I work at a game store. Last week I had the honor of putting it out on the shelves. Today I had the honor of taking them off. Thankfully we did not sell a single copy
Admittedly they did also produce 4 million copies...which was more than people who actually owned the Atari at the time, like they banked on people buying 2 copies. Also ET still *nearly* killed the NA video game console market which is thankfully not something Concord can say...
I would pay to be a fly on the wall when the executives made this decision. I hope Astrobot breaks all expectations just to really send the message home.
Funnily enough, there's already a thing called the Concorde Fallacy (aka Sunken Cost fallacy), which suits Concord's launch pretty well. "The Concorde fallacy is a mental bias where people continue spending resources (money, time, or effort) on failing projects because of a prior commitment." Based off the British government sinking huge amounts of money into an already obsolete airplane project. And Sony is 8 years late to the party and way over budget.
Oh yeah. All the people making these dumb AAA industry decisions would rather shove a 20-foot-tall cactus down their throats than actually learn from their mistakes.
Like how there clearly aren't enough widely appealing characters, which hurt the game's mass market appeal. So the clear step going forward is to make *more* regular humans with *even more* bland and tepid personalities, which will allow them to make all of the money in the world Please, dear Apollo in the heavens, please don't make this a very clear joke age badly
@@Boulder7685Thia game's faliure can be attributed to either (or both) a rejection of live service slop, or a rejection of "wokeness". If Concord returns with all the charachters looking like Nathan Drake, then we'll know what lesson they took.
Oh yeah, forensics taught us this. Concord's corpse is definitely cold, though, so any flies using it to complete a life cycle on it will take longer...
@@DANBAN119 when I saw that name on the trailer I said, "where's that familiar from..." Then I remembered this game. How are these so similar it's crazy 🤣
The lesson Sony should learn from this: Return to making single-player games. The lesson the greedy executives will probably learn from this: Time to double down on live service hero shooters!
How will they think that!? It was a ridicoulously obvious failure... You'll have to be either Really fucking stupid or Insane to take that as a lesson!
Imagine working 8 years on this game that is only meant to chase trends and by the time it comes out, it’s in an oversaturated market that doesn’t want this type of game anymore…and this is the end result.
The market was oversaturated when overwatch released. Who remembers Paladins? Who remembers Battleborn? The market had room for exactly one team-based character shooter and overwatch won that crown.
I think the thing that made me laugh about this wasn't even from Sony or the game itself, but it was a tweet I saw shortly after the Concord news and it was a post card from the new Mario & Luigi game that said,"Welcome to Concordia!" The timing was perfect lol
This follows a funny case of an incompetant boat captain who once crashed a boat called the Costa Concordia worth 600M or so. The name is cursed at this point.
Captain Schettino 😂 the only captain who is the first to leave 😂 anyway sweet baby Inc is similar indeed, they make every company sink then go away before going down
One could point to Flight of the Concords, which was a great show from what I saw, though the premise did focus around on their band being mostly unsuccessful, so as far as the name itself goes...
When I was a kid, my parents would take me to the Chinatown street markets where I could pick out a toy. The vendors never had the first run action figures-the GI Joes, the X-Men, the DC heroes. No, they had “Fire Man,” a weird hybrid of Spider-Man’s plastic toy model and a firefighter outfit, with Spider-Man on the box art putting out a fire with webs. Or “Army Recruit,” which was just a He-Man with recolored hair and legs and a flesh-colored harness so he looked vaguely like shirtless Rambo. This game looks like the knockoff brand of Guardians of the Galaxy turned into game characters. Why did they make them super realistic and not cartoony? Why did they give them awful colors and outfits? Did they EVER have focus testing on the character models? I don’t think so! Nobody likes Jaundice Lord or Trash Bot or Giant Papa Smurf. They’re awful. Just awful.
the design got approved because it's non-cliche when compared to early 2000s character design (which is full of military, spy, etc)... I don't know the agenda behind it, but conflicts such as War might affect the decision. Also, DEI is a dead topic. Which is why the media try to "innovate" it with different color and more extreme approach (I mean Dustborn exists, a complete embarrassment).
Imagine spending 8 years toiling away on a game for it to be taken down within 2 weeks. Genuinely impressive move by Sony to pour so much money into the black hole that is “making something nobody wants.”
Surely it was a front for money laundering, surely they didn't think this aberration would be a success, they had 8 years to correct their mistake, how did they not notice all the flaws in their game? So that's why I'm telling myself they can't be that incompetent, they knew it was gonna crash and burn and were just money laundering for all those years.
kusoyny wanted 'all the money' (TM) and they *got it .* There - ALL the moneys with prawnouns from their alleged "modern audience" ... Can't cry now! HAHA HA HA HAH !!
I genuinely feel bad for the game designers who worked hard on this. Crunched and underpaid like these companies are know to do, to then not even get the satisfaction of having people being happy to play the game they worked on.
If you think Sony is woke, you don't understand Sony, capitalism, or wokeness @@metarugia3981 This is simply a very late move into the market that the game design doc required 8 years ago
By issuing refunds, Sony is likely going to try to make Concord a tax write-off. They likely view whatever fraction of the cost of Concord's total budget they can save by paying less in taxes is going to be way more than the game will ever make. I would not expect it to return as a free to play title either, as in order to get the tax write-off, they can not do anything with Concord that could generate any revenue in the future. This is easily the biggest financial flop in gaming history.
they are already minus 200m i dont think the refunds amount to anything relevant in that scope, tax writeoffs occur any time you loose money anyway, you win money you pay, you loose you dont pay, so yah a tax writeoff but you still lost 200m - Whatever taxes are on 200m.
The stunning thing I noticed in PlayStation's blog post is that it doesn't promise the game is coming back. It says they'll "explore options" and "determine the best path ahead" but nowhere does it even suggest that the game is coming back. The possibility that it never comes back is very much on the table here.
@@TheNucaKola its not an "if" every loss is a tax write off, so if you loose 200m you are getting the tax of 200m as tax write offs (since you really spent that money and lost it) everything a company buys or loose is a tax write off and unless concord somehow manage to make more than 200m concord is a huge tax write off, a very costly one.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr's Journey, the second worst-selling Mario game of all time that also resulted in the bankruptcy of a studio, has sold more in Japan alone than the predicted amount that Concord sold. This flop is so extreme that it's almost impressive.
Alpha dreams had economic problems prior to that game, that game was just a glimmer of hope as it was a beloved entry and a favorite among the fans, that's why they released that remake instead of partners in time, but it didn't work as expected and it didn't save them from their imminent bankruptcy.
In early 2025 we need to talk like we were unfair to Concord. We need to make memes and get it trending on social media. And then when Sony pushes it out again based on hype, WE MAKE IT FLOP AGAIN. We need to MORBIUS this game!
I work fulfillment at a retailer, meaning I basically do people’s shopping for them. The other day, I had to pick a copy of this game for a cart. When it came time to pack the disc and ship it out, I got an error message saying it had been recalled and I could not package it. This was the first and only time I’ve ever encountered anything like that, so it, needless to say, confused the crap out of me. Lo and behold, now I’m seeing loads of UA-cam videos discussing the utter failure of Concord and can’t help but laugh that I obliviously held what may be the biggest flop in gaming history in my own hands
People sometimes say "can you think of a game that flopped worse than this" and the discussion ends up going to things like "Too Human (2008) had the US judicial system order all copies recalled and destroyed" and when THAT'S the yardstick of comparison you know you're in bad territory.
Just looked "Too Human" up. Shame it was killed, looked kinda cool. Maybe a little too ahead of its time, but the sequels definitely would've been rad.
@@polarknight5376 It was fairly fun. It was Sci-Fi Diablo in a time before micro transactions. It was honestly the first ARPG that I played through to the end because it wasn't a grind fest either.
With this colossal failure, people might once again ask "Will these companies FINALLY make smaller games with worse graphics?" At this point, I think these companies will legitimately pursue money laundering before even attempting to acknowledge that as a business model. It's sad.
I think the issue is the smaller games with worse graphics may be what the market wants, but it won't do "investor happy" numbers, which is why they still won't do it.
Funny how it seems like this generation of non-Nintendo AAA has pretty much ended up being defined by the failures of "maybe if we pretend this is what people want hard enough they'll buy it" projects.
@@just_an_elli true. I feel like Aces was the only Mario Sports improvement from its predecessor, though to be fair, it’s hard to be worse than Ultra Smash. But Super Rush and Battle League get no excuse, especially with the whole “more content after release”, which was clearly done to compensate for releasing a half-baked game. Nintendo’s been killing it this generation, but the Mario Sports have been a huge fumble for them.
We had gollum last year, suicide squad at the start of this year, and now dustborn and concord. Concord's failure isn't special, it's rote. The industry is garbage, led by people who don't even know why games sell, fueled by the blind pursuit of number-go-up because they're hopeless addicts. This isn't unique, and it will happen again because human incompetence brought us to this point.
@TyrantWesker Another noteworthy thing about that game is that it was funded by Norwegian and EU taxpayers. To see tax money going towards THAT is wild. I'm sure there were better things to spend that money on.
@@EmiCheese Its the latest punching bag of all those culture war slop channels. I've never seen any ad for it anywhere so as usual they're just fearmongering over litteraly nothing. Ironically they're basically giving it free publicity.
