitter.
They should turn Concord into a single player game, with a meta story where the characters find out their game is a flop and they have save themselves from being deleted, while commenting on how poorly concieved the idea was and how live service is bad.
That’s an amazing idea actually, a single player game that acts like it was once a huge multiplayer game that has since been abandoned. All the NPC’s being shocked someone’s around and trying to keep the quickly falling apart game together.
Looking at that cinematic trailer, part of me is convinced the game was originally meant to be a single player game but then some suit walked in and said "hey we need an Overwatch make me one" and they had to hastily change everything.
I think the copious amounts of hot sauce in the purple oatmeal he didn't even finish eating were symbolic of the copious amounts of money spent on the studio they didn't even keep.
People get distracted by how ugly the characters are and overlook how offputtingly and subconsciously ugly the world of it is. Part of what's repellent is this subtle message of "yeah he's just like you, you love absolute processed slop don't you. Eat it with your big fucked up bizarrely shaped spoon you stupid fucking giggling baby".
Notice how Hulst said "deliver GROWTH in this area" instead of "deliver amazing games in this genre". Clearly meaning that they want to make more games purely in the interest of making ridiculous money, rather than making good games people will actually WANT to play.
Lol. Gamers need to stop reading news releases and comments to shareholders. He was literally talking about the companies financial plans, this is stock corporate speak which is what you use when talking to shareholders.
@wokeupinapanic wrong. That's his job. That's the whole freaking point. You are trying to blame someone who most likely was not actually within 100 miles of the dev work other than mailing a check to pay for it.
Ya know, old generation legacy games like Mario and Zelda, and Monster Hunter, for some examples had a model, and that model was to start with a small budget and a small team. Then upon later releases, they had more budget and a bigger team, that allowed them to upscale everything each new release. I am surprised that these companies are going 100% on starter games that may flop. You'd think they'd know that it is more cost efficient to cut the fluff out so that once Franchise is established, you can start adding that to later releases, and even if the game does fail, it won't be a disaster like this game. Unless the company has a history of games behind them, that are recognizable, going budget deep as your first release is scary. What this game did, was provide an excellent case study of what not to do to launch a franchise.
This is a lot of why AAA games are unsustainable. You either make relatively safe sequels because you built up to that point, or spend an absurd amount of time and money on something that might not work. If there was less of a cultural push to max out the hardware, there could be more of a AAA middle ground like indies are comfortable in, but almost every AAA company wants to make the biggest, most maximalist game possible on the belief it will sell. It can sell, sometimes, but usually it doesn’t in recent years. So these companies effectively trap themselves through Moore’s Law into investing insane amounts of money into a single project in order to stay competitive in the areas they care about.
There are always weird exceptions to every rule, just because one can be successful doesn't mean all can be. If you have a really good idea then it might be worth going through with but I'm guessing with Concord they went in with the idea of: "live servive shooter game multiplayer" and thats not a great basis especially if you're not gonna do anything unique @birdbig6852
I think it would be more interesting and a bit ironic if the episode stays in and ends up being very well received and turns into a decent film/TV franchise. Not that it’s likely, but it would be neat to see.
Here’s what a friend told me about the game: (he was one of the "lucky" people who actually played Concord when it was still possible.): "Right from the start, I noticed how incredibly long it took to find a lobby. It’s definitely not a bad game. I was pleasantly surprised by how polished everything is; it runs very smoothly, and there were basically no errors or bugs. The game looks beautiful too; aside from the art direction, the pure graphics are definitely appealing. You can tell that the team behind it put in a lot of effort. But the biggest problem with the game is its soullessness. All the heroes feel like they were just designed somehow, lacking charm and any real identity. The same can be said for their abilities, they all feel familiar and too similar from other games. Like a budget Overwatch. A cool idea was that a new short film gets released every week, highlighting the characters and providing more lore about the world. THAT is something I’ve never seen before and is actually quite sweet. The problem here, though, is that the characters are just completely forgettable, and no one cares. It’s such a shame because I feel like the team behind Concord could create something cool if they tapped into a different, less overdone genre and incorporated more original ideas. One can definitely see the talent in the developers. Except for that one guy who had a mental breakdown on Twitter after criticism of the game."
That thing about short animations to highlight the characters? That’s something Valve already did for TF2 *15 years ago* with the Meet the Team videos. So yeah, not even that’s unique to Concord!
@@axios4702 OP just mentioned how the major problem for him is the soullessness of the characters. I heavily doubt they werent what the studio envisioned them to be. Its a product with quality everywhere, except where it really matters. Thats mostly of the reason why they failed
Reading this makes it a lot more sad because it seems like talented people were likely forced by executives to make this. They gave it their best, but they completely failed and now their entire studio gets shut down by the people who asked they make the game. I can’t imagine how upsetting it must be for any employee to not only have their work for the past 8 years shut down, but also to lose the studio they work for. I hope they can still find jobs in the industry
The thing about the ET game is that even after its colossal failure, at last the games still EXISTED. They were in a landfill that someone could go dig up. They were trash, but even trash exists. Concord... NO. LONGER. EXISTS. It is GONE. You cannot play it. You cannot look at it. You cannot go somewhere and find it. Because it was a digital product that relied solely on someone keeping it running on a server somewhere, it now no longer exists unless someone somehow has a software backup of it. For the vast majority of the public, the only proof that Concord was even real is video evidence. The game itself is effectively lost media. That's why I think it's a bigger failure than ET.
@@MystiaLore The game disc is a coaster. You cannot play the game with it because the game is gone. ET carts still work, because the game is IN the cartridge and not on some server somewhere.
ET also sell millions and made in five week by single dev who is very likely paid peanut for it, it's just the icing on the cake that is Atari constant blunder
Imagine if they had taken the concept art of the characters and shown it to 100 gamers with the question "Do you want to play as any of these?". All this could have been averted. I firmly believe that is a huge part of why it failed, more so than the pricetag or anything else. Even free to play, this would have failed. You can see by how much hype there is for Deadlock that it's not the genre's fault.
It’s true, 90% of the negative reaction to Concord was how painfully obnoxious (and somehow also bland) the characters and writing were. The “Concord universe” is what people meme generic soulless corporate produced media as being.
@@hippieyoda1993 And you need to stop having a knee jerk reaction just because you hate dota or valve or whatever. I never said deadlock was good. I haven't even played it. I'm just stating a fact. Lots of people were willing to try a new heroshooter so clearly the genre is not what stopped concord from succeeding. That is my entire point. Nobody was trying concord even when it was in free trial. That's all on concord and it's not evil gamers, the market or anything else.
Gonna play devil's advocate here: Concord took like 9 years to develop. Sony took a risk by buying the studio to finish the game. The risk did not pay off and the game failed horribly. Are they supposed to fund the Studio for another 9 years to develop a new game? One that might fail again?
@@marialuisalino2915 They BARELY made a game in those 9 years. And not some RPG with expansive open world, locations, dialogue and complex interconnected questline, but a fucking arena shooter, one of the least work intensive genres there is. They can't make a game under 9 years
On the bright side, Concord has given us a bunch of great videos from various visual artists showing how they would fix each of the character designs. Those have been fun.
