@@BellularNews Time for you to stop being so polite towards obvious DEI and agenda-pumped games. It's destroying the industry and you are obviously completely avoiding discussing it to play it safe. We - gamers - need folks like you to call it out into the light of day.
Agreed. DEI is destroying our industry and if u are not condemning it u are part of the problem. Thank god people with his narrative are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority agrees …End of Story
Agreed, DEI is destroying his gaming industry, and yet he choses to distract his audience from it by talking about things completely unrelated to the glaring issue. We are living in dark times and we need someone to stand up and FIGHT not ignore and act like the floor isnt collapsing underneath us. Guys if u want to see the truth about whats really happening in the gaming industry please go and watch all of Doctor Disaster’s videos. There is nothing else to discuss here accept for what the Doc is talkin about. End of Story
“Sony wanted a Call of Duty competitor,” Aachem, MAG, SOCOM, Killzone come to mind. Revive any of those and you have a chance to capture some of the market. Maybe Sony wouldn’t have to worry about studio acquisitions if they didn’t close all the good studios that they once had.
Might have been a touch more accurate to say, “Sony wanted an Overwatch competitor.” Of course, we don’t need to go into great detail about how over saturated the hero shooter market is and how the vast majority of those hero shooters have since closed up shop (with Concord seemingly taking the cake unless if I’m forgetting a title).
Instead of using the hollowed out brand names. Need to start naming board members/directors. Such as the Ubisoft/EA fellow that's been roasted and tossed out.
Do we really want these old time franchises be made in 2024.... If they made a true remaster or remake, without adding any modern politics in it. I guess it might be good, but I don't trust them!
I first saw XQC play this on Kick, and oh boy am I glad I didn’t pre purchase this. Dodged a bullet there 😅 🙏 Fun fact: There was a cruise ship that sunk a few years ago that also cost around 400 mil, and it was literally called COSTA CONCORDIA 😂
Don't forget about the Concorde Jet that was too expensive to run and just a crapy passenger experience due to being noisy (imagine paying a huge premium to fly and you can't take a nap because the plane is yelling at you for hours). Nail in the coffin? --> "25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde passenger jet on an international charter flight from Paris to New York, crashed shortly after takeoff killing 109 passengers"
A bigger budget in THEORY may produce an excellent game. However, as we witnessed over the last decade, what screws these games over is a lack of solid direction and leadership. I've come to learn that bigger is not necessarily better especially when you have too many cooks in the kitchen.
No budget big or small guarantees a good product. It's not like a huge budget means a game will be bad though. Red Dead Redemption 2 for example cost over $500 million to make.
@@slaphead90 It doesn't make a better game at all. But what it does is allow them to pursue certain kinds of games better. And certain genres of games have had increased expectations of graphical fidelity, motion capture, voice acting, and complexity. The entry fee for a hero shooter than can compete in today's market is just astronomically high.
@@IIC7Correct. Back then bigger budget was given for outsourcing things the main devs already finished but in a hurry to polish. The main gameplay loop is relatively cheap; but the world building, the characters personality, the BGMs, the cutscenes, the physics, and the entire immersion were the expensive part. Nowadays bigger budget was given BEFORE any game was made. Its insanity when the veterans of game now get paid less for actually working instead of pandering.
@@MediocreNed Are you insane? That's the only one worth watching, made by an actually talented filmmaker, not a shallow creatively bankrupt hack like JJ.
@tronam my guy the film doesn't even make sense with itself. All the last jedi did was take ideas from empire and did the exact opposite. It's not art. It's blatant plagiarism.
@@Usernamesdontmatter1 It's blatant plagiarism, but then did the exact opposite of what it plagiarized? You're not even making any sense, bro. JJ is the clueless moron who retrograded and killed off Han, my favorite character, and then stranded Luke on a BS mystery box island, shattering any and all hope for even a momentary reunion of the original trio. Equally egregious was inexplicably resurrecting Palpatine, completely robbing the cathartic victory and sacrificial redemption of Anakin at the end of RotJ. No filmmaker has done more to ruin both Star Wars *and* Star Trek than Abrams.
Over 400 million dollars burned for this. Meanwhile, countless PlayStation IPs are ignored. The shareholders need to go, and whoever else was responsible for this travesty. 😂😢
@@vincent207 you can, it's called abandonment. it can be considered abandonment of your copyright/trademark/IP if you don't use it for too long or fail to protect it. a lot of the reason companies release small projects related to small IPs, even completely unrelated projects with the same name, is to protect it from abandonment. same thing for suing for every small infringement, even if they are expected to lose the lawsuit, because the law expect them to protect their property with the risk of losing it.
@brandonedlin2052 Man even the CEOs buying a yatch yields less of a loss then what Concord did. I rather of them of bought a Sony yatch vs 8 years and 400million burned to a crisp.... Now people either way are also probably going to loss there jobs over this as well and nothing came out of those funds that probably could of even revived more then one old franchise and actually make profit with that cash. These live service games are such a gamble vs what Nintendo does, proper games and exclusives, proper system, and proper value, and I dislike what Nintendo does sometimes but at least it makes financal sence.
I just want to say, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed Horizon, I _do not want_ a live-service game in that universe. I mean, Sony, you do you... but I'm not buying it.
Concord - ongoing cost for millions just to keep finishing it - 200 million before alpha started, another 200 to finish it - outsourced 2 years before to get it out and finished - 400 million budget - no word on til alpha : onboarding and monetization, 2 years before release - Sony's biggest lost so far - TLOU 220 mil, SM3 350 mil, this cost more - about 1mil of that 400 mil made back - championed behind the scene as "star wars" levels of Sony - "the future of Sony" - code name : Chaos - Toxic Positivity - couldn't critique or call it out, not allowed - echo chamber, character design issues ignored, attacked, vitriol - Concord episode before Condord was even released from Amazon "secret level" - tone deaf cart before the horse
They didn't make anything back because they had to refund the games, since they're no longer providing access to it. They might've kept some money in the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, if they're lucky. Truthfully, many of the points in what happened make very little sense. I wouldn't be surprised if, beyond the incompetence, there was an underlying layer of guile. The people working on that game walked away with a lot of money regardless of the outcome.
@@slimeplort and that's the problem. It isn't that Sony lost a lot of money on this 💩, it is that so many people made more money than many others that made a better product. Why should the industry change when it is just shelling out blank checks to soothsayers that make money off of lies and grifts?
You got one point wrong: "- about 1mil of that 400 mil made back" This is false. Sony refunded everyone. In other words they didn't even get the 1 million back. And even if they did get that 1 million dollars, that's gross revenue, in other words it's not taking into account Steam's cut of the sales nor other production costs that would eat into the gross profit. But they still had to pay Steam and for the production costs so they lost even more money producing it too.
They refunded it to everyone to fill it as a tax writeoff. They are making more money from concord by refunding it and making it disappear than keeping the few sales revenue they got.
dude, i didn't see a single piece of marketing for Concord. I literally didn't know about it until i heard it had failed. I've known about every single other major release months before they dropped, if not years before. This game had NO marketing. There was no hype. If anything it felt like someone was paying to push the narrative that it was dead in the water. And they cut the live servers TWO WEEKS AFTER RELEASE. I've never seen that before. All i can think to say is that someone critical actively wanted this thing to fail. Where did the money go? It didn't look like it got spent on the game.
At the end of the day, the developers get the flak, and the CEO swans off into retirement with tens of millions in bonuses while the shareholders are protected from any losses, despite being the people who likely pushed all the decisions that caused this game to fail.
"the shareholders are protected from any losses" What are you saying? Shareholders are the very one who take a hit if something is wrong with how the company is run.
Shareholders take the loss. They aren't protected by failure. The developers got paid for years to produce what ended up being nothing. The shareholders are the only ones holding the bag. The devs and execs were paid.
Creators tried really hard not to design the characters as stereotypical tropes. A noble enough goal, problem is they went so hard for that at the expense of so much else they ended up with designs that don’t say or mean anything at all. Completely forgettable and communicate nothing about who or what a character is. The most damning critique of concord I’ve seen is it kinda makes you appreciate the effort blizzard puts in for Overwatch.
Its good not to make characters stereotypical trops i feel the baby was thrown out with the bath water in this case they threw out character archetypes along with the stereotypes and while yes you shouldnt just stick to an archetype they can be useful as building blocks/starting point when making characters even if its to say 'well usually with a sniper you do X but why not try Y for this one'. Archetypes get knocked on a lot today but there is a reason certain things have become common archetypes they tend to be easy to understand and engage the audience and by ignoring the useful things there they as you said made very boring and forgettable characters.