The irony is, that even bad games can sort of succeed over a long period of time if they aren't live service. Eventually, you might pick up enough sales to keep from being a humongous loss. But if you go live service, there is a point where you cannot sustain yourself, and that you cannot recover from without a miracle. Concord hit that point before it even launched.
Live Service games are in a unique position that they pretty much have to knock it out the park on launch. You don't get to let the game slowly build, you need players and they need to be enjoying themselves. You need enough content to sustain people until your first content update and you can't be buggy, because that will delay that content until you fix your game, which will be losing players.
@@DragonNexus What's sad is that doesn't have to be that way, necessarily. EVE Online is a live service game before the hideous corporate term 'live service game' was invented. It has a long tail, as a living game that constantly grew and built itself over time. Path of Exile is a live service game. The difference is the people who make those games want to make a game, and have a dream for what they one day can be. They're not completely 100% motivated by profit and nothing else. It's the capital profit motive that forces these things to be like this. 'Build something small and grow it' is completely anathema to these psycho gambling freaks. They don't see themselves in the business of growing trees or cultivating a garden, they're number goblins yanking on the arm of a slot machine hoping to get free money without having to personally do anything to earn it. Since people like that are in charge and have all the money, of COURSE AAA media will be like that. Genshin Impact and World of Warcraft didn't come out of nowhere. They were companies that built many games and fanbases, that led up to their big hit.
Basically "The Room effect" a movie, even if its bad could lead to sales in the right exposure. If it's solely on streaming, it's less likely to be viewed.
What's funny to me about all this is there was a lesser known turnbased moba game called Atlas Reactor. Its gameplay was great, I genuinely loved it, but it was a big flop and got shutdown a few seasons in and they had SUCH SIMILAR CGI TRAILERS! Fighting over a briefcase, "Marvel" writing, no-one in any danger despite everyone shooting eachother, sci-fi city, flying ships, and to top it all off, in Atlas Reactor the characters are known as "Freelancers" and in Concord they're "Freegunners", it's like the marketing team for Concord took a look at Universal Pictures' "The Dark Universe" and Atlas Reactor and somehow thought combining the marketing of those two flops would give them success lmao. Execs are so bad at what they do sometimes lol.
@@OneWingedRose It was just too late for this kind of a game. People have been tired of Hero Shooters since BEFORE Overwatch 2 disappointed everyone. And then on top of that, the people that are still actually into Hero Shooters are already heavily invested into their live service, whichever one they've picked. I played OW from Beta until maybe 2019 and just went back to Team Fortress 2. It's home to me.
@@OneWingedRoseI’d be excited to see it re-emerge as a co-op intergalactic heist game with the same cast in the trailers. Just less “hero shooter” and more “Payday meets GoTG”. Maybe have two teams stealing the same item or doing the same job, and they compete against each other where the first to do the job and get away wins. But that would be hard to make fun compared to a co-op Hitman.
So a common housefly lives between 15 to 30 days. Concord will be fully shutdown 14 days after release. The entire housefly race lasts longer than Concord
The best move would be to strip it for parts and repurpose the assets for other games. But the FUNNIEST move, and one that has the most potential, is to reskin and rename it as the Smash Bros of 3rd person shooters. Grab every property you can: Doomguy, Duke Nukem, B.J. Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein, Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, Lara Croft, a few characters from TF2, whoever the guy is from BulletStorm and just cram them all in as one big rompy nonsense cavalcade of bullets and nostalgia. If generic characters is what killed it, then reskin it to have some of the most iconic characters in the 3rd person genre.
As hilarious as that sounds, I highly doubt that any ip holders will allow their franchise to be attached to Concord and let it's corpse drag them down with it without insane amounts of cash.
@@njnjcoSpecially TF2, you know, the father of the genre and if you ask me somehow still the best one 17 years later. Seriously, why is the first one still the best one 17 years later?
One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention yet: Remember last year's Game Awards? Remember how there were a whole bunch of these generic, team-based, liver service shooters that were announced and shown off? Most of them haven't been released yet. What's going to happen to them? Cancelled outright as companies see that no one's interested anymore? Released into a market where no one wants them? Or will one of them actually manage to capture an audience? I'm very curious about that, and I wonder if this is just one game in a huge line of failures for the AAA gaming industry.
Well, I'm hoping that most of them look at this and say "Alright developer, what other kind of game can you make via recycling the assets you've made already?" Then let the developers try whatever they think will work. If only as a chance to cover their investments. We could get something good out of it, ala Overwatch coming out of the failed MMO project Titan. (Irony not lost on me.)
The sunk cost fallacy is reaI, as is the time investment to put out a game: a lot of companies are going to push out crap for a while yet, being unable to adapt to the meta as it shifts. We may see more bombs yet
The industry will learn nothing from this. That's the unfortunate part. They're going to think that they need even bigger budgets and that gamers WANT aggressive monetization. When all we really want is a fun game.
I was eagerly awaiting the follow up after I heard the news. We are literally witnessing the biggest video game flop of all time, truly a historical failure.
I don't think anything can surpass Atari's E.T., that shit literally crashed the videogame INDUSTRY. But this is at least the worst flop of the XXI century.
@@LeGooozeEven though E.T. lost a lot Atari more money, it sold over 2 million units. If they could sell games digitally back then it would have been a huge success. Based on circumstance, I’d say Concord was the bigger failure
@@LeGoooze Part of that was that the Industry was MUCH less established back then, and even thought of as "Just a Fad". So a failure of that level was MUCH more damaging to the industry as a whole, rather than the technically worse, but considered more "Funny Haha AAA Omegaflop" that Concord is turning out to be.
The problem with Concord is that its just... derivative. And it'll never be able to get around that. Its a mishmash of design elements ripped from other, better properties without the passion and intent that those elements had in their original context, and it just shows too much for anyone to take it as anything other than a trend-chasing cashgrab made by corporate committee. It has snarky aliens on a spaceship because Guardians of the Galaxy had snarky aliens on a spaceship. It's an arena shooter with magic abilities because Destiny was an arena shooter with magic abilities. It has flashy character cinematics because Overwatch had flashy character cinematics. But it's too busy trying to be all these other things for it to stand on its own merits. The only way for it to have succeeded would be to come out 8 years ago as a free-to-play game.
What's sad is how many employees are most likely going to get laid off/fired after working on this game and they were just doing their job. The big wigs are the ones telling them what to make and what will they get? A raise and more million dollar bonuses.
ET the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari had 669,000 copies RETURNED of an estimated 2.6million sold. 26 times as many copies of ET were returned as Concord sold. And that game is supposed to be responsible for crashing the entire games industry in the 80s. Let that sink in.
@@MLennholmand arcade/pc games were still doing fine iirc. plus it didn't single-handedly kill consoles, the quality of games was declining in general and et was the straw that broke the camel's back
To add onto what is happening in the replies: E.T. actually isn't responsible for the crash. It's the fact that the industry (in North America) was a gold rush where every developer made a stupid amount of shovelware, pummeling the Atari 2600 into the ground.
@@redpup112no, but it was the straw that broke the camels back. Contained every short coming that the market was known for, and was a moment of clarity for consumers. When viewing concord from that lense, it COULD trigger the next gaming renaissance, but more likely were going to hear how gaming is no longer viable, instead of just making good games.
>$100+ millions development cost >8 years in the making >Close after just 10 days This ain't the biggest flop in videogame history, this is the biggest flop in the entertainment industry. Sony even bought the studio cuz they loved what they saw, and whoever made that decision should be fired and never allowed to be part of this sector. They were so confident this was going to be a success that the newest Prime Video show called Secret Level, an anthology based "on popular video games and franchises" have an entire episode dedicated to Concord and who knows how much money Sony spent to force them to make it (I refuse to think they were ok w it). This generation has been absolutely terrible for PlayStation to the point is just sad
Summed up succinctly. Unfortunately, this generation is still in the bag for them because their competition either thrives in a vacuum by doing its own thing, or in the case of its most direct competition, is the 11-year-running champion of slamming their penith in the car door.
@@Link_1129 Microsoft could close down xbox entirely next month and still function as a business. Sony is more dependent on their games division, they have more to lose in spite of microsofts...everything.
To anyone with the "brilliant" idea of buying as many physical copies of Concord as you can and hoarding them in hopes that they will be valuable collector's items a couple decades from now: DON'T. Limited quantity alone doesn't make something appreciate value. A rare game can only be valuable if anyone is positively interested in it first, and still fully functional second. Concord discs will be neither of these by next week, much less several generations from now. This is not the modern equivalence of owning an issue 1 Superman comic and never will, so don't let Sony steal your money twice.
If this game have had a decent single-player story mode, Sony could have just turn down the servers, issue an apology and call it a day. But because they continue creating games as a *service* instead of as.*products*, now they have to spend a lot of money issuing refunds and disposing of the millions of physical copies like with the infamous E.T. game in the 1980s. And they fully deserve it.
The worst part of this is that the punishment will likely end up on the people who worked on the game. The programmers, coders, artists, and the numerous seemingly talented developers will likely lose their jobs, while the shareholders and other higher ups (who should take most of the blame) will be totally fine.