If I were any large corporate entity with half a brain stem, I would never want to have Herman Hulst leading a major project for 2 reasons: 1. He directly oversaw Concord as its leading vision. 2. He unironically believed it was going to be "the next star wars" and the project was his baby. The latter point is the worse one because it honestly demonstrates his lack of ability to look at projects objectively and adapt as a creative. He had the desire to create a mega blockbuster but could only see it through the lens of something that came before it as he envisioned it. This demonstrates that he looked backward and not forward and can only compare it to his vision of star wars as it once was. It is that kind of thinking that made an atari E.T level failure instead of a success. Don't be like Hulst. Having an artistic vision is fine but you have to know who (or what) your vision is designed for. Otherwise you wind up with Concord, which is the artistic version of duct taping a 15-pound solid gold banana to the wall and thinking it will be the next Mona Lisa.
I'm all for bashing on Sony but I think they 100% made the right call on closing Firewalk. I don't think you should get to make a screw-up that monumentally catastrophic and walk away unscathed and expect your parent company to just go "oh well make another game and hopefully you'll do better". Tango Gameworks being closed by MS was worthy of outrage because they had demonstrated *multiple* times throughout the years that they can make compelling titles, (though perhaps not the block-busters that MS wanted) and more importantly showed that they can tackle a completely new genre and absolutely NAIL it. Tango has now been plucked from the jaws of closure due to Krafton's intervention, and reading their CEO's comments on the matter, it really came off to me as someone who understood that Tango still has a lot more to offer. Firewalk had a disgustingly obscene amount of money and resources at their disposal, and they used it to make a game no one wanted to play. An embarrassment that will go down in Sony's history as an everlasting stain on their reputation not only as a game publisher, but as a business. I hope to see Herman Hulst and other Sony executives share in some of these consequences as well, but I have my doubts.
I honestly disagree with the notion that Concord wasn't a game made by suits. It...absolutely was. Fully trend chasing with no soul, the character designs are so ugly, no one is even finding anything positive to say about them (which just to reiterate is not a certain type of whining some grifters love to do), the gameplay was slow as balls and it had the audacity to charge 40 dollars for a game that's competing with Overwatch or any other hero shooter being free. Yeah, Concord was 150% made by suits. Let's also not forget Sony doubled down on making live services after this crashed. They wasted at LEAST 1/5 of a BILLION dollars and a decade of development only to go "And I'll fuckin' do it again."
@@Dakr2000played the beta. It was dogshit. Stiff aiming, sluggish movement, horrid ttk, uninspired abilities, maps were too big, and the game didn’t feel like it had a focus on what it wanted to be like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be overwatch or valorant. The embarrassment didn’t even have a FoV slider for crying out loud
I feel bad for the devs at Firewalk. From everything I have seen they were talented, capable people in a mismanaged, potentially toxic workplace, some of which have spent upwards of 5 years of their life on this project. Now they are all out of a job and the only thing they have to show for all that work is a resume with the most notorious flop in modern gaming history on it.
"From everything I have seen" so from the ONE GIANT FLOP, which is the only thing they made? Concord made you think "wow this is made by talented, capable people"???
If they're actually talented, their portfolio will speak for itself and they'll find other work. The video game industry isn't going away anytime soon. Losing your job sucks, but it's very far from the end of the world.
@@Talking_Ed It's not "gone", it's spent chilling, barely doing any work. They still got paid. 10% of your life doing shit job with no expectation is a pretty sweet deal. Then the performance review came and they didn't meet the standard.
Funny how this happens the same day xenoblade x drops. The whole xeno franchise has been a passionate creative and engaging sci fi epic that has spanned 20+ years of small successes and failures and now here we are 1 xenogears game 3 xenosaga games (+spin-offs) 3 xenoblade games (+ports +spinoff +dlcs) and now we have one of the most involved engrossing sci-fi epic that was homegrown and thoughtfully put together with little to no corporate meddling(budget and schedule issues aside) and this world that xeno has created is only going to get more popular and bigger and I believe is one day bound to be a blockbuster. Concord in contrast did none of this they expected to have a sci fi epic handed to them instantly and now they have nothing
No, they bought the studio & concord during development, helped finish it way too late. They never ordered anything from Firewalk, they saw the product & the potential and fully invested in it. That’s their job.
It's gonna be *really* awkward when the Secret Level anthology series drops the Concord short and we gotta explain to friends and family members who ask about it that this game literally does not exist any more
From all the information coming out about the culture at Firewalk Studios, it sounds like it’s actually for the best that they were shuddered. It sounds like they had a deep seated culture of toxic positivity, not to mention the only thing they were capable of doing was live service games, and we all know that we don’t need more of those. So, it was obviously incredibly dumb of Sony to buy the studio and expect big things of Concord, but I will not be shedding a tear on their behalf.
"Give them a good game to work on." About a year before launch, Sony had to use other studios to make major fixes to Concord, which was said to have been unplayable at that point. They had years to develop it and couldn't do it on their own, and even when finished it failed. According to an insider, the budget almost doubled due to the necessary fixes. They absolutely should've been shut down and not given another chance.
Yeah this developer get a free pass stuff is getting annoying. Firewalk delivered the worst aaa disaster in last two decades. If that doesn’t warrant a studio closure what does?
No you don't understand the developers are NEVER responsible. Even if they are working on exactly what they want, even if they're given full support to do what they want, even if they take over half a decade to make an arena shooter, even if they are given all the money in the world. Just give them another chance. The greedy investors shut them down instead of letting the studio fail for a full decade!
Yeah, this was a really weird video. Arlo acknowledged that Firewalk was working on Concord long before Sony bought them, and then continued to blame Sony for making them work on Concord. Also, all the stories that have come out about the work environment there suggest the studio really wasn't worth saving.
The studio is extremely expensive and rumours about how it was managed and the attitudes there about making games tell me that shutting it down was probably their only good decision.
When they pulled Concord and refunded players, I said that Firewalk's clock was ticking and at best, Sony would try to snag a few of their staff before axing the studio. It was such a colossal waste of money and likely did so much damage to the names "Concord' and "Firewalk" that there was probably little that could be done with them.
If sony aren't careful in repeating their mistakes it might not be once in a generation lol. Concorde was intended to be the first of many live service projects.
One of the main selling points was the weekly cinematics, which would require even more money being routinely sunk into the project, so even if they made it free, they'd be spending far more than they'd be making. It's no surprise they're choosing to axe it now rather than lose another $100m over the next few months.
@@Majinhero It would likely have been a year's worth, or near as damn it. A lot of live service games function on a year's worth of content and, depending on how much revenue is gained, the content output is adjusted accordingly. It's why you'll see a lot of live service games get a lot of decent treatment in the first year but the quantity and quality starts to rapidly drop each year after as players spend less money on it. So for arguments sake, if Concord somehow managed to sell well enough to stick around for a full year, there's a high chance that the weekly cinematics would change to every two weeks or even every month instead for year two before eventually grinding to a complete halt to "focus on making the *game* better" as false leverage.
I remember Halo 4's Spartan Ops had weekly cinematics too. Granted, there were only ten total, but they didn't really make Spartan Ops feel like an amazing must-play experience. I doubt 42 more cinematics would have changed that.