@@Pr0m3th310us He didn't say that. He made a comparison between Concord and Overwatch. Concord is so bad that it LOOKS like Blizzard is putting in effort with Overwatch. He's saying both games are low effort, only that Concord is worse.
The thing is, stereotypes are actually very powerful tools if you know how to play around with it (to make unexpected little surprises) in your character building. What Concord did was just lazy designing, staying away from the norm only for the sake of stay away from it in a checkboxes fasion, without giving them any depth and harmony as they stuff them all together. And the ultra-realistic graphic didn't help either for such color-vibrant aesthetic and childish-behaving "adult" characters. Even CP2077 gets somewhat weirdly cartonish at times (even with such grim settings) because of how colorful things are in the designs.
To an extent you are basically arguing that the lunch platform for a space rocket isn't part of the cost of the rocket. Because it is not LITERALLY part of the rocket. The building, the space, the extra people, the extra time. These are all costs relevant to the creation of the game. So it was probably more like 300 million. It hardly matters. The GAME is still nearly 5 times over budget. And all to fund incompetent developers and vary good animators. To bad the animators were working on movies instead of the game.
@renmcmanus I agree, I can't remember anyone listing the numbers for food costs for anyone in space, and it's a vitally important statistic. All these costs are important, like you said.
I mean, to be fair, you can REUSE the launch pad. So it cn be used for multiple launches. I mean you wouldn't consider buying a console part of the cost of a game because you use it for multiple games. If Firewalk makes a second game, do we still count the money Sony spent on in THAT budget?
The game only really started dying after Sony chose to not enforce PSN thing and Arrowhead started making absolutely shitty changes. If you believe Sony caused the Helldivers downturn, you’re misinformed.
@@byte-bg4ob na the fall-off was when Sony forced there hand on the game and shut it down in multiple countries, the game never recovered from that pr nightmare and it was down hill from there
Why? Concord was as low-risk as they could come up with. Another hero shooter in a market already deeply oversaturated. If anything, it makes the case for greenlighting MORE risky projects that have some originality
From the customer stand of point Concord was risky but for business people it was the most safest project ever. I can imagine the investors were wetting their pants when they heard a game was coming up with every character appealing to every demographic possible... by including none... For these people, the customers are an enigma, a black box. They have no idea what they are doing.
Because it absolutely will. This was the Risky idea that they were willing to invest in. Now that it has failed so hard they will be forced to do something they feel is going to be guaranteed success, by investing in something mediocre but not too bad.
May be a hot take, but personally, I don't think most AAA games need budgets higher than the majority of blockbuster films. If your video game is costing you so much that it can rival some of the highest budgeted movies of all time, then something is going wrong.
@@Rietto Well that and bloating development with ultra high definition textures that seem to exist mostly for the hardware partners to hock new GPUs. You're not wrong. But it's bloat in every direction.
TL;DW - the 400 million is a ballpark estimate of how much it cost to PUBLISH this game/studio across two seperate publishers, Sony did not spent 400m. Firewalk/Concord COST 400m across 8 years (and even then, part of that was going to other studios, and it included things like facilities) Suggested that the real reason Sony bought Firewalk was 1. the track record of it's CEO seemed to indicate a winner, and 2. it has a lot of experienced developers who worked at Bungie they wanted to poach because Sony also owned bungie.
@@bologna3048I still don’t believe it. No way in hell this game costed that much. Unless more than half of that spending went to someone else’s pocket.
@@doctorsilva1345if you read the food TLDR up top and ignore the useless one you replied to, you understand that those 400m did not just go into the game and its devs. Nor was it all paid for by Sony. Here's a very simple breakdown to understand how quickly costs build up. You pay 5 developers $100k for 2 years and that's 1m dollars. Just the programmers, not the artists, sound designers, HR, PR, designers, writers, etc. It grows quickly. Then you add a lot more for marketing. Then more for stuff like an office space and tech and software and server racks. It all adds up, especially over 8 years.
So how is Bungie doing these days? I mean is it really Bungie without Jason Jones, Marcus Lehto, and Marty O'Donnell? Well I guess legally yes, but not really.
"No game has that dev budget." Star Citizen would like a word. Although that's less a "game" and more a dumpster fire of dreams, incompetence, lies and embezzlement.
400 million dollars in 8 years and I have not seen 1 ad or any mentions of this game EVER. I got nothing about this game before the last 2 weeks and when I started hearing about this, it was nothing but complaints . Real sloppy if you ask me.
They showed it in the not-E3 as their biggest reveal with a looping cinematic that nobody liked because it was boring and dragged out. After it was revealed it was, indeed, a hero shooter it started getting flak so I guess marketing decided to let it cool off before revving up the machine. Thing is, the closed Beta was so disastrous that they scrapped an open beta quickly and then accelerated the release date, guess to stop bleeding money.
they literally lost 400 million straight up. How incompetent do you need to be to lose that much on project everybody else can figure out in 5 minutes that it's DOA?
I'd like to remind you that Dragon Age: Veilguard is coming out and the devs/publishers still *learned nothing* They really believe that DEI crap will sell.
@@Nurix09 it has nothing to do with DEI, as much as you want to. those projects are still mostly ran by white men working with other white men. and the minorities characters was the least problem of the game.
@@calisto789An extreme case of self-righteousness and pretentiousness. Total refusal to listen to any criticism, insulting anyone who did it. Their way of acting is a form of zealotry, only worshipping an idea instead of deity. The idea that only they are right, everyone else is wrong and lesser than them for that.
This is one of the best explanations for this kind of finance / business structure stuff I've seen in reporting targeting the general public. Great job.
It doesn't matter if it's 100, 200, or 400 million, it's still the biggest failure of all time regardless. Unlaunched in less than two weeks, and the laughing stock of the gaming industry as well as gamers. Concord jokes will never stop being funny. I can see some people on Twitter are trying to cope, but they will need a bigger canister of copium.
It would be nice if, whenever you quote something, you actually quoted correctly, verbatim, without shuffling words around. The order of words can be important for emphasis or meaning. Thus you quoting correctly when reporting on something is important.
"the way the industry works" is a wonderful excuse. the industry "works" this way because of a mindset, one not based on facts but dogma based on perception. it comes down to the executives - the same executives who were not hired on applicable merit and who chose, and continue to choose, to make product decisions that are extremely contrary to customer goodwill and fiduciary responsibility. these executives are entirely divorced from any actual knowledge of the company who hired them, the products their companies make, and the customers who by their customers. their decisions are not based on actual research or any real attempt at actual understanding the situation in which their company or industry is in. these executives, every last one of them, need to be removed before any improvement can occur. this applies to sony and all other companies in every single industry...
Yep. This is called _"modern management"_ and that's the best catalyst that capitalists can think of when they want to spread their toxic deadly ideology to every domain that can generate profit.
Yeah, that's how the industry works. People with money make decisions, no matter how little they know. Maybe in 30 years when the executives are ones who grew up with modern games and didn't at best play Mario or Tetris we'd at least get someone familiar with AAA games in the big seats. But who knows?
"...they pioneered it [live service]" Destiny release date: 2014 Warframe release date: 2013 World of Tanks: 2011 No, no they did not. And you should not credit them for doing so.
And before live service, you had MMOs which, at least production wise, is an ancestor. So there are plenty of devs and lots of experience in continuous development- just no one seems to be listening because they seem to want to reinvent the wheel and do things their own way
@greyed Yup! And you have non-video game examples like Magic and Warhammer which, conceptually, share similar principles of constant engagement and the like. All these older examples show that creating a hobby that people love will result in people spending money on the thing they love and have formed bonds with and in.
The irony is all they'd have to do to recoup this lost fortune is bring Bloodborne to PC and remove the PSN requirement for their PC ports and yet they'll never do it bc Sony is run by morons and enslaved by greedy shortsighted shareholders . So glad I'm a PC gamer.
Do we know what the actual reasons for Bloodborne not coming to PC, let alone giving it a 60fps update on console? Does it have anything to do with Fromsoft or is it for a fact just Sony being braindead?
@@anonymous_2223 Because Sony don't want to. A bunch of people have already got it running on PC 60fps with higher quality textures. So I'm pretty sure a company with Billions in capital can do much more than that.
@@anonymous_2223 I only can speak for the FPS. The Bloodborne physics engine is directly linked to FPS count. If this limit is removed without redesigning the physics engine to be able to accept 60 fps a lot of this would break. It is not like it can't be done but the change would cost money. Current FromSoftware Inc. games are capped at a 60 fps cap. I only guess the Bloodborne is on 30 fps because of the capabilities of the PS4 APU. FromSoftware caps their games at this time at 60fps because their game engines tie physics and animations to the frame rate, which can break if it goes higher. They aim for stable performance on all platforms and keep the gameplay consistent, ensuring combat remains precise. Prioritizing stability over higher frame rates helps prevent stuttering and other issues that could affect the experience. More inclusive answer why they are engine behave that way.