That guy un there in the glasses, he's the artist/designer responsible for both the terrible look and the "PR fumble" of calling people talentless hacks for not liking the game, no punishment will come his way lol
@@wmdank4918 Oh, that's not even the worst part. Getting work in the games industry is borderline impossible right now. I know veterans with 10+ years experience that worked on huge, successful games, getting totally ghosted and stuck in the unemployment line for six months or longer. The constant layoffs (every other week we get a new announcement) are scaring jobseekers and studios alike. Now imagine being a veteran whose majority of work they can't even put on their resume without shutting any potential open doors immediately.
@@wmdank4918I mean it looks as much like a functioning game as any, so I doubt anyone that worked on it would be that hard on themselves. It also would make a great talking point in an interview, I’m sure. The problem with this game isn’t that it was broken or fugly or anything. It was just a distillation of everything nobody wants to play. By all accounts, it was competent at what it did, but what it did just isn’t what anyone wanted to play. That cutscene trailer was visually appealing, even if it was just a blatant rip-off of various tropes and characters… so I would doubt that people who worked on it would shy away from it. It was just a perfect storm of higher-ups wanting to chase industry trends that peaked before development even began in earnest, and a customer base that’s jaded by all that came before it. TL;DR - nah, there’s no single thing that any individual that worked on this did to destroy everyone’s credibility. All of it was competently put together, it’s just that what they put together was commercially unviable.
It's weird to think that this might be the only major bit of that IP to survive. So I actually hope that it's a good episode, just so those who worked on the IP have one good thing to look back on.
Has the episode been written? If not, they have a chance to commit to some insane 4th wall breaks. Implying Sony doesn’t just want to completely pull the advert of course
As much as I weep for all of the hardworking devs that spent eight years bringing as much life to this corporate slop as they could only for it to flop harder than any AAA game in history, I wish publishers would just give up more. Way too often do they stick to these terrible products and insist they're way better than they are, when their work would be better spent just making something competent.
I feel bad for the people who have to hide working on Concord in their resume. "So, you've been unemployed for the past 8 years. You worked on Concord didn't you?"
Only the artist will, everyone in the proyect did their work well, it's a functional product that the suits force them to make this way and they did their part. They will be fine. The creative team? Boy, those are going to have a bad time to say it lightly.
I think we're witnessing actual gaming history on the hardest Live Service crash-and-burn of... ever! More than $100M worth of investment and 8 years worth of time thrown straight into an incinerator in not even two weeks is batshit insane!
Suicide Squad is spared the shit crown of indignity… your 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, at least gets to sit out in the sun and continue to rot. Bravo.
Look, I'm not happy for the devs seeing their works going down the drain, but I'm glad to see that single player games are getting so much love and success and a lot of life service games are just burning to the ground.
I literally said “damn Nintendo, you don’t gotta salt Sony’s wound” when I heard they were calling the place Concordia I then, moments later, saw that Sony was killing Concord. It’s been a fun day
I legitimately feel bad for people who like the game. Even if a majority didn’t want this game, there were people who did, and now the game is already gone in just 2 weeks.
Happy early birthday! I would wish you well on the day of, but I have poor memory and doubt I'd be able to find your comment by that point. Hope you're looking forward to Sparking Zero!
I really hope preservationists are working to save everything they can from this build already. Even if Concord comes back in some capacity later on, this initial release is a part of history that people looking back on this catastrophe will want preserved
There's plenty of lost media that people are searching nonstop for *because* they were so terrible that the company responsible tried to bury them. People in the future will want to know what the awful Concord build that flopped monumentally played like
@@tgirltouhou That's what the Stop Killing Games campaign is trying to do for future games basically, lobby governments to rule that live service games have to have an end of life plan/build so people can then host their own servers or whatever to play the games they bought that are then suddenly taken away (when not given refunds). Hope it succeeds!
The best case scenario with this whole situation is for Sony to have their “come to Jesus” moment when Astro Bot crushes it in sales and recognizing that they are at their best when they are embracing being a Japanese company.
This might be the funniest thing; it’s even got an episode in that prime show by the love and robots guys, they thought it would be such a huge success and it’s the most warmed over, bland, obviously nothing, market researched to death flop any of us ever saw!
God, this is SO painful to witness. Extremely funny, but also I feel bad for the devs who just wasted 8 years of their lives for nothing because of dumb corporate crap tainting the project.
That Secret Level episode Concord is in is gonna be super awkward now. It might be the only thing of Concord to exist which is really sad when you think about it. I feel so bad for the developers
@@Sorain1 My hope is that it will renew some interest in the game again if Sony brings it back and if it's good. I have no interest in the game but I don't like to see projects fail and developers leave, especially for a project they've worked on for 8 years
@@JJAB91 Not "they", it was only one developer. What that developer said was wrong but don't use those words to smear the rest of the team, that's wrong
When the Concord started Morbing in space it literally brought me to tears and saved my soul. I hope Sony re-releases this masterpiece to make a Concorde worth of money
That's an almost interesting point. They don't make physical copies as much as they used to, and the majority of what they did made is going to a landfill right now as we speak It COULD be a rare game! Is anyone gonna care? It's an interesting speculative buy for sure
Concord is very technically robust so in that regard I actually want it to succeed. If they go for a "Realm reborn" relaunch then there is hope. Not a lot of hope, but still
I knew it was going to close up shop in less than a year, but I wasn't expecting it to be this soon. I feel no sympathy for Sony on this misfire but the devs on the bottom rung are the ones that will be affected the most by this failure. That's the part that sucks.
No they are just as fault as everyone else, No employee should have made that design No employee should have approved those designs, No one should have modeled those designs, those developers created a miscarriage of art
@@sdfxcvblank5756With how working in any corporate job goes it's highly likely that the devs had much better designs and ideas lined up but the suits shut it all down and had them make this instead. Working for corporations in any creative industry means spending all your time fighting tooth and nail against marketing teams and business heads who are only interested in pushing out focus grouped, lowest common denominator, minimum viable product and can just fire you if you push back too much for their liking.
The character designer makes openly racist comments regularly and another dev went on social media calling people ragging on the game "talentless freaks," which suggests that the studio's bosses are accepting of that sort of behavior. They're bad people, so they get no sympathy.
@@sdfxcvblank5756 This. You *have* to be able to put out s o m e thing with 8 years and anywhere from 100 to 250 million dollars, right? And yet, they put out this.
The timing is so horrible, like, they tried to sell a hero shooter game with unappealing marvel-like characters, when there’s ALREADY a hero shooter with actually appealing marvel characters, and in top of that a brand new concept from Valve with Deadlock? Concord simply can’t stand between these two giants, let alone the already established Overwatch, there’s really no reason to play it or even look forward to it when there’s already better things on the horizon.
I just feel awful for the folks who worked on it all these years. To put all this effort in, and you have it turn out like this has to be such a heartbreaking kick in the face.
Executives who made every decision here will pay themselves a Christmas bonus bigger than the combined salaries of all the artists and devs who did everything they could to make this work, and then throw all those people under the bus for this.
I didn't even connect that that trailer was for this game until you played it in this video. That's how little of an impact the character designs had on me.
I agree with Arlo I have no idea what you can even do in this situation. It's not a gameplay issue, it's not something that can be fixed by tweaking some numbers or changing systems. The IP itself has just become poison. What do you even do when the whole aesthetic, every character, the brand name itself, is deemed a failure?
The only thing that could've saved this game is if it had PvE modes and/or single-player campaign. I have no idea why Sony thought _its_ audience would want a PvP shooter game. Is that what _anyone_ buys a PlayStation console for?
Concord is a great example of wasted talent. All the effort that went into this game could of been put into something more passionate and unique, possibly even groundbreaking but instead the big talent working on it now have a stain on their careers because of decisions out of their control. I hope they go indie.
Don't kid yourself, no one who worked on this had talent. They are all students churned out of those "Become a game designer!" courses you see everywhere, and no one had any sense to tell them that they didn't have what it took to make it that they should have looked for a different job.
@Furluge how much do you know about game development ? Cause it's not easy. Sure the game is an uninteresting ,boring attempt to cash in on a trend that died years ago. But from gameplay I've seen, seems pretty stable, seems completely adequate. The art is also clearly made by skilled artists, the models are all really good, it just happens that the character designs both in terms of visuals and writing are gaurdians of the galaxy knockoffs
@@Furluge Firewalk has plenty of skilled developers and there's zero chance an unskilled team made this. Say what you will about Concord's conceptual appeal, originality, and market success, but there's no denying it's a polished and high fidelity multiplayer title. Not the sort of game amateurs can make, even if it flopped. I sincerely doubt you know what you're talking about when you make claims about the industry like this.
Lowkey respect Sony for cutting the plug on it this fast 😂. It’s honestly impressive to not wait on it they knew it wasn’t worth the time anymore. The fact Mario and Luigi showed a place called CONCORDIA today has to somehow an intentional release for a trailer right?
@@uchihabomber1296 No, it's just a hilarious coincidence. PAX is going on, and with Echoes of Wisdom and Jamboree getting trailers, it was about time for Brothership to get one as well, and with the name "Concordia" being more than a year ago, as well as the fact that the footage would have been gathered a while ago so it could be edited together, means that this is just one of those cosmic coincidences
Unfortunately it's ultimately done to save server costs. Running a live service game is expensive so if there's nobody playing and they arent making back any money.. why bother? It be better to pull the plug now. But Sony also can't outright abandon it so it's back to the drawing board to see if they can salvage anything as cheap as possible. I look forward to seeing if this ever shows it's mug again in a state of play.