Concord wound up in the Museum of Failure. And no that’s not just me being poetic or dramatic there’s literally a museum of Failure and Concord is in it
Don't. The fact that they stayed and played along with the woke ideology and "toxic positivity" long enough to be credited as developers proves they're no better and will likely carry that mindset wherever they go next. Pity only the ones wise enough to quit early for wasting as much time as they did.
I get the argument. But the game wasn't made because of some suit in a tower and wasn't imposed on them. This was their game! Usually I'd agree the one failure and done thing is way too harsh. All the more so with games forced onto a studio and team. But they made it! It was theirs! Sony just funded some more after buying it. If any studio earned this result it's Firewalk! It's not up to others to give them good ideas to protect them from themselves.
Normally I would be totally with you that shutting down a studio is a terrible idea but in the case of concord I do believe it is the right decision. The studio wasted A LOT of money. Such huge amounts that they can't simply keep them open. And am I the only one who thinks Sony was always kinda disgusting as a company? They were always greedy and a bit of a bully. Nothing new.
I imagine the enterprise bridge, full of Arlos in every station and Cptn. Arlo shouting: RED ALERT! EVASIVE MANEUVERS! EVASIVE MANEUVERS!!! Dragon Age The Veilguard looming large on the screen.
Honestly I hate seeing dev teams get axed and people lose their jobs. The team clearly are capable of making good games. If it wasn't for this "passion project" that allegedly spent 8 years and that 400 million in costs. It truly does suck and I hope they can still keep that passion in the future.
I would say they probably could if they had the right idea, lead, and design, but if your flagship game is deemed "the biggest failure in modern gaming history", losing your job is kind of inevitable.
I completely disagree with firewalk studios being people who can make a good game. They all seemed to be all in on what that game was, is, and stood for, and I for one do not think anyone involved in the creative process of that game deserves another product and millions of dollars to burn
I would normally agree that it was bad to axe the team, but as the guy mentioned in the podcast that had insider knowledge, it took them so many years to develop a prototype so by the time Sony saw it, it was in such a "laughable" state, that they had to invest way more money so that they could outsource the game to other studios just to get it to where it was just before launch, so i truly believe that the team was just that incompetent, 8 years to make a game that took other devs less than half to make?, honestly the decision to axe the team just makes sense.
dude firewalk CHOSE to make this game... sony def invested poorly BUT that studio didnt deliver a good product period. You don't get to fail that hard and get another chance. they aren't an asset failing in the actual millions. so Sony's move was very logical and makes a ton sense. Sony buying them didnt change the fact they were making a bad game. I could care less about sony but bro this is just basic corporate.
No you don't give this studio another chance this isn't a case where they failed a little but the game was good, no this game bomb hard selling maybe 25k copies and by the sounds of it the studio itself was incompetent with Sony having to bring in outside help to make a game that was even even playable. When something fails as bad as this it's needs to be allowed to die instead on been propped up.
The issue is that this wasn't some small flop. This was an enormous financial loss for Sony, who are probably extremely jaded with Firewalk Studios for wasting so much of their time and money, and figured why should they give them a second chance and continue paying the devs' salaries when they took eight years and multiple hundreds of millions of dollars to create a game that died in just two weeks? While it sucks that some talented devs will be out of a job, that's simply how the free market works. They created a game that nobody wanted and are now reaping the consequences of it. I think a better analogy would be throwing away a defective meatball machine than one that produced meat with the wrong recipe.
This is so much worse than that. Nintendo probably would axe Monolithsoft if XBC only earned back 0.25% of its development cost 25,000 copies at $40 each -> $1 million Concord's been estimated to have cost $400 million over its entire development This is like if XBC failed to live up to one of those awful Wii shovelware games you'd find in the bargain bin at Office Depot
@derrickcrowe3888 That's true! I was being generous by using the earnings prior to refunds, since it better illustrates the scope of Concord's failure, but yeah, that $1M has pretty much evaporated. Just for giggles, I'd like to see the current revenue figures for Concord. Not all the physical copies were brought back to retailers for refunds, so there are still some sales on the balance sheet.
I would say that Sony (very late, bad on Sony) found a flaw that particular meatball machine. Sony analyzed the product and then the machine and found a flaw in the machine. That machine would pump out garbage no matter what recipe was plugged into the machine. Sony decided it was best to stop the hemorraging and cut bait and find a new meatball machine. Pretty simple.
4:58 I fully expect Sony and the people at Sony who *SHOULD* learn lessons from Concord's total failure to not learn a single thing and to continue making the same, if not worse mistakes going forward!
I was lucky enough to be passing a physical video game store and I saw a PlayStation poster in store that showed Concord. I took out my IPhone 12 and photographed the poster. This image will be my only reminder that Concord ever existed.
The problem isnt really firewalk tho. As an actual working game concord is very solid. Its the people making the decisions for firewalk that are the problem. The higher up "creative" people. Because there are no creative people there.
@@philltheotherguy1868 i mean technically speaking. Everything works. It plays fluently. Not a lot of bugs. Which are all pretty much above standard nowadays. In terms of a videogame being a technical piece of software (not counting anything creative) concord is objectively a fine game. The people executing the (bad) ideas did a professional job. If you put those people on actual good ideas they would do a good job too.
To get into Sony’s mindset, they bought the studio to produce Concord, and that didn’t turn out well. Why keep a meatball machine that doesn’t make meatballs?
Reminder, Senran Kagura was cancelled by Sony to work on Concord, so not only they cut a franchise that made them millions, they pretty much used more money than those games got them just to make Concord, literally ruined it every possible way they could.
Arlo I'm a casual viewer of your main channel so I JUST found this topic channel today, and it is GREAT. I hope this has turned out to be worth it for you, because tonight I've really loved a lot of these videos I've busted through (switch 2 stuff, weird sonic discussion, ps5 ridiculousness, Nintendo growth videos, etc). I've commented on another one of your videos, your entire vibe is "excited nerd friend who rants about thing he loves / is super passionate about" and as a parent whose entire life is working and young kids right now, your videos really help to fill that video game nerding out void currently in my life. Keep em coming!!!
I would LOVE to see a documentary on this game, how it came to be, what production was like, and how it's failure was handled and recieved by those invovled, ESPECIALLY the artists, designers, director(s), and programmers
Of course you can argue that they just spent 400 mil on training a team never to mess up again but on the other hand if a failiure of epic proportions such as this is no reason to get the axe then what is?
I'm keeping that State of Play footage just in case
May it haunt your files forever Arlo
Arlo has this trailer driven you insane yet? Scream for yes and blink for no
Probably the most amount of mileage that cinematic will get 😂
Has anyone EVER seen Arlo blink?
In this day and age, you never know. XD
Prediction: this will not be the last Concord video by Arlo
Prolli.
We need to super cut of Arlo Concord discussion videos
Secret Level with Arlo
Concordia In mario and luigi brothership:
I imagine we haven't heard the last about it's development. Probably going to be people with stories to tell now that the studio is done.
It seems that Concord's cons outweighed the cords.