Tbf it might actually be F2P and Valve will just profit from Steam Marketplace. They are in a very unique position of how they can monetize the few games they make.
I even got an invite and I basically live under a rock when it comes to popular multiplayer games. I have also found it surprisingly accessible compared to more traditional MOBAs. IMO Valve haven't lost their touch as Devs.
And it has GENUINELY GOOD diversity, i.e. it doesn't come at the cost of character design. When I want diversity and representation, I want characters like Ivy.
I don't get this talk of "modern audience"... it obviously exists and other games were successful with it. As you can see younger people are also playing video games.
@@octavianpopescu4776 "modern audience" does not mean younger people like you asume. For corporation, they use that term to market that their products are for "everyone", the DEI things, also to raise their ESG score. The "modern audience" exist thought, they are on Twitter (well, X now) to advocate their belief about diversity, inclusion, etc. The thing is: most of them aren't paying customer
@@octavianpopescu4776 Other games who don't pander to "modern audience" succeed. For example, Blackmyth Wukong. No FORCED diversity, no ideology shoved down our throat, no forced defeminization of female characters, no demonization of straight white male (and I'm saying this as an Asian woman), no insulting your customer, just some fun monke action.
@@i_like_lemons Overwatch, Valorant, Baldur's Gate 3, Last of Us 2... making money but it doesnt fit your narrative. At the end of the day its simpler: bad games are bad games. But that common sense narrative doesnt work when all you wanna do is cry and rage.
It's worrying to me that so many people had to be involved, so much money was riding on the project and somehow, no one with any pull at least, was like "These designs are awful and bland", no one realized they were just making a worse looking Overwatch/Guardians of the Galaxy? It's baffling when a project has so much money pumped into it, seemingly has so much riding on its success, but it was so obviously going to fail to anyone with eyes. With that much money, toxic positivity shouldn't even be a thing, even fast food places have some frigid higher up that comes in and nitpicks everything. How did they not have someone harsh with power go "WTF is this? Fix it NOW!" in almost a decade?
@@mismismism the long short of it was toxic positivity. Multiple sources say you weren’t allowed to say anything bad about it as per the NDA contract they signed. Honestly it was also run by a bunch of activists too up in their butt to see everything wrong about it. Especially the cost, another thing is how many people working on it. It’s literally an hour long credit for everyone who helped made it.
because the game was basically a venture capitalist bubble. the idea wasn't to make a good game, the idea was to make a huge project to attract investment. that is why the toxic positivity is key here, because if they make it look like the project is going to hell then everything fall apart. as for the designs, I believe it's a issue of "too many cooks in the kitchen". because if you look at the concept art, the cell shading animations, and finally the final product, it's like each team had a different vision of how the game was supposed to look like. the concept arts seemed to look great, the designs fit incredibly well for the cartoony cell shading style, but then they just made them photorealistic for the game without thinking if the designs fit the aesthetics.
When you have an employee that demanding she be called 'the professor' even though she doesn't have a doctorate, and got people fired for refusing it's not exactly a shocker the game ended up the way it did.
@@MediocreNed That's yet another baffling lack of oversight. If I'm someone on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, there is no employee that should be getting away with being a liability like that. But even that aside, no one with hold over the purse strings could see that this was a mess that whole time? Because this had to involve a lot of people, no one problematic employee can cause this and get it greenlit in the state it was in, a lot of people needed to fumble spectacularly for no one to get called out for failing at stuff so basic as having good looking designs in a hero shooter.
@@danilooliveira6580 I could get that if it was down to something only gamers could have issues with like mechanics, but just objectively, even if this was a movie, those designs look horrible. I do not understand how any business person or person with power at Sony, could get behind this and not even just look at it. You're investing in a hero shooter and they apparently didn't even google a single existing one to get the bare minimum idea of WTF the assignment was, none of them apparently showed just one kid, not even a kid, 1 random person on the street could look at these characters and said they look bad or uninteresting. It's baffling is how glaringly obvious it was that this was a massive failure. It's like me running a burger place and showing the investors a gross, raw burger with moldy bread and somehow convincing them that it will be a hit because they don't eat fast food. It's too blatant.
The credits for the Lord of the Rings The return of the king is the one of the longest credits in movies (even longer than star wars that are movies from 2 to 3 hours full of CGI and effects) which was over 20 minutes because they added all the fans. The credits for Concord last for over 75 minutes (most of them have no experience previously to this project) and they barely made 5 Maps and 16 characters.
The industry just needs to go back to making games that challenge gamers' minds and skills in truly novel ways. They can be scrappy with just workable graphics - and if it's fun, that's value. It's.. not that hard. Suits need to get their heads out of their asses and try to maximize quality or Concord-like situations are *increasingly likely*
Games are like movies. It been done a million times. Just like this game it looks actually like every shooter. What new can they come up with? Nothing. There's not been one thing new in a shooter for 10+ years. They may look nicer, but the cord play hasn't changed at all. Why a new one of these game sells one unit is shocking. If you play shooters, you already played any new shooter that comes out. They are all boring clones of each other.
Tbf, I wouldn't be surprised if GTA has like a billion dollar+ budget. So we're pretty far from that level. Of course, GTA will still make that back day 1, and then make millions a month on GTA6 online. So they can justify it. No one else has really put that kind of power into their IP except COD, WOW, and the biggest Nintendo IP's.
I'm intrigued by the IP. A little bit of a polish and a touch up and maybe make it like a Ratchet & Clank style story with tall people, scarier weapons and you'd have a fun game. I think they could keep the zig-zag cords aesthetic even for shield-generators too and similar and just double down on it and yeah, game!
It's the Pitchford Dilemma, similar to how Randy Pitchford embezzled the money he got from fox to make Colonial Marines and put it all into Borderlands 2.
If I was running Bioware, I'd try poaching the person who did the facial animation for Concord. That has long been a problem for Bioware, and the facial animation for Concord was better than 95% of the AAA games I've seen. With Concord getting pulled so quickly the whole development crew has to be nervous about their current employment, so they might be very receptive to a reasonable offer.
I was under the impression that the $200m number was Sony's total cost not including the acquisition money, and that the fucky math was coming from someone rolling the acquisition money and the pre-Sony dev costs together which involves some double-dipping. The more accurate number is $200m + Sony's cash outlay for the acquisition, and I don't believe for a second that totals out at $400m. Probably in the $250-300m range. Regardless, the key takeaway is that Sony has no business being involved in the decision making process of any multilplayer game. They've thoroughly demonstrated in recent years that they have no clue what they're doing in that arena.
One of the Concord devs DEMANDED to be called 'Professor' despite not having any of the credentials, and would get INCREDIBLY upset when if it didn't happen. If that's not a red flag, I don't know what is.
You know at least one person at Sony mentioned the character design, beta testes, Q and A, literally anyone they showed the game to had to have mentioned it. And whoever was in charge brushed it off as people being haters.
It's just a phrase. "Your truth" means "whatever you genuinely perceive to be reality." It's a belief. He's not saying all the conflicting claims are literally true. The idea is that the people giving their own reports, disputes, etc., are all operating under the belief that their conclusion is the truth based on their own sources. He's simply saying that he's not here to call anyone a liar, and doesn't want the video to be perceived as him assuming bad faith. He's only here to bring to bring in his own perspective and try to reason out the plausibilty of the story we've been fed.
@@SurzhenkoAndrii"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." - some postmodernist, probably. Just kidding, it's from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.
Man, employees at Firewalk must be eat good for eight years. If we assume that 50 million a year distributed evenly and fairly for all workers and employees.
@@duncanw5644 as a marathon fan, they better not. If they do, i only guarantee that marathon will be complete crap. Bad enough i have to see one of my favorite franchises as a child ruined by the game not being a good single player experience, i have to see it turned into a generic modern shooter….now i have to think it may be turned into a generic modern shooter where im forced to play only characters I cannot remotely bring myself to like that are fugly.
@@laughingalex7563 Bungie is going to keep creative control though… Firewalk will literally just be extra hands for Bungie in developing Marathon (which they desperately need)
Good video, weird question. Why does it look like this guy is a robot running an exe everytime he blinks. It's like he's physically forcing himself to blink and it takes a second too long. Once I noticed I couldn't stop lol
I gotta be real. I actually barely understood a fucking thing except that american videogame companies try to businesses and japan videogame companies try to make videogames
Colin Moriarity is not a good reference, and you should take everything he says with a grain of salt. That being said, I do think that them not receiving good feedback (willingly or not) is one of the reasons for the failure of Concord.