Concord is scheduled to be in the Amazon video game show coming out in December. Presumably it's already animated and done so even if Sony tries to let people forget that will remind people
I think what's going to happen is Sony is going to take the game offline and re-launch the game as free to play in December to coincide with the Secret Level segment. Do I think that's going to save it? Probably not.
@@blackout0938 Also plausible, but I imagine it's already animated, voiced etc. It would be weird for there to just be a gap where the Concord episode was, they can't just replace it in less than 3 months
Remember when publishers would give inventive new ideas a try like Max Payne, Manhunt, The Suffering, Psy-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, True Crime: Streets of LA, Infamous, and on and on?
I bet years from now...theres gonna be a 40 minute long essay about this game. This game is probably gonna go down as one of the biggest failures in gaming history
Oh absolutely. That doesn't even sound like it would be more than a year away. 40 minutes is quite modest, I could see hour-and-a-half long documentaries.
Honestly Sony should send all the Concord developers to the Helldivers 2 team. Helldivers is Sony's actual cash cow live service game that's dev team is shooting itself in the foot due to inexperience and lack of manpower.
If I was someone who worked on this game I wouldn't be that disappointed. I still got paid to make what I was told to make and will walk away able to get hired at most gaming companies for sure. It's the executives who drove the game in its directions and ordered it to be made like this that's gonna be the most embarrassed and get hit the hardest
People are selling it short by calling Concord the "Biggest flop in gaming history." I genuinely believe that it's the biggest flop in *all of entertainment* history.
I work at a game store. Last week I had the honor of putting it out on the shelves. Today I had the honor of taking them off. Thankfully we did not sell a single copy
Well now I want one just because NOBODY has it
@@PixyEmI think you deserve to decorate your living space with a less tacky paperweight :3
Id keep one as acollector's item.
If you think about it, there were probably more total stores selling Concord than there were copies sold.
We never even got any in stock, because nobody wanted it
Concord - Sold 25000 Copies.
Atari E.T. - Sold 2.6 Million Copies.
Thank you for answering the question I was just asking myself lol
Damn. When you put it that way... damn.
Admittedly they did also produce 4 million copies...which was more than people who actually owned the Atari at the time, like they banked on people buying 2 copies. Also ET still *nearly* killed the NA video game console market which is thankfully not something Concord can say...
Atari ET sold at 1.5m
E.T. was only an example of already crazy market saturated with low quality games. It’s wrong to see it as the catalyst of the crash.
I would pay to be a fly on the wall when the executives made this decision.
I hope Astrobot breaks all expectations just to really send the message home.
Astrobot comes out on the day Concord goes offline.
Fun Fact: The average lifespan of a fly is longer than Concord's lifespan.
@@garden6008 I'm pretty sure even a Lunar Moth lives longer than Concord did
I did my part and pre-ordered Astro. This is the one of the publics limited chances to give live service the finger.
I got both Astro as well as the controller.
The irony of them literally eating slop in the Concord trailer.
In the future, “Concording” will be a phrase meaning “to fail so poorly, even some your detractors feel kind of bad about it.”
Funnily enough, there's already a thing called the Concorde Fallacy (aka Sunken Cost fallacy), which suits Concord's launch pretty well.
"The Concorde fallacy is a mental bias where people continue spending resources (money, time, or effort) on failing projects because of a prior commitment." Based off the British government sinking huge amounts of money into an already obsolete airplane project. And Sony is 8 years late to the party and way over budget.
The AAA gaming industry is going to take all of the wrong lessons away from Concord's failure.
So sad but so true!!!
Oh yeah. All the people making these dumb AAA industry decisions would rather shove a 20-foot-tall cactus down their throats than actually learn from their mistakes.
What wrong lessons even are there to take away from this??? Did Concord do something right?
Like how there clearly aren't enough widely appealing characters, which hurt the game's mass market appeal. So the clear step going forward is to make *more* regular humans with *even more* bland and tepid personalities, which will allow them to make all of the money in the world
Please, dear Apollo in the heavens, please don't make this a very clear joke age badly
@@Boulder7685Thia game's faliure can be attributed to either (or both) a rejection of live service slop, or a rejection of "wokeness". If Concord returns with all the charachters looking like Nathan Drake, then we'll know what lesson they took.
Houseflies factually have a longer average lifespan than this game did
God damn
Ha!
We should call a live service game's release-shut down window based on 2 week increments and call it a concord.
Oh yeah, forensics taught us this. Concord's corpse is definitely cold, though, so any flies using it to complete a life cycle on it will take longer...
Most bacteria within your body are capable of living for 1-3weeks, this game has about the same lifespan as a single-celled organism.
Concord dying the same day as Astro Bot releasing couldn't be any more poetic.
🎵 I am Astro Bot! *!crushes Concord's skull*! 🎶 AS TRO BOT! 🎶
That and the new Mario and Luigi trailer being called "welcome to Concordia!", like fate is just trolling SONY at this point.
@@DANBAN119 when I saw that name on the trailer I said, "where's that familiar from..." Then I remembered this game. How are these so similar it's crazy 🤣
What people actually want.
OH IT'S OUT??? NICE
The PS5 losing a game is crazy, the jokes are literally writing themselves at this point
ONE GAME
If we pull the plugs on just a few more games, the value underflows and we get practically infinite PS5 games.
@@Juk3n what??
Sony is a brand. Brands can't feel emotions. Brands don't have values, they don't have souls. Brands exist to increase profits. 🌈 @@Juk3n
The jokes developed this for 8 years, and even bigger jokes bought the studio and supported its development.
The lesson Sony should learn from this: Return to making single-player games.
The lesson the greedy executives will probably learn from this: Time to double down on live service hero shooters!
How will they think that!? It was a ridicoulously obvious failure... You'll have to be either Really fucking stupid or Insane to take that as a lesson!
Failures dont mean anything to them, they just see the rare runaway successes and want some of that. Fire all the devs and try again ;)
No it means new IPs don't work, let's not try that again
Mario and Luigi's timing of their new trailer is the most hilarious case of timing ever.
Mario and Luigi is a shooter?
@@chiquita683 No, the location of the new game is called "Concordia".
I was thinking the same thing!
Well, we can be pretty certain that "Concordia" will sell way better than Concord.
Nintendo: “We have the opportunity to do the funniest shit imaginable”
Imagine working 8 years on this game that is only meant to chase trends and by the time it comes out, it’s in an oversaturated market that doesn’t want this type of game anymore…and this is the end result.
@@Furlugeis the woke in the room with us now?
The market was oversaturated when overwatch released. Who remembers Paladins? Who remembers Battleborn? The market had room for exactly one team-based character shooter and overwatch won that crown.
@@Crusader1089 **sad tf2 noises**
@@FurlugeI don't think its ideologically woke, but rather was attempting to look like it as a marketing tactic.
@@Crusader1089it wasn't. None of these games ever approached OW's popularity. It was a niche genre before OW.
I think the thing that made me laugh about this wasn't even from Sony or the game itself, but it was a tweet I saw shortly after the Concord news and it was a post card from the new Mario & Luigi game that said,"Welcome to Concordia!" The timing was perfect lol
This follows a funny case of an incompetant boat captain who once crashed a boat called the Costa Concordia worth 600M or so.
The name is cursed at this point.
Maybe the supersonic snoot plane made a deal with a hag or something. "NOTHING AGAIN AFTER I"
Don't forget the plane, Concorde!
"Come along, Concord!"
**gets hit by arrow with note**
"...Message for you, sir!"
**dies**
Captain Schettino 😂 the only captain who is the first to leave 😂 anyway sweet baby Inc is similar indeed, they make every company sink then go away before going down
One could point to Flight of the Concords, which was a great show from what I saw, though the premise did focus around on their band being mostly unsuccessful, so as far as the name itself goes...
When I was a kid, my parents would take me to the Chinatown street markets where I could pick out a toy. The vendors never had the first run action figures-the GI Joes, the X-Men, the DC heroes. No, they had “Fire Man,” a weird hybrid of Spider-Man’s plastic toy model and a firefighter outfit, with Spider-Man on the box art putting out a fire with webs. Or “Army Recruit,” which was just a He-Man with recolored hair and legs and a flesh-colored harness so he looked vaguely like shirtless Rambo. This game looks like the knockoff brand of Guardians of the Galaxy turned into game characters. Why did they make them super realistic and not cartoony? Why did they give them awful colors and outfits? Did they EVER have focus testing on the character models? I don’t think so! Nobody likes Jaundice Lord or Trash Bot or Giant Papa Smurf. They’re awful. Just awful.
Yes! They are visually repulsive characters.
The sketch concept art looks great for these characters. 3D models look so bland in comparison.
the design got approved because it's non-cliche when compared to early 2000s character design (which is full of military, spy, etc)... I don't know the agenda behind it, but conflicts such as War might affect the decision.
Also, DEI is a dead topic. Which is why the media try to "innovate" it with different color and more extreme approach (I mean Dustborn exists, a complete embarrassment).
Imagine spending 8 years toiling away on a game for it to be taken down within 2 weeks. Genuinely impressive move by Sony to pour so much money into the black hole that is “making something nobody wants.”