That one hurt lol
Good one
Thats rough buddy
oof.. that was genius lol
What Sony said before they pulled the trigger
If I have to watch this cinematic ONE MORE TIME
lmao this trailer is driving me insane
Facts @@JoshTheWoz
I’ve seen that green guy pour hot sauce more than I’ve seen actual gameplay
Concord_gameplay_footage file not found
Because nobody played it
It's Concover boys
I hate you so much it's unreal
I don't wanna con cover boys!!! Noooo...!
Time to bail out. Pull the ConCord
Next week: we’re so Concback!
Good. I'm so concover this game already.
Arlo can finally delete that State of Play footage.
Let’s not get crazy!
Don't you dare jinx it.
Again lol. Maybe not though. Concord may be gone but it lives on in the most pathetic and disgusting way.
End of year/decade review videos
You're not gonna believe this
"We learned important lessons" is always a funny quote when everyone who attended the class has been tossed out the building.
😂😂😂
"We" means "the executives".
"Important lessons" means "nothing".
The 'TopicArlo Concord Saga' was 1000x more entertaining than anything from the game itself
From the single story I've heard from someone who actually played Concord, apparently the game itself was actually pretty fun.
It lasted longer than the game
@@DrPumpkinzI don’t know, so not gonna knock their experience. The main issues were that there is f2p alternatives already and that concord didn’t really stand out.
Basically, it might have been fun, but there just wasn’t enough to pull an audience away from competitors.
The saga isn't ending yet, we still have the Amazon series episode to go
spoke too soon he mentions it around 7:40 lol
No, it is. That episode won't be enough to revive a franchise. Especially one that was practically killed off in its infancy.
@@AllustarI think the point is there will be no more after that😂
And possibly Concord 2: Electric Bugalloo
Fairgames is next
And the best part of all of this, is that the guy who poured unfathomable resources into this project and touted concord as being "the future of playstation", the guy who's an objective failure in every metric... He's gonna get a raise this holiday season and probably buy a yacht.
This industry is truly amazing
bingo
Remember, in the past we used to find people that did stuff like this and break their bones so they get the idea that it’s bad 🙂 CEOs and big business people will continually do this until they face some sort of repercussions because they have enough money to not care if the game doesn’t sell. They have investments and other streams on income… only one set of knees though.
@@z34567890123456 eat the rich
He's still the current head of Playstation.
You're just describing Capitalism, but yea. Been loving Comrade Arlo's multi-year long descent into publicly hating investors, CEOs and the whole framework of profitmotives, it's been awesome
Anyone else notice the exec said Sony still wanted live service games? They learned nothing, least of all "stop killing your studios to recoup costs".
Tax write-offs. Same reason Warner Bros torpedoed Batgirl and a Scooby Doo movie.
They desperately want every game to be a constant cash cow. It’s pathetic.
Helldivers made a ton of money so yeah they are going to try again
@@MrEnzio777Do you actually know tax code or are you spouting nonsense?
We're gonna have to teach that old man this lesson again when that fairgame$ thing comes out.
I can't believe that after all of this, Sony has the audacity to say that they want to double-down on support for live service games to "make them better". This is exactly like Microsoft shutting down their smaller studios, then saying they want more games like the ones those studios made. Disgusting.
YES, what's up with that?
@@lorettabes4553 They said they'll learn their lesson from this but whatever lesson they learned ain't the right one.
"Hmmm, this genre isn't making us any money. Let's double down on it" - Sony, probably
@@flameguy21 lol yup, good to see ya flameguy
at least I hope this means they won't put any more of their "they them" woke crap and see if that will make their next live service sell a little bit better than this one
Gonna miss all those memorable characters:
Trash can guy
Green alien person
Monkey thing
The girl with the powers
The sniper character
The straight ripoff off character from another game
Saviors of the Solar System
Asian Gamora
Green Peter Quill
Vacuum Groot
Drax but hairy
Rocket but black lady
You forgot Carlos of Duty
@@wokeupinapanicDoom Snorlax
@@ShadowMuppetX lol not gonna front that's gold 😂
It's sad to see this, "Arlo talking over that one concord cinematic" was one of my favorite video genres on this channel. It will be missed
The executive that wanted Concord to be "the next Star Wars" closes Firewalk & gets to stay at Sony. He's just gonna try again with some other IP & studio. The next live service fresh off the conveyor belt is gonna get "the Concord treatment" & we can watch that one die too.
It's probably going to be Bungie and Marathon that are next on the chopping block
@@0uttaS1TEYep, I can already see the titles: “Sony has officially closed Bungie”
They call him "the reaper". They say every studio he touches, dies. Spooky.
I don't think it was trying to be the next Star Wars that killed it. People still love Star Wars and like getting new shows. Guardians of the Galaxy was going for that rag tag crew feeling too.
Not enough people wanted another hero shooter. The people that like those games already have a favourite with preferred characters, a community, and already unlocked stuff. They didn't want to pay full price on the same game without those perks.
Concord could have worked as a single play action RPG, or a Telltale adventure, or some kind of multi-player heist. It's just those aren't easy to monetize so they made a game in a genre that was 8 years late.
@andrebrynkus2055 it probably was the largest contributor to the budget spiraling out of control, everything about it was based of "WHEN" it succeeds, not "IF" it succeeds.
Rather than make a game, thry tried to launch a multi media franchise, but without any foundations.
This "Arlo-showing-the-concord-trailer" thing has meme potential at this point
I can’t wait until it’s the background footage for his entire Tears of the Kingdom review
@@thatdanjamesguy.330 oh wait that's still coming along? I could have sworn he said he was working on his review a few weeks back but I haven't been able to find where I read him announcing it in the community comments, on the fan arlo reddit, or his twitter.
Arlo has got more mileage out of that SoP footage than anyone alive.
Definitely more than Sony did, amma right?
He got more mileage out of that SoP footage than Sony got out of the entirety of Concord
This concord trailer is becoming more and more funny. It's like steamed hams at this point
“He’s gonna do it! He’s gonna pour the hot sauce in the purple slop again! YEAHHHHHHHH! What’s Arlo talking about again? Meatball machine?”
They should turn Concord into a single player game, with a meta story where the characters find out their game is a flop and they have save themselves from being deleted, while commenting on how poorly concieved the idea was and how live service is bad.
Or at least make it a PVE game with both a single-player and co-op mode.
That’s an amazing idea actually, a single player game that acts like it was once a huge multiplayer game that has since been abandoned. All the NPC’s being shocked someone’s around and trying to keep the quickly falling apart game together.
Reboot for the modern audience
this could've slapped
Looking at that cinematic trailer, part of me is convinced the game was originally meant to be a single player game but then some suit walked in and said "hey we need an Overwatch make me one" and they had to hastily change everything.
Finally we can stop watching that man’s hot sauce
I don't think that time has come yet.
I think the copious amounts of hot sauce in the purple oatmeal he didn't even finish eating were symbolic of the copious amounts of money spent on the studio they didn't even keep.
would you eat that funny yellow mans hot sauce???????? tell me!
@@poorlymadeproduction well I do like hot sauce but I’m not sure about the purple goop
@@Spatu10 the purple gloop looks mildly appealing but i guess we will never know bc they went out of business forever, sadchi
Arlo's hard drive can finally rest
Two weeks later: "Sony Just Teased Concord II?!"