The biggest issue was the character designs. They all look super lame. And that matters A LOT when the game is just pvp. Then the nail in the coffin was the lame mini revela trailer, which made it look generic and forced. Those two killed the game. Doesnt matter how good the gameplay is or graphics are.
I'm so sick of the "saturated markets" narrative. Just. Make a good game. There are so many holes in the market. Particularly with hero shooters. Everyone acts like there are hundreds of popular hero shooters. I dont see them? There's Overwatch. I guess you could say valorant but its such a different thing. Deadlock now. I want more good hero shooters. Its a starved market. Not oversaturated.
After seeing everything Sony has done this year in gaming I do NOT think they will be able to "save" the crumbling Destiny franchise Bungie developed. I know a lot of people hold out hope that Destiny can be brought back into the spotlight with all of Sony's resources, etc, but the whole debacle with Hell Divers 2 earlier this year and now with this major launch failure of Concord I just don't see it happening. Sony is kind of just eating shit right now and the launch of a PS5 Pro for $700 without the stand included was just icing on the cake for me to stop giving them the benefit of doubt and/or blindly believing that they got that Midas touch in the gaming space these days.
This is a good example of what happens when "new talent" is removed from the pipeline leaving no career growth in the industry and no one to optomize the overall workflow to make sure a product doesnt end up "never ready"
How in the blue hells did a 5v5 hero shooter without a single player story campaign with motion captured cinematics and high-profile voice actors balloon to a budget of 350 million USD? That is squarely in the production budget of big tent pole Hollywood summer blockbuster films! If I'm at Sony, I'm seriously rethinking video game development going forward.
All that matters is the return in the end and either way you look at it, they spent $200 million or $400 million the end result is the same, they didn't even see a 1% return on the game. $400 million was spent on this game, the studio spent 200 and Sony 200 on buying the studio which means they would've had to sell 10 million copies just to break even and you know Sony wants 2-3 times the return, so a possible 30 million. Elden Ring is made by a known and loved studio and it didn't even make 30 million copies. How in the fuck did they ever think this was going to succeed? Edit: Btw Concord sold 25,000 copies.
OK, this makes no sense to me. Sony brought the Firewalk studio for $200 mil in April 2023 so they managed to spend another $200 million on the game in 16 months? Sony brought Insomniac Studio in 2019 for $229 mil, which had several hits and the best selling Spider Man. Firewalk made nothing before Concord
8 years.... $400M.... DELETED IN 2 WEEKS. Just WOW. This should be studied by business, art, and technical professions alike. What a spectacular failure.
All we need to do is page through Sony's financial's to find out how much it cost. I don't know if they reported the quarter concord was in because I haven't been an investor in a few years but I'm zure I'll get to it eventually.
I read comments like "Burned money". Guys, that money went into paying the devs. The artists, programmers, testers, everyone involved in the game!!! It is NOT burned money. The only problem is, the invested money did not bring a good result. That happens all the time in so many areas. Why so much hate. People got paid, did their job and moved onto working for someone else. I read so many comments about low wages, and exploits on working people. So maybe this was the case where the paid them well. And the large bill is the result of that. I think it's all good here. Those money were not burned, stolen or something like that.
The people who designed those characters probably had well paying jobs ... for almost a decade. You know, I'd call that financial success for individuals who may not have deserved it.
Wild how Sony could revive a number of franchises to get into the markets they're trying to get into. It's like they forgot MAG, SOCOM, Resistance, Killzone, and Warhawk/Starhawk. They could easily get into the FPS or TPS market without gambling on untested studios who can only say they have an idea and some staff worked on other games before.
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@@BellularNews Time for you to stop being so polite towards obvious DEI and agenda-pumped games. It's destroying the industry and you are obviously completely avoiding discussing it to play it safe. We - gamers - need folks like you to call it out into the light of day.
Agreed. DEI is destroying our industry and if u are not condemning it u are part of the problem. Thank god people with his narrative are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority agrees …End of Story
Agreed, DEI is destroying his gaming industry, and yet he choses to distract his audience from it by talking about things completely unrelated to the glaring issue. We are living in dark times and we need someone to stand up and FIGHT not ignore and act like the floor isnt collapsing underneath us. Guys if u want to see the truth about whats really happening in the gaming industry please go and watch all of Doctor Disaster’s videos. There is nothing else to discuss here accept for what the Doc is talkin about. End of Story
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“Sony wanted a Call of Duty competitor,” Aachem, MAG, SOCOM, Killzone come to mind. Revive any of those and you have a chance to capture some of the market.
Maybe Sony wouldn’t have to worry about studio acquisitions if they didn’t close all the good studios that they once had.
Might have been a touch more accurate to say, “Sony wanted an Overwatch competitor.”
Of course, we don’t need to go into great detail about how over saturated the hero shooter market is and how the vast majority of those hero shooters have since closed up shop (with Concord seemingly taking the cake unless if I’m forgetting a title).
Instead of using the hollowed out brand names. Need to start naming board members/directors.
Such as the Ubisoft/EA fellow that's been roasted and tossed out.
Do we really want these old time franchises be made in 2024....
If they made a true remaster or remake, without adding any modern politics in it. I guess it might be good, but I don't trust them!
MAG was great
Even resistance
"Toxic Positivity" is just another way of saying "shared delusion".
YES. criticism is necessary. you learn because you fall flat on your ass. nothing is better at inspiring someone than revenge
@@aznhomig the Alphabet People in a Nutshell.
Enforced shared delusion
@@silverhawkscape2677 Yup. Funny how it flipped from "all we want are equal rights" to "do what we say or we call you bigot"
@@aznhomig The Emperor's New Clothes was social commentary from centuries ago.
I first saw XQC play this on Kick, and oh boy am I glad I didn’t pre purchase this. Dodged a bullet there 😅 🙏 Fun fact: There was a cruise ship that sunk a few years ago that also cost around 400 mil, and it was literally called COSTA CONCORDIA 😂
For those that bought a physical copy it might actually increase in price ^^
A lettuce in my fridge outlived concord
Biggest flop in gaming history
Don't forget about the Concorde Jet that was too expensive to run and just a crapy passenger experience due to being noisy (imagine paying a huge premium to fly and you can't take a nap because the plane is yelling at you for hours).
Nail in the coffin? --> "25 July 2000, Air France Flight 4590, a Concorde passenger jet on an international charter flight from Paris to New York, crashed shortly after takeoff killing 109 passengers"
Irony bolte bhai...irony
Does a mega million budget actually make a better game? In my experience, over the last few years, the answer is a resounding no.
A bigger budget in THEORY may produce an excellent game. However, as we witnessed over the last decade, what screws these games over is a lack of solid direction and leadership.
I've come to learn that bigger is not necessarily better especially when you have too many cooks in the kitchen.
No budget big or small guarantees a good product. It's not like a huge budget means a game will be bad though. Red Dead Redemption 2 for example cost over $500 million to make.
@@slaphead90 It doesn't make a better game at all. But what it does is allow them to pursue certain kinds of games better. And certain genres of games have had increased expectations of graphical fidelity, motion capture, voice acting, and complexity. The entry fee for a hero shooter than can compete in today's market is just astronomically high.
You see, that's the problem. A typical business mindset would say yes, which is why executives never learn.
@@IIC7Correct.
Back then bigger budget was given for outsourcing things the main devs already finished but in a hurry to polish. The main gameplay loop is relatively cheap; but the world building, the characters personality, the BGMs, the cutscenes, the physics, and the entire immersion were the expensive part.
Nowadays bigger budget was given BEFORE any game was made. Its insanity when the veterans of game now get paid less for actually working instead of pandering.
They wanted to be Star Wars . They achieved it 100% since the Disney Star Wars is pure shit.
Well, except for The Last Jedi which is the best film in the series since Empire.
@@tronam
What the fuck are you talking about? That's the film that killed star wars or at least caused it's death spiral.
@@MediocreNed Are you insane? That's the only one worth watching, made by an actually talented filmmaker, not a shallow creatively bankrupt hack like JJ.
@tronam my guy the film doesn't even make sense with itself. All the last jedi did was take ideas from empire and did the exact opposite. It's not art. It's blatant plagiarism.
@@Usernamesdontmatter1 It's blatant plagiarism, but then did the exact opposite of what it plagiarized? You're not even making any sense, bro. JJ is the clueless moron who retrograded and killed off Han, my favorite character, and then stranded Luke on a BS mystery box island, shattering any and all hope for even a momentary reunion of the original trio. Equally egregious was inexplicably resurrecting Palpatine, completely robbing the cathartic victory and sacrificial redemption of Anakin at the end of RotJ. No filmmaker has done more to ruin both Star Wars *and* Star Trek than Abrams.