Surely it was a front for money laundering, surely they didn't think this aberration would be a success, they had 8 years to correct their mistake, how did they not notice all the flaws in their game? So that's why I'm telling myself they can't be that incompetent, they knew it was gonna crash and burn and were just money laundering for all those years.
kusoyny wanted 'all the money' (TM) and they *got it .*
There - ALL the moneys with prawnouns from their alleged "modern audience" ... Can't cry now! HAHA HA HA HAH !!
Sony being whoke thought this is what the "modern audience" wanted.🤣
I genuinely feel bad for the game designers who worked hard on this. Crunched and underpaid like these companies are know to do, to then not even get the satisfaction of having people being happy to play the game they worked on.
If you think Sony is woke, you don't understand Sony, capitalism, or wokeness
@@metarugia3981
This is simply a very late move into the market that the game design doc required 8 years ago
By issuing refunds, Sony is likely going to try to make Concord a tax write-off. They likely view whatever fraction of the cost of Concord's total budget they can save by paying less in taxes is going to be way more than the game will ever make. I would not expect it to return as a free to play title either, as in order to get the tax write-off, they can not do anything with Concord that could generate any revenue in the future.
This is easily the biggest financial flop in gaming history.
they are already minus 200m i dont think the refunds amount to anything relevant in that scope, tax writeoffs occur any time you loose money anyway, you win money you pay, you loose you dont pay, so yah a tax writeoff but you still lost 200m - Whatever taxes are on 200m.
If they make it a tax write off that’ll be hilarious
The stunning thing I noticed in PlayStation's blog post is that it doesn't promise the game is coming back. It says they'll "explore options" and "determine the best path ahead" but nowhere does it even suggest that the game is coming back. The possibility that it never comes back is very much on the table here.
@@TheNucaKola its not an "if" every loss is a tax write off, so if you loose 200m you are getting the tax of 200m as tax write offs (since you really spent that money and lost it) everything a company buys or loose is a tax write off and unless concord somehow manage to make more than 200m concord is a huge tax write off, a very costly one.
So here's my question, how does that work when Concord has an entire episode of television dedicated to it via Secret Level.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story + Bowser Jr's Journey, the second worst-selling Mario game of all time that also resulted in the bankruptcy of a studio, has sold more in Japan alone than the predicted amount that Concord sold.
This flop is so extreme that it's almost impressive.
M&L also likely had a much smaller budget. This game is a disaster.
Alpha dreams had economic problems prior to that game, that game was just a glimmer of hope as it was a beloved entry and a favorite among the fans, that's why they released that remake instead of partners in time, but it didn't work as expected and it didn't save them from their imminent bankruptcy.
@@tailsspin621 M&L definitely wasn't in development for 8 years
No, this is most definitely impressive.
Wait I thought that was the worst selling mario game, not second worst, what sold worse? Mario Clash?
In early 2025 we need to talk like we were unfair to Concord. We need to make memes and get it trending on social media.
And then when Sony pushes it out again based on hype, WE MAKE IT FLOP AGAIN.
We need to MORBIUS this game!
aww yeah it's concording time
peak chaotic evil
Gaslight
Gatekeep
Gamerboss
I was waiting for someone to suggest this! It's con time! *cords all the enemy team*
LOL that's so cruel it's genius
I work fulfillment at a retailer, meaning I basically do people’s shopping for them. The other day, I had to pick a copy of this game for a cart. When it came time to pack the disc and ship it out, I got an error message saying it had been recalled and I could not package it. This was the first and only time I’ve ever encountered anything like that, so it, needless to say, confused the crap out of me. Lo and behold, now I’m seeing loads of UA-cam videos discussing the utter failure of Concord and can’t help but laugh that I obliviously held what may be the biggest flop in gaming history in my own hands
People sometimes say "can you think of a game that flopped worse than this" and the discussion ends up going to things like "Too Human (2008) had the US judicial system order all copies recalled and destroyed" and when THAT'S the yardstick of comparison you know you're in bad territory.
Too Human after that became free forever for xbox one/360
So even THEN it still did better
Just looked "Too Human" up. Shame it was killed, looked kinda cool. Maybe a little too ahead of its time, but the sequels definitely would've been rad.
thats batshit lmao the government is wild
@@polarknight5376 It was fairly fun. It was Sci-Fi Diablo in a time before micro transactions. It was honestly the first ARPG that I played through to the end because it wasn't a grind fest either.
@@polarknight5376 you can still play it on Xbox one and 360 right now for free
With this colossal failure, people might once again ask "Will these companies FINALLY make smaller games with worse graphics?"
At this point, I think these companies will legitimately pursue money laundering before even attempting to acknowledge that as a business model. It's sad.
Some are starting to experiment, ill give em credit, look at the new prince of persia games
They're already laundering money. It's how corporations get to this point.
sometimes i wonder if game companies might start selling those 'gpu benchmark programs' and calling them games
@@joseaca1010too bad it sold like shit
I think the issue is the smaller games with worse graphics may be what the market wants, but it won't do "investor happy" numbers, which is why they still won't do it.
Funny how it seems like this generation of non-Nintendo AAA has pretty much ended up being defined by the failures of "maybe if we pretend this is what people want hard enough they'll buy it" projects.
Even Nintendo has done it a couple times on the Switch. Mario Strikers: Battle League is the first game that comes to mind
@@just_an_elliSuch as?
@@just_an_elliI'm curious too, just from a knowledge standpoint.
@@davidwhidden9337 Every Switch Pokemon game, 1-2 Switch, Mario 3D All-Stars, Mario Strikers Battle League, Super Mario Party
@@just_an_elli true. I feel like Aces was the only Mario Sports improvement from its predecessor, though to be fair, it’s hard to be worse than Ultra Smash. But Super Rush and Battle League get no excuse, especially with the whole “more content after release”, which was clearly done to compensate for releasing a half-baked game. Nintendo’s been killing it this generation, but the Mario Sports have been a huge fumble for them.
Forget the refund. Owning a “limited edition” of the biggest video game flop in history might actually be worth something later on.
You can show your grandchildren the copy in the future, and tell them the story of Concord for a laugh.
We had gollum last year, suicide squad at the start of this year, and now dustborn and concord. Concord's failure isn't special, it's rote. The industry is garbage, led by people who don't even know why games sell, fueled by the blind pursuit of number-go-up because they're hopeless addicts.
This isn't unique, and it will happen again because human incompetence brought us to this point.
I mean, Dustborn didn't fail because of trend-chasing and greed, it failed because it's just a shit game that puts politics over fun.
@TyrantWesker Another noteworthy thing about that game is that it was funded by Norwegian and EU taxpayers. To see tax money going towards THAT is wild. I'm sure there were better things to spend that money on.
First time i heard about Dustborn, so I don't know if that's the high-profile flop that you think it is
@@EmiCheese Its the latest punching bag of all those culture war slop channels. I've never seen any ad for it anywhere so as usual they're just fearmongering over litteraly nothing. Ironically they're basically giving it free publicity.
i learned a new word today: rote
thank u!
The irony is, that even bad games can sort of succeed over a long period of time if they aren't live service. Eventually, you might pick up enough sales to keep from being a humongous loss.
But if you go live service, there is a point where you cannot sustain yourself, and that you cannot recover from without a miracle. Concord hit that point before it even launched.
What talent
Live Service games are in a unique position that they pretty much have to knock it out the park on launch.
You don't get to let the game slowly build, you need players and they need to be enjoying themselves. You need enough content to sustain people until your first content update and you can't be buggy, because that will delay that content until you fix your game, which will be losing players.
@@DragonNexus What's sad is that doesn't have to be that way, necessarily. EVE Online is a live service game before the hideous corporate term 'live service game' was invented. It has a long tail, as a living game that constantly grew and built itself over time. Path of Exile is a live service game.
The difference is the people who make those games want to make a game, and have a dream for what they one day can be. They're not completely 100% motivated by profit and nothing else. It's the capital profit motive that forces these things to be like this.
'Build something small and grow it' is completely anathema to these psycho gambling freaks. They don't see themselves in the business of growing trees or cultivating a garden, they're number goblins yanking on the arm of a slot machine hoping to get free money without having to personally do anything to earn it. Since people like that are in charge and have all the money, of COURSE AAA media will be like that.
Genshin Impact and World of Warcraft didn't come out of nowhere. They were companies that built many games and fanbases, that led up to their big hit.
The funniest thing is this was no live service game. It had no micro transactions. Just the 40$ price tag.
Basically "The Room effect" a movie, even if its bad could lead to sales in the right exposure. If it's solely on streaming, it's less likely to be viewed.
"We may have gone too far in a few places" - Sony seconds before pulling the plug .
RIP Overwatch Guardians of the Valorant Galaxy
What's funny to me about all this is there was a lesser known turnbased moba game called Atlas Reactor.
Its gameplay was great, I genuinely loved it, but it was a big flop and got shutdown a few seasons in and they had SUCH SIMILAR CGI TRAILERS!
Fighting over a briefcase, "Marvel" writing, no-one in any danger despite everyone shooting eachother, sci-fi city, flying ships, and to top it all off, in Atlas Reactor the characters are known as "Freelancers" and in Concord they're "Freegunners", it's like the marketing team for Concord took a look at Universal Pictures' "The Dark Universe" and Atlas Reactor and somehow thought combining the marketing of those two flops would give them success lmao.