YES, GREEN MAN! POUR THE SAUCE INTO THE PURPLE GOOP!!!!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
POUR!!!!!!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
I love the moment where he says “I ENJOY ADDING THIS CONDIMENT TO MY MEALS” ❤❤❤
I loved the part when the characters on screen "talked" (air from lungs goes through windpipe and larynx, coming out of the mouth as "speech")
People get distracted by how ugly the characters are and overlook how offputtingly and subconsciously ugly the world of it is. Part of what's repellent is this subtle message of "yeah he's just like you, you love absolute processed slop don't you. Eat it with your big fucked up bizarrely shaped spoon you stupid fucking giggling baby".
Look, not starlord is eating goop, how relatable!
Dang, Concord fully dead before the Secret Level episode even released
Notice how Hulst said "deliver GROWTH in this area" instead of "deliver amazing games in this genre". Clearly meaning that they want to make more games purely in the interest of making ridiculous money, rather than making good games people will actually WANT to play.
They forgot the fact that in order for a product to sell, people need to want it first and has to be good.
Sounds like they just bank on it being addictive not a fun gameplay experience that's two different things
Lol. Gamers need to stop reading news releases and comments to shareholders. He was literally talking about the companies financial plans, this is stock corporate speak which is what you use when talking to shareholders.
@@DKarkarovObviously he’s talking to the fking shareholders. That’s the ENTIRE problem.
@wokeupinapanic wrong. That's his job. That's the whole freaking point. You are trying to blame someone who most likely was not actually within 100 miles of the dev work other than mailing a check to pay for it.
Ya know, old generation legacy games like Mario and Zelda, and Monster Hunter, for some examples had a model, and that model was to start with a small budget and a small team. Then upon later releases, they had more budget and a bigger team, that allowed them to upscale everything each new release.
I am surprised that these companies are going 100% on starter games that may flop. You'd think they'd know that it is more cost efficient to cut the fluff out so that once Franchise is established, you can start adding that to later releases, and even if the game does fail, it won't be a disaster like this game. Unless the company has a history of games behind them, that are recognizable, going budget deep as your first release is scary.
What this game did, was provide an excellent case study of what not to do to launch a franchise.
Ever heard of Star Citizen? It's the biggest budget game and I don't think the studio ever released a single game.
This is a lot of why AAA games are unsustainable. You either make relatively safe sequels because you built up to that point, or spend an absurd amount of time and money on something that might not work.
If there was less of a cultural push to max out the hardware, there could be more of a AAA middle ground like indies are comfortable in, but almost every AAA company wants to make the biggest, most maximalist game possible on the belief it will sell. It can sell, sometimes, but usually it doesn’t in recent years. So these companies effectively trap themselves through Moore’s Law into investing insane amounts of money into a single project in order to stay competitive in the areas they care about.
Execs and investors think big money goes in and bigger money comes out. The only thing money guarantees is risk.
@@birdbig6852star citizen is a weird exception that would be super hard to replicate
There are always weird exceptions to every rule, just because one can be successful doesn't mean all can be. If you have a really good idea then it might be worth going through with but I'm guessing with Concord they went in with the idea of: "live servive shooter game multiplayer" and thats not a great basis especially if you're not gonna do anything unique @birdbig6852
Of course the studio is axed, but the ceo or whatever who steamrolled his shitty vision into reality will probably get a raise
Waiter Waiter!! More Arlo ranting about Concord while looping the announcement trailer please!
Coming right up sir! And might we interest you in a side of hot sauce? It's very hot right now.
Hot sauce with the purple goop??? Yessir, yessir - fill me up, boss!
@@uraynuke Excuse me waiter, I'll have what they're having!
I wouldn't be surprised if its episode gets removed from that Amazon show.
If I was a gambler, I'd put money on that.
@@tkfarms7882 Let's go gambling
@@tkfarms7882 I'd bet they leave it in to get those rich headlines of the dead game episode to get more exposure for the show
I think it would be more interesting and a bit ironic if the episode stays in and ends up being very well received and turns into a decent film/TV franchise. Not that it’s likely, but it would be neat to see.
@@EMLtheViewerI hope it does well so they re-release the game only to let it flop a second time
Here’s what a friend told me about the game: (he was one of the "lucky" people who actually played Concord when it was still possible.):
"Right from the start, I noticed how incredibly long it took to find a lobby. It’s definitely not a bad game. I was pleasantly surprised by how polished everything is; it runs very smoothly, and there were basically no errors or bugs. The game looks beautiful too; aside from the art direction, the pure graphics are definitely appealing. You can tell that the team behind it put in a lot of effort.
But the biggest problem with the game is its soullessness. All the heroes feel like they were just designed somehow, lacking charm and any real identity. The same can be said for their abilities, they all feel familiar and too similar from other games. Like a budget Overwatch.
A cool idea was that a new short film gets released every week, highlighting the characters and providing more lore about the world. THAT is something I’ve never seen before and is actually quite sweet. The problem here, though, is that the characters are just completely forgettable, and no one cares. It’s such a shame because I feel like the team behind Concord could create something cool if they tapped into a different, less overdone genre and incorporated more original ideas. One can definitely see the talent in the developers. Except for that one guy who had a mental breakdown on Twitter after criticism of the game."
Tl;Dr Talented people were forced to work on a soul-less cash grab none of them actually wanted to make.
If he liked the short film idea, Team Fortress has the "Meet the (X character) series which is basically exactly that.
That thing about short animations to highlight the characters? That’s something Valve already did for TF2 *15 years ago* with the Meet the Team videos. So yeah, not even that’s unique to Concord!
@@axios4702 OP just mentioned how the major problem for him is the soullessness of the characters. I heavily doubt they werent what the studio envisioned them to be.
Its a product with quality everywhere, except where it really matters. Thats mostly of the reason why they failed
Reading this makes it a lot more sad because it seems like talented people were likely forced by executives to make this. They gave it their best, but they completely failed and now their entire studio gets shut down by the people who asked they make the game. I can’t imagine how upsetting it must be for any employee to not only have their work for the past 8 years shut down, but also to lose the studio they work for. I hope they can still find jobs in the industry
11:39 Studios can make a successful game and still be shutdown *cough*Hi-Fi Rush*cough*.
You know something is wrong when success and failure have the same outcome...
Sparking 0
Visions of Mana
Prince of Persia...😡
No one bought hifi rush. It was a good game, but it did not sell well.
I would say Rest In Peace but... I don't think peace is a luxury Concord deserves.
Gonna need a video of arlo placing the last rose on concords casket.
The thing about the ET game is that even after its colossal failure, at last the games still EXISTED. They were in a landfill that someone could go dig up. They were trash, but even trash exists. Concord... NO. LONGER. EXISTS. It is GONE. You cannot play it. You cannot look at it. You cannot go somewhere and find it. Because it was a digital product that relied solely on someone keeping it running on a server somewhere, it now no longer exists unless someone somehow has a software backup of it. For the vast majority of the public, the only proof that Concord was even real is video evidence. The game itself is effectively lost media. That's why I think it's a bigger failure than ET.
*Look at his physical copy of the game* Sony can't prevent me for possessing it !