Over 400 million dollars burned for this. Meanwhile, countless PlayStation IPs are ignored. The shareholders need to go, and whoever else was responsible for this travesty. 😂😢
THEY COULD HAVE MADE ANYTHING ELSE!
Im sure whichever executive allowed this to happen will be given a few million dollar severance package and a more lucrative job elsewhere.
There should be a law that if something is not used within 15 years, it becomes public domain.
@@tuskedwings7453 because he probably made a lot of people a small fortune in the process. the shitstorm at the end is the next CEO's problem.
@@vincent207 you can, it's called abandonment. it can be considered abandonment of your copyright/trademark/IP if you don't use it for too long or fail to protect it. a lot of the reason companies release small projects related to small IPs, even completely unrelated projects with the same name, is to protect it from abandonment. same thing for suing for every small infringement, even if they are expected to lose the lawsuit, because the law expect them to protect their property with the risk of losing it.
Incredibly sad what they could have used those hundreds of millions for instead of making this
Think of the yachts they will never own! 😢 THE YACHTS!!! 😭😭😭
@brandonedlin2052 Man even the CEOs buying a yatch yields less of a loss then what Concord did. I rather of them of bought a Sony yatch vs 8 years and 400million burned to a crisp.... Now people either way are also probably going to loss there jobs over this as well and nothing came out of those funds that probably could of even revived more then one old franchise and actually make profit with that cash. These live service games are such a gamble vs what Nintendo does, proper games and exclusives, proper system, and proper value, and I dislike what Nintendo does sometimes but at least it makes financal sence.
botted the comment sections award
Could've been a laundering scheme, or an OP lol
True
ghost of tsushima took 6 years to develop and had 160 developers it cost 60 million dollars and it was developed at the same place as Concord
I just want to say, as someone who thoroughly enjoyed Horizon, I _do not want_ a live-service game in that universe. I mean, Sony, you do you... but I'm not buying it.
Amen bro. Preach on.
@@ahettinger525 I can't even imagine how bad that would look like
@Nate-bd8fg It would likely have season passes with themed and colored machine mounts or something weird like that
Concord
- ongoing cost for millions just to keep finishing it
- 200 million before alpha started, another 200 to finish it
- outsourced 2 years before to get it out and finished
- 400 million budget
- no word on til alpha : onboarding and monetization, 2 years before release
- Sony's biggest lost so far
- TLOU 220 mil, SM3 350 mil, this cost more
- about 1mil of that 400 mil made back
- championed behind the scene as "star wars" levels of Sony
- "the future of Sony"
- code name : Chaos
- Toxic Positivity - couldn't critique or call it out, not allowed
- echo chamber, character design issues ignored, attacked, vitriol
- Concord episode before Condord was even released from Amazon "secret level"
- tone deaf cart before the horse
They didn't make anything back because they had to refund the games, since they're no longer providing access to it. They might've kept some money in the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, if they're lucky. Truthfully, many of the points in what happened make very little sense. I wouldn't be surprised if, beyond the incompetence, there was an underlying layer of guile. The people working on that game walked away with a lot of money regardless of the outcome.
@@slimeplort and that's the problem. It isn't that Sony lost a lot of money on this 💩, it is that so many people made more money than many others that made a better product.
Why should the industry change when it is just shelling out blank checks to soothsayers that make money off of lies and grifts?
You got one point wrong: "- about 1mil of that 400 mil made back"
This is false. Sony refunded everyone. In other words they didn't even get the 1 million back. And even if they did get that 1 million dollars, that's gross revenue, in other words it's not taking into account Steam's cut of the sales nor other production costs that would eat into the gross profit. But they still had to pay Steam and for the production costs so they lost even more money producing it too.
They refunded it to everyone to fill it as a tax writeoff.
They are making more money from concord by refunding it and making it disappear than keeping the few sales revenue they got.
dude, i didn't see a single piece of marketing for Concord. I literally didn't know about it until i heard it had failed. I've known about every single other major release months before they dropped, if not years before. This game had NO marketing. There was no hype. If anything it felt like someone was paying to push the narrative that it was dead in the water. And they cut the live servers TWO WEEKS AFTER RELEASE. I've never seen that before. All i can think to say is that someone critical actively wanted this thing to fail. Where did the money go? It didn't look like it got spent on the game.
At the end of the day, the developers get the flak, and the CEO swans off into retirement with tens of millions in bonuses while the shareholders are protected from any losses, despite being the people who likely pushed all the decisions that caused this game to fail.
"the shareholders are protected from any losses"
What are you saying? Shareholders are the very one who take a hit if something is wrong with how the company is run.
Shareholders take the loss. They aren't protected by failure.
The developers got paid for years to produce what ended up being nothing.
The shareholders are the only ones holding the bag. The devs and execs were paid.
Creators tried really hard not to design the characters as stereotypical tropes. A noble enough goal, problem is they went so hard for that at the expense of so much else they ended up with designs that don’t say or mean anything at all. Completely forgettable and communicate nothing about who or what a character is.
The most damning critique of concord I’ve seen is it kinda makes you appreciate the effort blizzard puts in for Overwatch.
I dont agree with you here. They blatantly followed some troupes.
What effort? Overwatch is every bit as terrible as Concord
Its good not to make characters stereotypical trops i feel the baby was thrown out with the bath water in this case they threw out character archetypes along with the stereotypes and while yes you shouldnt just stick to an archetype they can be useful as building blocks/starting point when making characters even if its to say 'well usually with a sniper you do X but why not try Y for this one'. Archetypes get knocked on a lot today but there is a reason certain things have become common archetypes they tend to be easy to understand and engage the audience and by ignoring the useful things there they as you said made very boring and forgettable characters.
@@Pr0m3th310us He didn't say that. He made a comparison between Concord and Overwatch. Concord is so bad that it LOOKS like Blizzard is putting in effort with Overwatch. He's saying both games are low effort, only that Concord is worse.
The thing is, stereotypes are actually very powerful tools if you know how to play around with it (to make unexpected little surprises) in your character building.
What Concord did was just lazy designing, staying away from the norm only for the sake of stay away from it in a checkboxes fasion, without giving them any depth and harmony as they stuff them all together.
And the ultra-realistic graphic didn't help either for such color-vibrant aesthetic and childish-behaving "adult" characters. Even CP2077 gets somewhat weirdly cartonish at times (even with such grim settings) because of how colorful things are in the designs.
To an extent you are basically arguing that the lunch platform for a space rocket isn't part of the cost of the rocket. Because it is not LITERALLY part of the rocket.
The building, the space, the extra people, the extra time. These are all costs relevant to the creation of the game.
So it was probably more like 300 million. It hardly matters. The GAME is still nearly 5 times over budget. And all to fund incompetent developers and vary good animators. To bad the animators were working on movies instead of the game.
this
@renmcmanus I agree, I can't remember anyone listing the numbers for food costs for anyone in space, and it's a vitally important statistic. All these costs are important, like you said.
@@YesThisIsCrass A vary good addition to my analogy.
It does matter if you care about business. Of course I know this is an audience of gamers who don't care but want to pretend to.
I mean, to be fair, you can REUSE the launch pad. So it cn be used for multiple launches. I mean you wouldn't consider buying a console part of the cost of a game because you use it for multiple games. If Firewalk makes a second game, do we still count the money Sony spent on in THAT budget?
The fact the game had over an 1 entire hour of credits, I can see how the game was just a money sink, to the point it looks like embezzlement
Glad to see they’re getting the day they deserve after Sony ran Hell divers into the ground with certain decisions
The game only really started dying after Sony chose to not enforce PSN thing and Arrowhead started making absolutely shitty changes.
If you believe Sony caused the Helldivers downturn, you’re misinformed.
tbh it was arrowheads fault that helldivers lost interest, they nerfed too much
@@byte-bg4ob Exactly. Thats why I stopped played. Same for a bunch of my friends. Game just didn’t feel good anymore. That was ALL on Arrowhead.
@@byte-bg4ob na the fall-off was when Sony forced there hand on the game and shut it down in multiple countries, the game never recovered from that pr nightmare and it was down hill from there
I think they nerfed the fun out of it. As much as I'd like to lay into Sony
Why do i feel like this will make Sony less likely to green light more risky projects.