Execs are so bad at what they do sometimes lol.
@@OneWingedRose It was just too late for this kind of a game. People have been tired of Hero Shooters since BEFORE Overwatch 2 disappointed everyone. And then on top of that, the people that are still actually into Hero Shooters are already heavily invested into their live service, whichever one they've picked. I played OW from Beta until maybe 2019 and just went back to Team Fortress 2. It's home to me.
Some youtuber I saw yesterday callled it "Custodians of the Gas station"
@@OneWingedRoseI’d be excited to see it re-emerge as a co-op intergalactic heist game with the same cast in the trailers. Just less “hero shooter” and more “Payday meets GoTG”. Maybe have two teams stealing the same item or doing the same job, and they compete against each other where the first to do the job and get away wins. But that would be hard to make fun compared to a co-op Hitman.
@@OneWingedRoseoh Atlas Reactor was SO GOOD.
So a common housefly lives between 15 to 30 days.
Concord will be fully shutdown 14 days after release.
The entire housefly race lasts longer than Concord
Well at least there will be houseflies will finally experience the launch and shutdown of a multiplayer game within their lifetimes
I really want a physical copy now, they are gonna be so rare in a few years
Rare? Absolutely. Valuable? Maybe just as a warning.
That's a good point they will probably be worth quite a bet
The best move would be to strip it for parts and repurpose the assets for other games.
But the FUNNIEST move, and one that has the most potential, is to reskin and rename it as the Smash Bros of 3rd person shooters. Grab every property you can: Doomguy, Duke Nukem, B.J. Blazkowicz from Wolfenstein, Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, Lara Croft, a few characters from TF2, whoever the guy is from BulletStorm and just cram them all in as one big rompy nonsense cavalcade of bullets and nostalgia. If generic characters is what killed it, then reskin it to have some of the most iconic characters in the 3rd person genre.
This actually sounds like an amazing idea.
I might actually want to play that.
As hilarious as that sounds, I highly doubt that any ip holders will allow their franchise to be attached to Concord and let it's corpse drag them down with it without insane amounts of cash.
isnt that fortnite's thing
@@njnjcoSpecially TF2, you know, the father of the genre and if you ask me somehow still the best one 17 years later.
Seriously, why is the first one still the best one 17 years later?
One thing that I haven't seen anyone mention yet: Remember last year's Game Awards? Remember how there were a whole bunch of these generic, team-based, liver service shooters that were announced and shown off? Most of them haven't been released yet. What's going to happen to them? Cancelled outright as companies see that no one's interested anymore? Released into a market where no one wants them? Or will one of them actually manage to capture an audience? I'm very curious about that, and I wonder if this is just one game in a huge line of failures for the AAA gaming industry.
Well, I'm hoping that most of them look at this and say "Alright developer, what other kind of game can you make via recycling the assets you've made already?" Then let the developers try whatever they think will work. If only as a chance to cover their investments. We could get something good out of it, ala Overwatch coming out of the failed MMO project Titan. (Irony not lost on me.)
The sunk cost fallacy is reaI, as is the time investment to put out a game: a lot of companies are going to push out crap for a while yet, being unable to adapt to the meta as it shifts. We may see more bombs yet
@@Delmworks Referring to current market trends in the preferred genre of gamers as "The Meta" just fucking sent me, it's such a gamer way to word it.
@@Sorain1Honestly, a single player campaign you could take on with like 20+ different heroes doesn't sound too bad.
I don’t see companies learning anything from this. They haven’t learned anything from the last 20 times.
The industry will learn nothing from this. That's the unfortunate part. They're going to think that they need even bigger budgets and that gamers WANT aggressive monetization. When all we really want is a fun game.
And all the while they are unaware that AAA is steadily becoming an insult with every release.
They're going to look at this and go, "See?! Nobody wants new IPs anymore, so we're just going to run our franchises into the ground even harder!"
Well we'll see not every company is stupid like Sony or greedy like EA.
Nintendo thankfully is very aware of what fans want, that being fun foremost
I’m not sure if anyone else does
@sophiebubbles07 ehhh, yes but no iykwim.
I was eagerly awaiting the follow up after I heard the news. We are literally witnessing the biggest video game flop of all time, truly a historical failure.
GENERATIONAL failure. Hall of Shame GIGA flop.
I don't think anything can surpass Atari's E.T., that shit literally crashed the videogame INDUSTRY. But this is at least the worst flop of the XXI century.
@@LeGooozeEven though E.T. lost a lot Atari more money, it sold over 2 million units. If they could sell games digitally back then it would have been a huge success.
Based on circumstance, I’d say Concord was the bigger failure
@@LeGoooze Part of that was that the Industry was MUCH less established back then, and even thought of as "Just a Fad". So a failure of that level was MUCH more damaging to the industry as a whole, rather than the technically worse, but considered more "Funny Haha AAA Omegaflop" that Concord is turning out to be.
@@LeGooozeE.T. was only representative of the market saturated with similarly bad games. It didn’t single-handedly destroy the market.
The problem with Concord is that its just... derivative. And it'll never be able to get around that. Its a mishmash of design elements ripped from other, better properties without the passion and intent that those elements had in their original context, and it just shows too much for anyone to take it as anything other than a trend-chasing cashgrab made by corporate committee.
It has snarky aliens on a spaceship because Guardians of the Galaxy had snarky aliens on a spaceship. It's an arena shooter with magic abilities because Destiny was an arena shooter with magic abilities. It has flashy character cinematics because Overwatch had flashy character cinematics. But it's too busy trying to be all these other things for it to stand on its own merits. The only way for it to have succeeded would be to come out 8 years ago as a free-to-play game.
This. The gameplay is meh. But combined its all so soulless you just can't be bothered with it
What's sad is how many employees are most likely going to get laid off/fired after working on this game and they were just doing their job. The big wigs are the ones telling them what to make and what will they get? A raise and more million dollar bonuses.
Cant wait for the "wha happen" video by the funny skull guy
(readies the "Yeah, that makes sense!" button)
Video be so short, it probs be less than 15 mins
The funny BLUE skull guy specifically.
please dont be nux taku
@@s.p.d.magentaranger1822 SF3:3rdS for the win!
ET the Extra Terrestrial for the Atari had 669,000 copies RETURNED of an estimated 2.6million sold.
26 times as many copies of ET were returned as Concord sold. And that game is supposed to be responsible for crashing the entire games industry in the 80s.
Let that sink in.
Not the entire industry, it was limited to the North American market. That's why the Japanese companies could swoop in and fill the void.
@@MLennholmand arcade/pc games were still doing fine iirc. plus it didn't single-handedly kill consoles, the quality of games was declining in general and et was the straw that broke the camel's back
To add onto what is happening in the replies: E.T. actually isn't responsible for the crash. It's the fact that the industry (in North America) was a gold rush where every developer made a stupid amount of shovelware, pummeling the Atari 2600 into the ground.
@@redpup112no, but it was the straw that broke the camels back. Contained every short coming that the market was known for, and was a moment of clarity for consumers.
When viewing concord from that lense, it COULD trigger the next gaming renaissance, but more likely were going to hear how gaming is no longer viable, instead of just making good games.
Just the North American gaming industry
>$100+ millions development cost
>8 years in the making
>Close after just 10 days
This ain't the biggest flop in videogame history, this is the biggest flop in the entertainment industry. Sony even bought the studio cuz they loved what they saw, and whoever made that decision should be fired and never allowed to be part of this sector. They were so confident this was going to be a success that the newest Prime Video show called Secret Level, an anthology based "on popular video games and franchises" have an entire episode dedicated to Concord and who knows how much money Sony spent to force them to make it (I refuse to think they were ok w it). This generation has been absolutely terrible for PlayStation to the point is just sad
Summed up succinctly. Unfortunately, this generation is still in the bag for them because their competition either thrives in a vacuum by doing its own thing, or in the case of its most direct competition, is the 11-year-running champion of slamming their penith in the car door.
@@Link_1129 Are the former and latter supposed to be Nintendo and Microsoft?
@@memesandhoi2924 Yep.
@@Link_1129 Makes sense.
@@Link_1129 Microsoft could close down xbox entirely next month and still function as a business.
Sony is more dependent on their games division, they have more to lose in spite of microsofts...everything.
To anyone with the "brilliant" idea of buying as many physical copies of Concord as you can and hoarding them in hopes that they will be valuable collector's items a couple decades from now: DON'T.
Limited quantity alone doesn't make something appreciate value. A rare game can only be valuable if anyone is positively interested in it first, and still fully functional second. Concord discs will be neither of these by next week, much less several generations from now. This is not the modern equivalence of owning an issue 1 Superman comic and never will, so don't let Sony steal your money twice.
It would be a great prank gift.
I get that, but consider: it'd be funny
If this game have had a decent single-player story mode, Sony could have just turn down the servers, issue an apology and call it a day. But because they continue creating games as a *service* instead of as.*products*, now they have to spend a lot of money issuing refunds and disposing of the millions of physical copies like with the infamous E.T. game in the 1980s. And they fully deserve it.
The worst part of this is that the punishment will likely end up on the people who worked on the game. The programmers, coders, artists, and the numerous seemingly talented developers will likely lose their jobs, while the shareholders and other higher ups (who should take most of the blame) will be totally fine.