@@MystiaLore The game disc is a coaster. You cannot play the game with it because the game is gone. ET carts still work, because the game is IN the cartridge and not on some server somewhere.
ET also sell millions and made in five week by single dev who is very likely paid peanut for it, it's just the icing on the cake that is Atari constant blunder
Memes about Concord having never existed when?
Imagine if they had taken the concept art of the characters and shown it to 100 gamers with the question "Do you want to play as any of these?". All this could have been averted. I firmly believe that is a huge part of why it failed, more so than the pricetag or anything else. Even free to play, this would have failed. You can see by how much hype there is for Deadlock that it's not the genre's fault.
It’s true, 90% of the negative reaction to Concord was how painfully obnoxious (and somehow also bland) the characters and writing were. The “Concord universe” is what people meme generic soulless corporate produced media as being.
@@thatdanjamesguy.330tell me you haven’t played concord without telling me you haven’t played concord:
@@Dakr2000no one’s played concord 😂
Deadlock is trashhh people need to stop riding valve’s sausage. It’s literally just DotaWatch 2.
@@hippieyoda1993 And you need to stop having a knee jerk reaction just because you hate dota or valve or whatever. I never said deadlock was good. I haven't even played it. I'm just stating a fact. Lots of people were willing to try a new heroshooter so clearly the genre is not what stopped concord from succeeding. That is my entire point. Nobody was trying concord even when it was in free trial. That's all on concord and it's not evil gamers, the market or anything else.
*Creators yearn for the Concord Mines*
Although this seems to be our last expedition...
For now...
The supposed upcoming show is still in the air
Gonna play devil's advocate here: Concord took like 9 years to develop. Sony took a risk by buying the studio to finish the game. The risk did not pay off and the game failed horribly. Are they supposed to fund the Studio for another 9 years to develop a new game? One that might fail again?
just DON'T make another 9 years development game. Just DON'T put 400 million dollars in it.
@@marialuisalino2915 They BARELY made a game in those 9 years. And not some RPG with expansive open world, locations, dialogue and complex interconnected questline, but a fucking arena shooter, one of the least work intensive genres there is. They can't make a game under 9 years
Can’t wait for you to talk about the Secret Level Concord Episode.
At least then he’d have more footage lol
It's so Concover.
So concover
One concordillion dollars
If I have to see green Star Lord screwing around with that damn hot sauce one more time than I am gonna lose it.
On the bright side, Concord has given us a bunch of great videos from various visual artists showing how they would fix each of the character designs. Those have been fun.
People have played those old Tiger Electronic handheld games longer than Concord.
"can we fit this meatball machine into a guillotine? i dunno, but we're gonna try"
14:40 new all time favorite arlo quote unlocked
If I were any large corporate entity with half a brain stem, I would never want to have Herman Hulst leading a major project for 2 reasons:
1. He directly oversaw Concord as its leading vision.
2. He unironically believed it was going to be "the next star wars" and the project was his baby.
The latter point is the worse one because it honestly demonstrates his lack of ability to look at projects objectively and adapt as a creative. He had the desire to create a mega blockbuster but could only see it through the lens of something that came before it as he envisioned it. This demonstrates that he looked backward and not forward and can only compare it to his vision of star wars as it once was. It is that kind of thinking that made an atari E.T level failure instead of a success.
Don't be like Hulst. Having an artistic vision is fine but you have to know who (or what) your vision is designed for. Otherwise you wind up with Concord, which is the artistic version of duct taping a 15-pound solid gold banana to the wall and thinking it will be the next Mona Lisa.
I'm all for bashing on Sony but I think they 100% made the right call on closing Firewalk. I don't think you should get to make a screw-up that monumentally catastrophic and walk away unscathed and expect your parent company to just go "oh well make another game and hopefully you'll do better". Tango Gameworks being closed by MS was worthy of outrage because they had demonstrated *multiple* times throughout the years that they can make compelling titles, (though perhaps not the block-busters that MS wanted) and more importantly showed that they can tackle a completely new genre and absolutely NAIL it.
Tango has now been plucked from the jaws of closure due to Krafton's intervention, and reading their CEO's comments on the matter, it really came off to me as someone who understood that Tango still has a lot more to offer.
Firewalk had a disgustingly obscene amount of money and resources at their disposal, and they used it to make a game no one wanted to play.
An embarrassment that will go down in Sony's history as an everlasting stain on their reputation not only as a game publisher, but as a business. I hope to see Herman Hulst and other Sony executives share in some of these consequences as well, but I have my doubts.
I honestly disagree with the notion that Concord wasn't a game made by suits. It...absolutely was. Fully trend chasing with no soul, the character designs are so ugly, no one is even finding anything positive to say about them (which just to reiterate is not a certain type of whining some grifters love to do), the gameplay was slow as balls and it had the audacity to charge 40 dollars for a game that's competing with Overwatch or any other hero shooter being free.
Yeah, Concord was 150% made by suits.
Let's also not forget Sony doubled down on making live services after this crashed. They wasted at LEAST 1/5 of a BILLION dollars and a decade of development only to go "And I'll fuckin' do it again."
I’m going to take a wild guess and say you didn’t even play the game for yourself
@@Dakr2000To be fair, not many people even had the chance to.
@@Dakr2000played the beta. It was dogshit. Stiff aiming, sluggish movement, horrid ttk, uninspired abilities, maps were too big, and the game didn’t feel like it had a focus on what it wanted to be like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be overwatch or valorant. The embarrassment didn’t even have a FoV slider for crying out loud
Yeah it's basically Destiny 😂
Overwatch is free? (I don’t play shooters I’m here for arlo aha)
I feel bad for the devs at Firewalk. From everything I have seen they were talented, capable people in a mismanaged, potentially toxic workplace, some of which have spent upwards of 5 years of their life on this project. Now they are all out of a job and the only thing they have to show for all that work is a resume with the most notorious flop in modern gaming history on it.
I don't. The toxicity of their team was obvious. They had 5 years to bail. Only loyal cultists stay aboard the ship the whole way to oblivion.
"From everything I have seen" so from the ONE GIANT FLOP, which is the only thing they made? Concord made you think "wow this is made by talented, capable people"???
If they're actually talented, their portfolio will speak for itself and they'll find other work. The video game industry isn't going away anytime soon. Losing your job sucks, but it's very far from the end of the world.
The game took 8 years to develop that's 10% of a person's life just gone.
@@Talking_Ed It's not "gone", it's spent chilling, barely doing any work. They still got paid. 10% of your life doing shit job with no expectation is a pretty sweet deal. Then the performance review came and they didn't meet the standard.
Funny how this happens the same day xenoblade x drops. The whole xeno franchise has been a passionate creative and engaging sci fi epic that has spanned 20+ years of small successes and failures and now here we are 1 xenogears game 3 xenosaga games (+spin-offs) 3 xenoblade games (+ports +spinoff +dlcs) and now we have one of the most involved engrossing sci-fi epic that was homegrown and thoughtfully put together with little to no corporate meddling(budget and schedule issues aside) and this world that xeno has created is only going to get more popular and bigger and I believe is one day bound to be a blockbuster. Concord in contrast did none of this they expected to have a sci fi epic handed to them instantly and now they have nothing
“Don’t game studios deserve a few more chances?” My guy, you don’t get another chance after a 400 Million Dollar mistake.