Why? Concord was as low-risk as they could come up with. Another hero shooter in a market already deeply oversaturated. If anything, it makes the case for greenlighting MORE risky projects that have some originality
@@Synthonym the only lessons the game industry learns are the wrong ones
From the customer stand of point Concord was risky but for business people it was the most safest project ever. I can imagine the investors were wetting their pants when they heard a game was coming up with every character appealing to every demographic possible... by including none... For these people, the customers are an enigma, a black box. They have no idea what they are doing.
Hopefully the love for astrobot causes either the excecs or studio heads, to want to work with some of those IPs
Because it absolutely will. This was the Risky idea that they were willing to invest in. Now that it has failed so hard they will be forced to do something they feel is going to be guaranteed success, by investing in something mediocre but not too bad.
I think this video for me contained a bit too many actors, and I got lost. A few summaries or some diagrams would have helped me
May be a hot take, but personally, I don't think most AAA games need budgets higher than the majority of blockbuster films. If your video game is costing you so much that it can rival some of the highest budgeted movies of all time, then something is going wrong.
Bloated wages for the management, and poor management wasting money everywhere else.
Not a hot take. Both games and movies need to cost less than the modern studio movie budget.
The only games that can justify that budget are MMORPGs.
@@Rietto Well that and bloating development with ultra high definition textures that seem to exist mostly for the hardware partners to hock new GPUs. You're not wrong. But it's bloat in every direction.
Blockbuster movies are also getting more expensive. That Indiana Jones movie was like 400m. Everything's getting more expensive
TL;DW - the 400 million is a ballpark estimate of how much it cost to PUBLISH this game/studio across two seperate publishers, Sony did not spent 400m. Firewalk/Concord COST 400m across 8 years (and even then, part of that was going to other studios, and it included things like facilities)
Suggested that the real reason Sony bought Firewalk was 1. the track record of it's CEO seemed to indicate a winner, and 2. it has a lot of experienced developers who worked at Bungie they wanted to poach because Sony also owned bungie.
tl;dr = they blew it.
@@bologna3048I still don’t believe it. No way in hell this game costed that much. Unless more than half of that spending went to someone else’s pocket.
@@doctorsilva1345if you read the food TLDR up top and ignore the useless one you replied to, you understand that those 400m did not just go into the game and its devs. Nor was it all paid for by Sony.
Here's a very simple breakdown to understand how quickly costs build up. You pay 5 developers $100k for 2 years and that's 1m dollars. Just the programmers, not the artists, sound designers, HR, PR, designers, writers, etc. It grows quickly. Then you add a lot more for marketing. Then more for stuff like an office space and tech and software and server racks. It all adds up, especially over 8 years.
So how is Bungie doing these days?
I mean is it really Bungie without Jason Jones, Marcus Lehto, and Marty O'Donnell?
Well I guess legally yes, but not really.
"No game has that dev budget." Star Citizen would like a word. Although that's less a "game" and more a dumpster fire of dreams, incompetence, lies and embezzlement.
Hard to believe they've put all that money into the game, and it's still not finished. Talk about a system to steal money they sure did it.
400 million dollars in 8 years and I have not seen 1 ad or any mentions of this game EVER. I got nothing about this game before the last 2 weeks and when I started hearing about this, it was nothing but complaints . Real sloppy if you ask me.
The thing is
If you did see an ad for it you wouldnt remember
They showed it in the not-E3 as their biggest reveal with a looping cinematic that nobody liked because it was boring and dragged out.
After it was revealed it was, indeed, a hero shooter it started getting flak so I guess marketing decided to let it cool off before revving up the machine.
Thing is, the closed Beta was so disastrous that they scrapped an open beta quickly and then accelerated the release date, guess to stop bleeding money.
Looooong cinematic, autocorrect put looping for some reason
they literally lost 400 million straight up. How incompetent do you need to be to lose that much on project everybody else can figure out in 5 minutes that it's DOA?
I'd like to remind you that Dragon Age: Veilguard is coming out and the devs/publishers still *learned nothing*
They really believe that DEI crap will sell.
They are in an ideological cult.
They are gonna get eaten alive in the investor meetings
From what I heard, the people working at bioware are praying for a bust. Not because of DEI but the way projects are managed.
@@Nurix09 it has nothing to do with DEI, as much as you want to. those projects are still mostly ran by white men working with other white men. and the minorities characters was the least problem of the game.
The CEO is out there disputing the $400M figure. It doesn’t matter what the number was. Whatever this game cost to make it was too much.
The only way it wouldn’t be “too much” would be if it was $400
But you can’t stretch $400 across 8 years (that’s about $50 a year)
You can say It doesn't, but Idk why you'd go to a video like this arguing about the cost of you don't care. Others do.
At least no man's sky turned it around after a few years.
Can't turn around an ideology that pervades the entire development team
What ideology?
Inb4 he says it's wokeness, DEI or some other reactionary pavlovian whistle
@@calisto789An extreme case of self-righteousness and pretentiousness. Total refusal to listen to any criticism, insulting anyone who did it.
Their way of acting is a form of zealotry, only worshipping an idea instead of deity. The idea that only they are right, everyone else is wrong and lesser than them for that.
@@kokorochacarero8003 are you one of the 700 peak players?
@@kraosdadafusfus8034LOL, the worst people I’ve ever met worship a deity
This is one of the best explanations for this kind of finance / business structure stuff I've seen in reporting targeting the general public. Great job.
Don't worry everyone Sony lost $400+ Million on Concord, but atleast they made $100 Million from Blackrock. That was worth it, right?
You mean at best 5 million
@@calisto789 I do wonder about that.
Sony can make it back with all the amazing headphones 🤑
You mean they OWE $100 Million to Blackrock for interest.
@@aliensounddigital8729 Na, it's priced into the PS5 Pro
It doesn't matter if it's 100, 200, or 400 million, it's still the biggest failure of all time regardless. Unlaunched in less than two weeks, and the laughing stock of the gaming industry as well as gamers. Concord jokes will never stop being funny. I can see some people on Twitter are trying to cope, but they will need a bigger canister of copium.
It would be nice if, whenever you quote something, you actually quoted correctly, verbatim, without shuffling words around. The order of words can be important for emphasis or meaning. Thus you quoting correctly when reporting on something is important.
Exactly. The details are everything
"the way the industry works" is a wonderful excuse. the industry "works" this way because of a mindset, one not based on facts but dogma based on perception. it comes down to the executives - the same executives who were not hired on applicable merit and who chose, and continue to choose, to make product decisions that are extremely contrary to customer goodwill and fiduciary responsibility. these executives are entirely divorced from any actual knowledge of the company who hired them, the products their companies make, and the customers who by their customers. their decisions are not based on actual research or any real attempt at actual understanding the situation in which their company or industry is in. these executives, every last one of them, need to be removed before any improvement can occur. this applies to sony and all other companies in every single industry...
Yep. This is called _"modern management"_ and that's the best catalyst that capitalists can think of when they want to spread their toxic deadly ideology to every domain that can generate profit.
Yeah, that's how the industry works. People with money make decisions, no matter how little they know.
Maybe in 30 years when the executives are ones who grew up with modern games and didn't at best play Mario or Tetris we'd at least get someone familiar with AAA games in the big seats. But who knows?
"...they pioneered it [live service]"
Destiny release date: 2014
Warframe release date: 2013
World of Tanks: 2011
No, no they did not. And you should not credit them for doing so.
@@greyed Warframe is the best live service and has been around for 11 years and I'm surprised it's now getting clones lol 😆
And before live service, you had MMOs which, at least production wise, is an ancestor. So there are plenty of devs and lots of experience in continuous development- just no one seems to be listening because they seem to want to reinvent the wheel and do things their own way
@@PhotonBeast Oh yeah. Asheron's Call released in '99 and had monthly content drops for most of its run.
@greyed Yup! And you have non-video game examples like Magic and Warhammer which, conceptually, share similar principles of constant engagement and the like. All these older examples show that creating a hobby that people love will result in people spending money on the thing they love and have formed bonds with and in.
The irony is all they'd have to do to recoup this lost fortune is bring Bloodborne to PC and remove the PSN requirement for their PC ports and yet they'll never do it bc Sony is run by morons and enslaved by greedy shortsighted shareholders . So glad I'm a PC gamer.
Do we know what the actual reasons for Bloodborne not coming to PC, let alone giving it a 60fps update on console? Does it have anything to do with Fromsoft or is it for a fact just Sony being braindead?
@@anonymous_2223 probably the latter, so I've heard. Apparently Hidetaka Miyazaki said it's up to Sony.
@@anonymous_2223 Because Sony don't want to. A bunch of people have already got it running on PC 60fps with higher quality textures. So I'm pretty sure a company with Billions in capital can do much more than that.