Hopefully we will end up in a world where it is difficult to find people willing to work on such projects
That guy un there in the glasses, he's the artist/designer responsible for both the terrible look and the "PR fumble" of calling people talentless hacks for not liking the game, no punishment will come his way lol
Imagine trying to ignore 8 years of work when you're asked, "What did you work on previously?"
@@wmdank4918 Oh, that's not even the worst part. Getting work in the games industry is borderline impossible right now. I know veterans with 10+ years experience that worked on huge, successful games, getting totally ghosted and stuck in the unemployment line for six months or longer. The constant layoffs (every other week we get a new announcement) are scaring jobseekers and studios alike. Now imagine being a veteran whose majority of work they can't even put on their resume without shutting any potential open doors immediately.
@@wmdank4918I mean it looks as much like a functioning game as any, so I doubt anyone that worked on it would be that hard on themselves. It also would make a great talking point in an interview, I’m sure.
The problem with this game isn’t that it was broken or fugly or anything. It was just a distillation of everything nobody wants to play. By all accounts, it was competent at what it did, but what it did just isn’t what anyone wanted to play.
That cutscene trailer was visually appealing, even if it was just a blatant rip-off of various tropes and characters… so I would doubt that people who worked on it would shy away from it.
It was just a perfect storm of higher-ups wanting to chase industry trends that peaked before development even began in earnest, and a customer base that’s jaded by all that came before it.
TL;DR - nah, there’s no single thing that any individual that worked on this did to destroy everyone’s credibility. All of it was competently put together, it’s just that what they put together was commercially unviable.
It's crazier when you realize Concord has a whole episode to itself in that new video game anthology series, Secret Level.
Man, I can already tell that gaming UA-camrs are gonna have a field day tearing that to shreds
Which was obviously for marketing. Probably that means it’s not gone for good, but also sheesh.
It's weird to think that this might be the only major bit of that IP to survive. So I actually hope that it's a good episode, just so those who worked on the IP have one good thing to look back on.
@@Sorain1itd be funny if the episode is actually good and sony just decides "fuck it the ip is gonna be a show instead"
Has the episode been written? If not, they have a chance to commit to some insane 4th wall breaks. Implying Sony doesn’t just want to completely pull the advert of course
This is the funniest thing since sliced bread.
Wait.
🍞
You are correct, nia xenoblade
@@ivythay4259we got a Xenoblade fan boys!!!
More sad than funny
@@chasemiller3712 😂😂😂😂😂 good one homie
As much as I weep for all of the hardworking devs that spent eight years bringing as much life to this corporate slop as they could only for it to flop harder than any AAA game in history, I wish publishers would just give up more. Way too often do they stick to these terrible products and insist they're way better than they are, when their work would be better spent just making something competent.
I feel bad for the people who have to hide working on Concord in their resume.
"So, you've been unemployed for the past 8 years. You worked on Concord didn't you?"
Only the artist will, everyone in the proyect did their work well, it's a functional product that the suits force them to make this way and they did their part. They will be fine.
The creative team? Boy, those are going to have a bad time to say it lightly.
I think we're witnessing actual gaming history on the hardest Live Service crash-and-burn of... ever! More than $100M worth of investment and 8 years worth of time thrown straight into an incinerator in not even two weeks is batshit insane!
Throwing money in the incinerator would actually be more profitable than this game.
The only funnier story is the gacha that announced its upcoming western release and it's western end of service date IN THE SAME TWEET.
Suicide Squad is spared the shit crown of indignity… your 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars wasted, at least gets to sit out in the sun and continue to rot.
Bravo.
Look, I'm not happy for the devs seeing their works going down the drain, but I'm glad to see that single player games are getting so much love and success and a lot of life service games are just burning to the ground.
Astro Bot better sell well and Sony and other companies better take note
@@dpackerman4203let's hope the aaa companies take the right notes
No need to be sad for developers because they already got paid. Sony is the one taking the L here.
The devs chose to make this game. They weren’t coerced. This is the product they wanted to make. And it got the reception it deserved.
@@JPD2587that's really not how anything works bro lmao
I literally said “damn Nintendo, you don’t gotta salt Sony’s wound” when I heard they were calling the place Concordia
I then, moments later, saw that Sony was killing Concord. It’s been a fun day
Eh, it's more than time.
What place is being called that?
@@Wizilizthe game world in Mario&Luigi Brothership.
@@Wiziliz The main location Mario & Luigi Brothership is taking place in. I'm guessing it's a collective name for the many islands or smth
I legitimately feel bad for people who like the game. Even if a majority didn’t want this game, there were people who did, and now the game is already gone in just 2 weeks.
I feel so bad for the guys who were excited for this week's cutscene drop
Imagine the money they wasted on that Amazon show for a Concorde segment 😂
September 6th is my birthday. I couldn’t ask for a better gift than Concord not existing anymore. Thank you, Sony.
Happy early birthday!
Happy soon-to-be birthday, buddy!
What about Sony immediately pivoting to Astro Bot instead on that same day?
Happy early birthday! I would wish you well on the day of, but I have poor memory and doubt I'd be able to find your comment by that point. Hope you're looking forward to Sparking Zero!
Happy birthday early!!🎊
I really hope preservationists are working to save everything they can from this build already. Even if Concord comes back in some capacity later on, this initial release is a part of history that people looking back on this catastrophe will want preserved
That's like trying to save the Bubonic Plague
Like yeah you COULD.... why?
@@Dre2Dee2the preservationists were so eager to save what they could they didn't stop to think about wether or not they should.
I love me some game preservation but there isn't a single thing I'd save from Concord 😂
There's plenty of lost media that people are searching nonstop for *because* they were so terrible that the company responsible tried to bury them. People in the future will want to know what the awful Concord build that flopped monumentally played like
@@Dre2Dee2 because it's history, and failures on this scale should be remembered so that they aren't repeated.
Kinda a shame for video game preservation. I want to play the game that was developed for 8 years, flopped immediately, and then died.
Yeah - and this game does have things worth preserving! It has some stellar gunplay and unique kits.
they should just let people set up their own servers on pc when online games like this die
@@tgirltouhou That's what the Stop Killing Games campaign is trying to do for future games basically, lobby governments to rule that live service games have to have an end of life plan/build so people can then host their own servers or whatever to play the games they bought that are then suddenly taken away (when not given refunds). Hope it succeeds!
Honestly? I agree. Both the best and the worst need to be preserved so that future generations can learn from both.
Yeah, at the very least something to remember this flop and not let it be lost media
Imagine some Grandma buying a Christmas present for their grand kids and when they open it "oh, it's Concord"
The best case scenario with this whole situation is for Sony to have their “come to Jesus” moment when Astro Bot crushes it in sales and recognizing that they are at their best when they are embracing being a Japanese company.
This!!!
Sony: We learn our lesson! *lay off astrobot studio*
This might be the funniest thing; it’s even got an episode in that prime show by the love and robots guys, they thought it would be such a huge success and it’s the most warmed over, bland, obviously nothing, market researched to death flop any of us ever saw!
Man, I thought Skull & Bones was gonna be this year’s biggest flop.
It's probably given Arlo his best video of 2024, though, so there is that! 🤣
Christ 2024 is a long year, that game feels like history already
Concord looks like a fake video game you’d find in a movie
No, there's more effort put into movie video games.
Concord looks AI generated.
No, it looks like a video made from a movie, that was made from a better game.
Like Street Fighter: the Movie: the Game
Concord is such a flop that there is not even a TVTropes page of it, it is that bad!
When the "All-Devouring Pop Culture Wiki" doesn't list one of the biggest failures in pop culture, you know you failed as a product LMAO
No R34 either. That’s when you know it’s bad
It's got one now. With like 75% of it being the YMMV page listing how badly it flopped.
God, this is SO painful to witness. Extremely funny, but also I feel bad for the devs who just wasted 8 years of their lives for nothing because of dumb corporate crap tainting the project.
That Secret Level episode Concord is in is gonna be super awkward now. It might be the only thing of Concord to exist which is really sad when you think about it. I feel so bad for the developers
I hope that turns out to be good. It'd be nice for those who worked on the project to have something nice to look back on.
Considering they were insulting people and calling people who don't like the game "talentless freaks" I don't feel bad whatsoever. Good riddance.
@@Sorain1 My hope is that it will renew some interest in the game again if Sony brings it back and if it's good. I have no interest in the game but I don't like to see projects fail and developers leave, especially for a project they've worked on for 8 years
@@JJAB91 Yeah i dont know why so many people are defending these entitled freaks
@@JJAB91 Not "they", it was only one developer. What that developer said was wrong but don't use those words to smear the rest of the team, that's wrong
Petition to make "It's morbin time" the official synonym for a SONY flop.
I can't believe Concord morbed so hard.
When the Concord started Morbing in space it literally brought me to tears and saved my soul. I hope Sony re-releases this masterpiece to make a Concorde worth of money
Honestly this is tempting me to buy a physical copy. They might be worth a lot in the future as historical artifact
That's an almost interesting point. They don't make physical copies as much as they used to, and the majority of what they did made is going to a landfill right now as we speak
It COULD be a rare game! Is anyone gonna care? It's an interesting speculative buy for sure
Concord is very technically robust so in that regard I actually want it to succeed. If they go for a "Realm reborn" relaunch then there is hope. Not a lot of hope, but still
No it belongs in the Dustbin with Dustborn
Nintendo: "Someone get the guys who make AAA full-priced live service games on optical discs a cigarette and a blindfold."