Good to see sony actually learned from Morbius and didnt make the same mistake twice.
oooh boy this costed them way more though.
Concord didn't flop twice.
Tax write-offs let's goooo
BARELY!
Execs: "Make us a game that nobody wants!"
Studio: Makes the exact game they asked for, nobody plays it
Execs: O_O
No, they bought the studio & concord during development, helped finish it way too late. They never ordered anything from Firewalk, they saw the product & the potential and fully invested in it. That’s their job.
They wanted to make it. Is it not possible that somebody other than execs is shit at their job?
It's gonna be *really* awkward when the Secret Level anthology series drops the Concord short and we gotta explain to friends and family members who ask about it that this game literally does not exist any more
It’s kind of better that way. By failing so hard, Concord takes on a kind of mythic status, just like ET once did.
From all the information coming out about the culture at Firewalk Studios, it sounds like it’s actually for the best that they were shuddered. It sounds like they had a deep seated culture of toxic positivity, not to mention the only thing they were capable of doing was live service games, and we all know that we don’t need more of those.
So, it was obviously incredibly dumb of Sony to buy the studio and expect big things of Concord, but I will not be shedding a tear on their behalf.
"Give them a good game to work on." About a year before launch, Sony had to use other studios to make major fixes to Concord, which was said to have been unplayable at that point. They had years to develop it and couldn't do it on their own, and even when finished it failed. According to an insider, the budget almost doubled due to the necessary fixes. They absolutely should've been shut down and not given another chance.
Yeah this developer get a free pass stuff is getting annoying. Firewalk delivered the worst aaa disaster in last two decades. If that doesn’t warrant a studio closure what does?
No you don't understand the developers are NEVER responsible. Even if they are working on exactly what they want, even if they're given full support to do what they want, even if they take over half a decade to make an arena shooter, even if they are given all the money in the world. Just give them another chance. The greedy investors shut them down instead of letting the studio fail for a full decade!
Yeah, this was a really weird video. Arlo acknowledged that Firewalk was working on Concord long before Sony bought them, and then continued to blame Sony for making them work on Concord. Also, all the stories that have come out about the work environment there suggest the studio really wasn't worth saving.
Sony defense is so gross ngl@@derrickcrowe3888
The studio is extremely expensive and rumours about how it was managed and the attitudes there about making games tell me that shutting it down was probably their only good decision.
When they pulled Concord and refunded players, I said that Firewalk's clock was ticking and at best, Sony would try to snag a few of their staff before axing the studio. It was such a colossal waste of money and likely did so much damage to the names "Concord' and "Firewalk" that there was probably little that could be done with them.
Yeah, the BIBLICAL failure poisoned the well so severely that shutting down the studio to get a tax break was the only option.
We are lucky to be alive as this once in a generation historical gaming catastrophe unfolds.
If sony aren't careful in repeating their mistakes it might not be once in a generation lol. Concorde was intended to be the first of many live service projects.
Yeah, when was the last historical gaming catastrophe?
definitely before I was born
This is more like an entertainment industry catastrophe times are hard right now
You take great joy in watching people lose their jobs? OK.
@@skippertheeyechild6621 I do, and I'm tired of pretending it's not (funny)
One of the main selling points was the weekly cinematics, which would require even more money being routinely sunk into the project, so even if they made it free, they'd be spending far more than they'd be making.
It's no surprise they're choosing to axe it now rather than lose another $100m over the next few months.
the question is; how many did they make in advance?
@@Majinhero It would likely have been a year's worth, or near as damn it. A lot of live service games function on a year's worth of content and, depending on how much revenue is gained, the content output is adjusted accordingly. It's why you'll see a lot of live service games get a lot of decent treatment in the first year but the quantity and quality starts to rapidly drop each year after as players spend less money on it.
So for arguments sake, if Concord somehow managed to sell well enough to stick around for a full year, there's a high chance that the weekly cinematics would change to every two weeks or even every month instead for year two before eventually grinding to a complete halt to "focus on making the *game* better" as false leverage.
I remember Halo 4's Spartan Ops had weekly cinematics too. Granted, there were only ten total, but they didn't really make Spartan Ops feel like an amazing must-play experience. I doubt 42 more cinematics would have changed that.
In conclussion, never name a product "Concord", no planes or games named Concord have succeeded.
The Concord plane was around for 20-something years. The concord game wasn't even around for 20-something days!
It can only succeed as New England towns
I just remembered Costa Concordia...
Nothing of value was lost.
About f ing time. Even more embarrassing is how this was supposed to be the main attraction for the state of play now that embarrassing
03:07: Arlo talking about acceptance while the characters are hanging on for dear life 😂
Concord wound up in the Museum of Failure. And no that’s not just me being poetic or dramatic there’s literally a museum of Failure and Concord is in it
feel bad for the developers who are actually talented, but not surprised
Don't. The fact that they stayed and played along with the woke ideology and "toxic positivity" long enough to be credited as developers proves they're no better and will likely carry that mindset wherever they go next. Pity only the ones wise enough to quit early for wasting as much time as they did.
@@Xnaut314 some people need a job to survive
@@Xnaut314what do you people get from being so miserable?
@@Xnaut314what a truly braindead opinion on devs needing jobs to survive.
@@Xnaut314what is woke?
So glad that Mario and Luigi is carrying the Concord torch
Aw man. I was so looking forward to the inevitable sequel: Lexington.
I get the argument. But the game wasn't made because of some suit in a tower and wasn't imposed on them. This was their game! Usually I'd agree the one failure and done thing is way too harsh. All the more so with games forced onto a studio and team. But they made it! It was theirs! Sony just funded some more after buying it.
If any studio earned this result it's Firewalk! It's not up to others to give them good ideas to protect them from themselves.
Normally I would be totally with you that shutting down a studio is a terrible idea but in the case of concord I do believe it is the right decision. The studio wasted A LOT of money. Such huge amounts that they can't simply keep them open. And am I the only one who thinks Sony was always kinda disgusting as a company? They were always greedy and a bit of a bully. Nothing new.
I imagine the enterprise bridge, full of Arlos in every station and Cptn. Arlo shouting: RED ALERT! EVASIVE MANEUVERS! EVASIVE MANEUVERS!!! Dragon Age The Veilguard looming large on the screen.
Honestly I hate seeing dev teams get axed and people lose their jobs. The team clearly are capable of making good games. If it wasn't for this "passion project" that allegedly spent 8 years and that 400 million in costs. It truly does suck and I hope they can still keep that passion in the future.
Define "clearly" because I assure you it's the opposite.
@@En_Joshi-Godrezwhen you get past all of the blind rage hate reviews theyre actually pretty positive
I would say they probably could if they had the right idea, lead, and design, but if your flagship game is deemed "the biggest failure in modern gaming history", losing your job is kind of inevitable.
"The team clearly are capable of making good games." based on what? They made only concord
@Dakr2000 citations needed
Downloaded state of play one last time
And nothing of value was lost.