@@anonymous_2223 I only can speak for the FPS. The Bloodborne physics engine is directly linked to FPS count. If this limit is removed without redesigning the physics engine to be able to accept 60 fps a lot of this would break. It is not like it can't be done but the change would cost money. Current FromSoftware Inc. games are capped at a 60 fps cap. I only guess the Bloodborne is on 30 fps because of the capabilities of the PS4 APU.
FromSoftware caps their games at this time at 60fps because their game engines tie physics and animations to the frame rate, which can break if it goes higher. They aim for stable performance on all platforms and keep the gameplay consistent, ensuring combat remains precise. Prioritizing stability over higher frame rates helps prevent stuttering and other issues that could affect the experience. More inclusive answer why they are engine behave that way.
nah, no one on pc is going to buy it, the minute it's cracked there's going to be 0 sales.
Meanwhile Valve has an unreleased Alpha that's getting 100k concurrent players that none of us have paid for and the game is amazing. 😂
Tbf it might actually be F2P and Valve will just profit from Steam Marketplace. They are in a very unique position of how they can monetize the few games they make.
I even got an invite and I basically live under a rock when it comes to popular multiplayer games. I have also found it surprisingly accessible compared to more traditional MOBAs. IMO Valve haven't lost their touch as Devs.
And it has GENUINELY GOOD diversity, i.e. it doesn't come at the cost of character design.
When I want diversity and representation, I want characters like Ivy.
@@RaptieFeathers she's a sassy Latina from the Bronx! Love Ivy, been running two different builds for her, so far really enjoying the ammo dump build.
Jim Ryan leaving makes more sense each time. He knew that he fked hard.
My search for the modern audience continues.
Who are they making games for? Will we ever find out?
I don't get this talk of "modern audience"... it obviously exists and other games were successful with it. As you can see younger people are also playing video games.
@@octavianpopescu4776 "modern audience" does not mean younger people like you asume.
For corporation, they use that term to market that their products are for "everyone", the DEI things, also to raise their ESG score.
The "modern audience" exist thought, they are on Twitter (well, X now) to advocate their belief about diversity, inclusion, etc. The thing is: most of them aren't paying customer
@@octavianpopescu4776 Other games who don't pander to "modern audience" succeed. For example, Blackmyth Wukong. No FORCED diversity, no ideology shoved down our throat, no forced defeminization of female characters, no demonization of straight white male (and I'm saying this as an Asian woman), no insulting your customer, just some fun monke action.
@@i_like_lemons Overwatch, Valorant, Baldur's Gate 3, Last of Us 2... making money but it doesnt fit your narrative.
At the end of the day its simpler: bad games are bad games. But that common sense narrative doesnt work when all you wanna do is cry and rage.
It's worrying to me that so many people had to be involved, so much money was riding on the project and somehow, no one with any pull at least, was like "These designs are awful and bland", no one realized they were just making a worse looking Overwatch/Guardians of the Galaxy? It's baffling when a project has so much money pumped into it, seemingly has so much riding on its success, but it was so obviously going to fail to anyone with eyes. With that much money, toxic positivity shouldn't even be a thing, even fast food places have some frigid higher up that comes in and nitpicks everything. How did they not have someone harsh with power go "WTF is this? Fix it NOW!" in almost a decade?
@@mismismism the long short of it was toxic positivity. Multiple sources say you weren’t allowed to say anything bad about it as per the NDA contract they signed. Honestly it was also run by a bunch of activists too up in their butt to see everything wrong about it. Especially the cost, another thing is how many people working on it. It’s literally an hour long credit for everyone who helped made it.
because the game was basically a venture capitalist bubble. the idea wasn't to make a good game, the idea was to make a huge project to attract investment. that is why the toxic positivity is key here, because if they make it look like the project is going to hell then everything fall apart.
as for the designs, I believe it's a issue of "too many cooks in the kitchen". because if you look at the concept art, the cell shading animations, and finally the final product, it's like each team had a different vision of how the game was supposed to look like. the concept arts seemed to look great, the designs fit incredibly well for the cartoony cell shading style, but then they just made them photorealistic for the game without thinking if the designs fit the aesthetics.
When you have an employee that demanding she be called 'the professor' even though she doesn't have a doctorate, and got people fired for refusing it's not exactly a shocker the game ended up the way it did.
@@MediocreNed That's yet another baffling lack of oversight. If I'm someone on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, there is no employee that should be getting away with being a liability like that. But even that aside, no one with hold over the purse strings could see that this was a mess that whole time? Because this had to involve a lot of people, no one problematic employee can cause this and get it greenlit in the state it was in, a lot of people needed to fumble spectacularly for no one to get called out for failing at stuff so basic as having good looking designs in a hero shooter.
@@danilooliveira6580 I could get that if it was down to something only gamers could have issues with like mechanics, but just objectively, even if this was a movie, those designs look horrible. I do not understand how any business person or person with power at Sony, could get behind this and not even just look at it. You're investing in a hero shooter and they apparently didn't even google a single existing one to get the bare minimum idea of WTF the assignment was, none of them apparently showed just one kid, not even a kid, 1 random person on the street could look at these characters and said they look bad or uninteresting.
It's baffling is how glaringly obvious it was that this was a massive failure. It's like me running a burger place and showing the investors a gross, raw burger with moldy bread and somehow convincing them that it will be a hit because they don't eat fast food. It's too blatant.
Eight years in development is 50million per year. And that number is in line with development costs.
Concord product managers and art directors investigated themselves and found no wrongdoing.
The $400m figure I'm skeptical of. Maybe they mean when you add it all up (including the purchase of the studio) it comes close to that figure? Idk
I could really make use of that 0.1% from 400 million dollars though
This was a great deep dive and super insightful and informative. 😊
I'm ready for 'toxic positivity' to enter the regular vernacular. That is a big problem in our world today.
The credits for the Lord of the Rings The return of the king is the one of the longest credits in movies (even longer than star wars that are movies from 2 to 3 hours full of CGI and effects) which was over 20 minutes because they added all the fans.
The credits for Concord last for over 75 minutes (most of them have no experience previously to this project) and they barely made 5 Maps and 16 characters.
We could've gotten a new Killzone game for that 400 mil.
I think its funny that I've seen more on why Concord was a flop then any ads, news bits or information for it.
The industry just needs to go back to making games that challenge gamers' minds and skills in truly novel ways. They can be scrappy with just workable graphics - and if it's fun, that's value. It's.. not that hard. Suits need to get their heads out of their asses and try to maximize quality or Concord-like situations are *increasingly likely*
But the untapped audience of people who don't want to be challenged, and just want to spend money on microtransactions.
The biggest selling games do the opposite of that. So that's what studios will chase.
Games are like movies. It been done a million times. Just like this game it looks actually like every shooter. What new can they come up with? Nothing. There's not been one thing new in a shooter for 10+ years. They may look nicer, but the cord play hasn't changed at all. Why a new one of these game sells one unit is shocking. If you play shooters, you already played any new shooter that comes out. They are all boring clones of each other.
When every game has a GTAV budget but only one game has GTAV sales your industry is in trouble.
Tbf, I wouldn't be surprised if GTA has like a billion dollar+ budget. So we're pretty far from that level.
Of course, GTA will still make that back day 1, and then make millions a month on GTA6 online. So they can justify it. No one else has really put that kind of power into their IP except COD, WOW, and the biggest Nintendo IP's.
@@raze2012_GTA V budget was $265M.
I'm intrigued by the IP. A little bit of a polish and a touch up and maybe make it like a Ratchet & Clank style story with tall people, scarier weapons and you'd have a fun game. I think they could keep the zig-zag cords aesthetic even for shield-generators too and similar and just double down on it and yeah, game!
Imagine all the bloodborne games we could have gotten with 400 million.
"Too many cooks spoils the broth in preproduction" so true
It's the Pitchford Dilemma, similar to how Randy Pitchford embezzled the money he got from fox to make Colonial Marines and put it all into Borderlands 2.
It sounds more like 500+ million lost tbh. I didn’t know the vr funding was so expensive.
Jack Ryan lit this bag of shit on the front porch and never looked back.
The sad thing is - I'm not sure that they care as long as the stock price is ok. Which it is.
If I was running Bioware, I'd try poaching the person who did the facial animation for Concord. That has long been a problem for Bioware, and the facial animation for Concord was better than 95% of the AAA games I've seen. With Concord getting pulled so quickly the whole development crew has to be nervous about their current employment, so they might be very receptive to a reasonable offer.
"Sir, what budget did you have in mind?"
Director: *Double it and give it to the next person*
"What?"