I knew it was going to close up shop in less than a year, but I wasn't expecting it to be this soon.
I feel no sympathy for Sony on this misfire but the devs on the bottom rung are the ones that will be affected the most by this failure. That's the part that sucks.
No they are just as fault as everyone else, No employee should have made that design No employee should have approved those designs, No one should have modeled those designs, those developers created a miscarriage of art
@@sdfxcvblank5756With how working in any corporate job goes it's highly likely that the devs had much better designs and ideas lined up but the suits shut it all down and had them make this instead. Working for corporations in any creative industry means spending all your time fighting tooth and nail against marketing teams and business heads who are only interested in pushing out focus grouped, lowest common denominator, minimum viable product and can just fire you if you push back too much for their liking.
The character designer makes openly racist comments regularly and another dev went on social media calling people ragging on the game "talentless freaks," which suggests that the studio's bosses are accepting of that sort of behavior. They're bad people, so they get no sympathy.
@@TyrantWesker *Some of them are bad people.
@@sdfxcvblank5756 This. You *have* to be able to put out s o m e thing with 8 years and anywhere from 100 to 250 million dollars, right? And yet, they put out this.
The timing is so horrible, like, they tried to sell a hero shooter game with unappealing marvel-like characters, when there’s ALREADY a hero shooter with actually appealing marvel characters, and in top of that a brand new concept from Valve with Deadlock?
Concord simply can’t stand between these two giants, let alone the already established Overwatch, there’s really no reason to play it or even look forward to it when there’s already better things on the horizon.
I just feel awful for the folks who worked on it all these years. To put all this effort in, and you have it turn out like this has to be such a heartbreaking kick in the face.
I feel so, so awful for everyone who worked on this game. Eight years. What a horrible waste.
I don't because they blamed the players for the game's failure.
Executives who made every decision here will pay themselves a Christmas bonus bigger than the combined salaries of all the artists and devs who did everything they could to make this work, and then throw all those people under the bus for this.
I didn't even connect that that trailer was for this game until you played it in this video. That's how little of an impact the character designs had on me.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather play a fun single player adventure game over a multiplayer online game any day
Especially when most of the AAA games just feel like shooters now.
Same Sony's about to be damn lucky Astrobot is coming out in a few days.
I wonder what this means for Bungie? For Fairgames? Hell, for Sony as a whole. They lit $200 million on fire. That must have a knock on effect.
The company is worth $120 billion.
They'll be fine.
@@DragonNexus But will the people that have helped the company become worth $120 billion with their talents and efforts be fine, that is the question.
@@JeffreyThrash Yeah, exactly. It's always the wrong people who suffer for the stupid decisions made by those who have no job insecurity at all.
The fact that Mario & Luigi Brothership is in CONCORDIA IS ABSOLUTELY HILARIOUS.
0:39 “this never ending saga” he says as it ends
I agree with Arlo I have no idea what you can even do in this situation. It's not a gameplay issue, it's not something that can be fixed by tweaking some numbers or changing systems. The IP itself has just become poison. What do you even do when the whole aesthetic, every character, the brand name itself, is deemed a failure?
Add the cancelled single player from overwatch XD
The only thing that could've saved this game is if it had PvE modes and/or single-player campaign. I have no idea why Sony thought _its_ audience would want a PvP shooter game. Is that what _anyone_ buys a PlayStation console for?
Concord is a great example of wasted talent. All the effort that went into this game could of been put into something more passionate and unique, possibly even groundbreaking but instead the big talent working on it now have a stain on their careers because of decisions out of their control. I hope they go indie.
Don't kid yourself, no one who worked on this had talent. They are all students churned out of those "Become a game designer!" courses you see everywhere, and no one had any sense to tell them that they didn't have what it took to make it that they should have looked for a different job.
@@Furluge These are not the words of a healthy mind, are you ok in there man?
@@Furlugenot really
@Furluge how much do you know about game development ? Cause it's not easy. Sure the game is an uninteresting ,boring attempt to cash in on a trend that died years ago.
But from gameplay I've seen, seems pretty stable, seems completely adequate.
The art is also clearly made by skilled artists, the models are all really good, it just happens that the character designs both in terms of visuals and writing are gaurdians of the galaxy knockoffs
@@Furluge Firewalk has plenty of skilled developers and there's zero chance an unskilled team made this. Say what you will about Concord's conceptual appeal, originality, and market success, but there's no denying it's a polished and high fidelity multiplayer title. Not the sort of game amateurs can make, even if it flopped.
I sincerely doubt you know what you're talking about when you make claims about the industry like this.
8 years gone in 8 days 💀
😭
Poetry.
Remember how one of the developers called the game's critics talentless hacks? Look who's the talentless hack now! 2 weeks of life wow
This is probably the biggest video game industry blunder ever, right?
There can't be a bigger one.
This has been the greatest video trilogy of all time
Trilogy?
The initial concord reveal rant video, the recent “concord not doing well video”, and this video
With Concord out of the picture, Sony’s doing a last minute marketing push for Astro Bot.
Wish that little guy the best. :)
Concord is the video game
Equivalent of Prime Minister Liz Truss
Even that lasted longer according to my UA-cam search.
Truss failed to outlast a lettuce. Concord couldn't even outlast the typical life cycle of a common house fly
As a Brit, I and many of my fellows are all here for using the length of Truss’ premiership as a benchmark for utter failures.
Maybe Sony now gets the message that their playerbase wants SINGLE PLAYER games
Yeah, release an extreme woke single player game with pronoun robots and everything will be fixed 😂
The worst part about this is the ones who get the boot are the devs that were following orders, not the executives who went the wrong way
Lowkey respect Sony for cutting the plug on it this fast 😂. It’s honestly impressive to not wait on it they knew it wasn’t worth the time anymore. The fact Mario and Luigi showed a place called CONCORDIA today has to somehow an intentional release for a trailer right?
@@uchihabomber1296 No, it's just a hilarious coincidence. PAX is going on, and with Echoes of Wisdom and Jamboree getting trailers, it was about time for Brothership to get one as well, and with the name "Concordia" being more than a year ago, as well as the fact that the footage would have been gathered a while ago so it could be edited together, means that this is just one of those cosmic coincidences
Unfortunately it's ultimately done to save server costs. Running a live service game is expensive so if there's nobody playing and they arent making back any money.. why bother? It be better to pull the plug now. But Sony also can't outright abandon it so it's back to the drawing board to see if they can salvage anything as cheap as possible.
I look forward to seeing if this ever shows it's mug again in a state of play.
@@Druid-T I definitely do believe it was a coincidence tho but man is it too funny
Let’s all laugh at an industry that never learns anything…
Concord is scheduled to be in the Amazon video game show coming out in December. Presumably it's already animated and done so even if Sony tries to let people forget that will remind people
Oh god that's gonna be real friggin awkward when one of the games literally doesn't exist.
@@UltimaKeyMaster That's what they deserve for being so sure the game was going to be a massive hit.
I think what's going to happen is Sony is going to take the game offline and re-launch the game as free to play in December to coincide with the Secret Level segment.
Do I think that's going to save it? Probably not.
@@MrCrossamore likely I think they might just cut out that episode entirely if they can
@@blackout0938 Also plausible, but I imagine it's already animated, voiced etc. It would be weird for there to just be a gap where the Concord episode was, they can't just replace it in less than 3 months
For the price of Concord, you can make 2000 Undertales.
3:50 A nightmare? No… Can’t be that bad. That’s like what, three people?
It's amazing that this video contains no non-trailer gameplay footage, because there is none.
Ohh no.. Anyway Astro Bot release this week!!
What
@@utopes 'Astro Bot' man.. Go check it up.. Looks so fun..
Atleast in doing this concord will have one single point of interest in video game history now
Remember when publishers would give inventive new ideas a try like Max Payne, Manhunt, The Suffering, Psy-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, True Crime: Streets of LA, Infamous, and on and on?
Yeah most of them crashed and burned because single player games don't make money.
Say what you want, the animation in concords trailer is fantastic. I am still impressed by the lady's hair and how realistic it looks.
I bet years from now...theres gonna be a 40 minute long essay about this game. This game is probably gonna go down as one of the biggest failures in gaming history
Oh absolutely. That doesn't even sound like it would be more than a year away. 40 minutes is quite modest, I could see hour-and-a-half long documentaries.
and a year after that how it was actually an underrated gem
@@BBP-OMO Exactly!
Honestly Sony should send all the Concord developers to the Helldivers 2 team. Helldivers is Sony's actual cash cow live service game that's dev team is shooting itself in the foot due to inexperience and lack of manpower.
All those years...
😂😂😂
of planning...
WASTED!
- Corpse Bride (2005)
2005? My goodness where has the time gone???
If I was someone who worked on this game I wouldn't be that disappointed. I still got paid to make what I was told to make and will walk away able to get hired at most gaming companies for sure. It's the executives who drove the game in its directions and ordered it to be made like this that's gonna be the most embarrassed and get hit the hardest
People are selling it short by calling Concord the "Biggest flop in gaming history." I genuinely believe that it's the biggest flop in *all of entertainment* history.
The saga of this game was something to behold...