I completely disagree with firewalk studios being people who can make a good game. They all seemed to be all in on what that game was, is, and stood for, and I for one do not think anyone involved in the creative process of that game deserves another product and millions of dollars to burn
come on bro, just give them another five years to burn another 400 mil for actual return of ZERO, you're not some sort of investor are you?
You vastly overestimate the agency or creative control of your average employee in the creative process lmao.
I would normally agree that it was bad to axe the team, but as the guy mentioned in the podcast that had insider knowledge, it took them so many years to develop a prototype so by the time Sony saw it, it was in such a "laughable" state, that they had to invest way more money so that they could outsource the game to other studios just to get it to where it was just before launch, so i truly believe that the team was just that incompetent, 8 years to make a game that took other devs less than half to make?, honestly the decision to axe the team just makes sense.
Yeah it's absolutely pathetic that Arlo is so eager to defend the people who made the biggest flop in gaming history. They deserve to lose their jobs.
that seem harsh,they still need to live
They can live, by taking my order and asking if I want fries with that. Seems more their skill level.
dude firewalk CHOSE to make this game... sony def invested poorly BUT that studio didnt deliver a good product period. You don't get to fail that hard and get another chance. they aren't an asset failing in the actual millions. so Sony's move was very logical and makes a ton sense. Sony buying them didnt change the fact they were making a bad game. I could care less about sony but bro this is just basic corporate.
No you don't give this studio another chance this isn't a case where they failed a little but the game was good, no this game bomb hard selling maybe 25k copies and by the sounds of it the studio itself was incompetent with Sony having to bring in outside help to make a game that was even even playable.
When something fails as bad as this it's needs to be allowed to die instead on been propped up.
I’ve seen this trailer more times than I’ve seen my family in my entire lifetime
Looks like it's truly the final time Arlo will have to download the State of Play footage for Concord 😭
The issue is that this wasn't some small flop. This was an enormous financial loss for Sony, who are probably extremely jaded with Firewalk Studios for wasting so much of their time and money, and figured why should they give them a second chance and continue paying the devs' salaries when they took eight years and multiple hundreds of millions of dollars to create a game that died in just two weeks? While it sucks that some talented devs will be out of a job, that's simply how the free market works. They created a game that nobody wanted and are now reaping the consequences of it. I think a better analogy would be throwing away a defective meatball machine than one that produced meat with the wrong recipe.
Could you imagine if Nintendo shut down Monolithsoft because the original Xenoblade Chronicles didnt immediately become the next Zelda or Mario
I don’t think it would’ve happened with Concord too tbf
Bruh, XBC wasn't a legendary flop with a huge budget and dev cycle.
This is so much worse than that. Nintendo probably would axe Monolithsoft if XBC only earned back 0.25% of its development cost
25,000 copies at $40 each -> $1 million
Concord's been estimated to have cost $400 million over its entire development
This is like if XBC failed to live up to one of those awful Wii shovelware games you'd find in the bargain bin at Office Depot
@@TKAandMore Not even 0.25%. They had to issue refunds to everyone who bought the game. It earned back literally 0% of its cost.
@derrickcrowe3888 That's true! I was being generous by using the earnings prior to refunds, since it better illustrates the scope of Concord's failure, but yeah, that $1M has pretty much evaporated.
Just for giggles, I'd like to see the current revenue figures for Concord. Not all the physical copies were brought back to retailers for refunds, so there are still some sales on the balance sheet.
04:43 So this man is still pushing for live service? Wth?
The flies have been feasting on the dead horse for weeks now...
I would say that Sony (very late, bad on Sony) found a flaw that particular meatball machine. Sony analyzed the product and then the machine and found a flaw in the machine. That machine would pump out garbage no matter what recipe was plugged into the machine. Sony decided it was best to stop the hemorraging and cut bait and find a new meatball machine. Pretty simple.
4:58 I fully expect Sony and the people at Sony who *SHOULD* learn lessons from Concord's total failure to not learn a single thing and to continue making the same, if not worse mistakes going forward!
I love how when announcing they’re closing the dev team, they can’t even say they made a bad product.
Farewell, CRATER CITY. We hardly knew you.
It cratered.
I was lucky enough to be passing a physical video game store and I saw a PlayStation poster in store that showed Concord. I took out my IPhone 12 and photographed the poster. This image will be my only reminder that Concord ever existed.
I don’t see your point, keeping Firewalk around in the hopes that they’ll make a better game seems like sunk cost fallacy to me.
The problem isnt really firewalk tho. As an actual working game concord is very solid. Its the people making the decisions for firewalk that are the problem. The higher up "creative" people. Because there are no creative people there.
@ I don’t think the game itself is solid. Has realistic graphics, but nothing else going for it.
@@philltheotherguy1868 i mean technically speaking. Everything works. It plays fluently. Not a lot of bugs. Which are all pretty much above standard nowadays. In terms of a videogame being a technical piece of software (not counting anything creative) concord is objectively a fine game. The people executing the (bad) ideas did a professional job. If you put those people on actual good ideas they would do a good job too.
To get into Sony’s mindset, they bought the studio to produce Concord, and that didn’t turn out well. Why keep a meatball machine that doesn’t make meatballs?
Reminder, Senran Kagura was cancelled by Sony to work on Concord, so not only they cut a franchise that made them millions, they pretty much used more money than those games got them just to make Concord, literally ruined it every possible way they could.
Didn't the creator of the SK series leave because of Sony's corpo mindset on game building?
Wonder what the guy's doing now?
Since when did Sony own Senran Kagura?
At least nothing of value was lost.
Also when did they ever own it?
@@thelazyworkersandwich4169 Apparently they had stock on it since the start, they didn't own the IP, just the team.
@@Surkk2960 Exactly they issue, then the team went on to work in Concord's development.
BRO SHUTTING DOWN THE STUDIO OF THESE BRILLIANT CREATIVE MINDS????? GIVE EM ANOTHER CHANCE LIKE WHAT THE HELL… ;w;
It is dead, buried and dirt is pat with a shovel.
I wonder if 10 years from now someone will take this footage and do a video on this game.
It’s gonna be really funny if this game returns from the grave before the year ends
It’s about got damn time
Arlo I'm a casual viewer of your main channel so I JUST found this topic channel today, and it is GREAT. I hope this has turned out to be worth it for you, because tonight I've really loved a lot of these videos I've busted through (switch 2 stuff, weird sonic discussion, ps5 ridiculousness, Nintendo growth videos, etc). I've commented on another one of your videos, your entire vibe is "excited nerd friend who rants about thing he loves / is super passionate about" and as a parent whose entire life is working and young kids right now, your videos really help to fill that video game nerding out void currently in my life. Keep em coming!!!
Nothing valuable was lost and great video arlo 🙌🏽
I would LOVE to see a documentary on this game, how it came to be, what production was like, and how it's failure was handled and recieved by those invovled, ESPECIALLY the artists, designers, director(s), and programmers
You ain't keeping around a studio that loses you $400 million.
EA kept Bioware after Anthem for some reason, but not Visceral after Battlefield: Hardline
I have never watched this cinematic with its original audio
Of course you can argue that they just spent 400 mil on training a team never to mess up again but on the other hand if a failiure of epic proportions such as this is no reason to get the axe then what is?