Maybe they should have researched if Sony players would even be interested in live service games, a questionnaire wouldn't have gone amiss
It's not "personal truth," it's "what they believe to be true"
A shame Immortals of Aveum didnt do too well. The background looked AMAZING
I'm still trying to figure out where the money went... doesn't seem like it went towards development.
Watch the video, it gives ideas of how it breaks down for AAA games.
All I'm gonna say is that this wouldn't have happened if they made another WipEout game.
god i miss wipeout. Best racing game EVER
Reflective Objectivity > Toxic Positivity
I was under the impression that the $200m number was Sony's total cost not including the acquisition money, and that the fucky math was coming from someone rolling the acquisition money and the pre-Sony dev costs together which involves some double-dipping. The more accurate number is $200m + Sony's cash outlay for the acquisition, and I don't believe for a second that totals out at $400m. Probably in the $250-300m range.
Regardless, the key takeaway is that Sony has no business being involved in the decision making process of any multilplayer game. They've thoroughly demonstrated in recent years that they have no clue what they're doing in that arena.
One of the Concord devs DEMANDED to be called 'Professor' despite not having any of the credentials, and would get INCREDIBLY upset when if it didn't happen. If that's not a red flag, I don't know what is.
You know at least one person at Sony mentioned the character design, beta testes, Q and A, literally anyone they showed the game to had to have mentioned it. And whoever was in charge brushed it off as people being haters.
Bellular over here running damage control 😂😂😂
"their truth"
A grown man not understanding that truth isn't subjective is very concerning.
It's 2024. The truth is whatever the internet says it is now
It's just a phrase. "Your truth" means "whatever you genuinely perceive to be reality." It's a belief. He's not saying all the conflicting claims are literally true.
The idea is that the people giving their own reports, disputes, etc., are all operating under the belief that their conclusion is the truth based on their own sources.
He's simply saying that he's not here to call anyone a liar, and doesn't want the video to be perceived as him assuming bad faith. He's only here to bring to bring in his own perspective and try to reason out the plausibilty of the story we've been fed.
Postmodernism?
You're thinking of fact, not truth.
@@SurzhenkoAndrii"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." - some postmodernist, probably.
Just kidding, it's from "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius.
I never heard of Concord until after it was canceled. I honestly wish I could have tried it.
Man, employees at Firewalk must be eat good for eight years. If we assume that 50 million a year distributed evenly and fairly for all workers and employees.
If there’s any silver lining to this, at least Firewalk likely won’t get fired if Song follows through and lets them help Bungie with Marathon.
@@duncanw5644 as a marathon fan, they better not. If they do, i only guarantee that marathon will be complete crap.
Bad enough i have to see one of my favorite franchises as a child ruined by the game not being a good single player experience, i have to see it turned into a generic modern shooter….now i have to think it may be turned into a generic modern shooter where im forced to play only characters I cannot remotely bring myself to like that are fugly.
@@laughingalex7563 Bungie is going to keep creative control though… Firewalk will literally just be extra hands for Bungie in developing Marathon (which they desperately need)
Good video, weird question. Why does it look like this guy is a robot running an exe everytime he blinks. It's like he's physically forcing himself to blink and it takes a second too long. Once I noticed I couldn't stop lol
I just can't with these character designs, the gorilla guy has nipples on his back and the robot is literally just a walking vacuum. Like lmfao.
The cutscenes cost $390M, the rest of the game cost $10M.
“I condensed down the 8 min discussion in the podcast” then proceeds to talk showing he listened to nothing besides the text on the tweet
So much yapping in these vids, most of it useless noise.
I gotta be real. I actually barely understood a fucking thing except that american videogame companies try to businesses and japan videogame companies try to make videogames
Colin Moriarity is not a good reference, and you should take everything he says with a grain of salt. That being said, I do think that them not receiving good feedback (willingly or not) is one of the reasons for the failure of Concord.
The biggest issue was the character designs. They all look super lame. And that matters A LOT when the game is just pvp. Then the nail in the coffin was the lame mini revela trailer, which made it look generic and forced. Those two killed the game. Doesnt matter how good the gameplay is or graphics are.
I just wish not so many games were being made for next to non existent audiences... the wasted potential.
What do you mean by this?
@@RaptieFeathers he means the so called "modern audience" i guess.
I'm so sick of the "saturated markets" narrative. Just. Make a good game. There are so many holes in the market. Particularly with hero shooters. Everyone acts like there are hundreds of popular hero shooters. I dont see them? There's Overwatch. I guess you could say valorant but its such a different thing. Deadlock now. I want more good hero shooters. Its a starved market. Not oversaturated.
Should have just brought everyone in the US a big mac, they'd saved themselves millions and it probably would have lasted longer
amazing how people think the next star wars will just fall into their lap lol
So this game made about the same amount of money as the GTA6 trailer on UA-cam? Very impressive.
After seeing everything Sony has done this year in gaming I do NOT think they will be able to "save" the crumbling Destiny franchise Bungie developed. I know a lot of people hold out hope that Destiny can be brought back into the spotlight with all of Sony's resources, etc, but the whole debacle with Hell Divers 2 earlier this year and now with this major launch failure of Concord I just don't see it happening. Sony is kind of just eating shit right now and the launch of a PS5 Pro for $700 without the stand included was just icing on the cake for me to stop giving them the benefit of doubt and/or blindly believing that they got that Midas touch in the gaming space these days.
This is a good example of what happens when "new talent" is removed from the pipeline leaving no career growth in the industry and no one to optomize the overall workflow to make sure a product doesnt end up "never ready"
Is it just me or does the audio notably get a touch louder at the beginning of the sponsored segment?
Lets face it, Marathon has been destined to fail from it's inception.
How in the blue hells did a 5v5 hero shooter without a single player story campaign with motion captured cinematics and high-profile voice actors balloon to a budget of 350 million USD? That is squarely in the production budget of big tent pole Hollywood summer blockbuster films! If I'm at Sony, I'm seriously rethinking video game development going forward.
Tester to CEO pipeline ? My man is the Dave McKay of game development.
It's insane to me how anyone thought Concord was gonna be a hit
All that matters is the return in the end and either way you look at it, they spent $200 million or $400 million the end result is the same, they didn't even see a 1% return on the game. $400 million was spent on this game, the studio spent 200 and Sony 200 on buying the studio which means they would've had to sell 10 million copies just to break even and you know Sony wants 2-3 times the return, so a possible 30 million. Elden Ring is made by a known and loved studio and it didn't even make 30 million copies. How in the fuck did they ever think this was going to succeed?
Edit: Btw Concord sold 25,000 copies.
OK, this makes no sense to me. Sony brought the Firewalk studio for $200 mil in April 2023 so they managed to spend another $200 million on the game in 16 months?
Sony brought Insomniac Studio in 2019 for $229 mil, which had several hits and the best selling Spider Man.
Firewalk made nothing before Concord
8 years.... $400M.... DELETED IN 2 WEEKS. Just WOW. This should be studied by business, art, and technical professions alike. What a spectacular failure.
Personal truth isnt a thing. Either you're right or wrong. Doesn't matter what you think is right
True
You have a very limited understanding of the world
@@danielsmokesmids Personal truth is a lame attempt to make an opinion sound more important than it is.
All we need to do is page through Sony's financial's to find out how much it cost. I don't know if they reported the quarter concord was in because I haven't been an investor in a few years but I'm zure I'll get to it eventually.
hey man love the content but out of topic the audio is need fixing, sometimes low sometimes loud.
good luck
Sorry for the developers, deserved for sony
Every inch of this game was Live Service Hero Shooter Product, and I'll bet a dollar to a bent dime that that's exactly what the executives demanded.
You should bet 400mil with Sony.They'd take the bet.
I read comments like "Burned money". Guys, that money went into paying the devs. The artists, programmers, testers, everyone involved in the game!!! It is NOT burned money. The only problem is, the invested money did not bring a good result. That happens all the time in so many areas. Why so much hate. People got paid, did their job and moved onto working for someone else. I read so many comments about low wages, and exploits on working people. So maybe this was the case where the paid them well. And the large bill is the result of that. I think it's all good here. Those money were not burned, stolen or something like that.
The people who designed those characters probably had well paying jobs ... for almost a decade.
You know, I'd call that financial success for individuals who may not have deserved it.
Wild how Sony could revive a number of franchises to get into the markets they're trying to get into. It's like they forgot MAG, SOCOM, Resistance, Killzone, and Warhawk/Starhawk. They could easily get into the FPS or TPS market without gambling on untested studios who can only say they have an idea and some staff worked on other games before.
400m for 700 players. Definitely they underspent. They could have got 100k “modern users” on launch if spending 50 trillions.