Concord, the gift that just keeps on giving

I have written earlier about the video game Concord, which is arguably the biggest flop in the entire history of video games, surpassing every other (in)famous failed video game by a large margin, by any metric you may want to use: It took about 8 years to develop, cost several hundred million dollars to make (the 400 million dollars figure is the most commonly cited), and it was recalled by its publisher, Sony, less than 2 weeks after launch, all purchases refunded.

Reportedly the game had sold a few tens of thousands of copies by that point (which is a small fraction of the typical sales numbers of such high-budget games, which are in the millions, and obviously nowhere even near enough to even break even), and the maximum number of concurrent players on Steam was something like 600, which is abysmal (in contrast, typical video games of this kind of budgets get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, sometimes even millions).

With a budget in the several hundreds of millions of dollars, and 8 years of development, one would think that this was some kind of grand video game of epic proportions, vast open worlds with thousands of locales to explore, thousands of quests, thousands of acted lines of dialogue and motion-captured animations, and an extensive deep main quest storyline, not to talk about the hundreds of fully-scripted fully-acted side quests and stories.

Nope. It was a relatively simple so-called "hero shooter", ie. a team-based "arena" shooter, consisting of a dozen or so different levels (which, reportedly, weren't even specially large or extraordinarily well designed). From the content that we saw it didn't look like anything that a competent development team couldn't create in six months, a year at most, at one hundredth the budget, one tenth the most.

At its face, there's no justification why the game cost that much to make, and took that amount of time. However, reports of the development company (which Sony acquired at some point) and its internal working culture sheds light on the reason: It's one of these modern companies that has been completely overtaken by the modern American far left, and thus is internally extremely burdened by far-leftist oppressive rules, mandates, culture, behavior and what has been called "toxic positivity" (which means that no criticism is allowed, you can't say anything that might even theoretically hurt someone's feelings, and no suggestion can be directly criticized nor rejected, and everything must be taken in a positive manner, which of course burdens the entire development process with huge amounts of useless junk that only slows things down and makes everything worse, because nothing is criticized nor rejected outright.)

The far-leftist nature of the developer company also explains why the playable characters in the game are so unlikeable, as they are your stereotypical far-leftist "counter-culture" representatives (ie. fat ugly people), which no doubt contributed to the failure of the game.

Of course that's not the main reason why the game failed so catastrophically. The main reasons are most likely that by this point, in late 2024, the "hero shooter" genre is both extremely saturated and very stale, and the fact that the game was being sold at US$40, while its main long-established competitors, such as Overwatch 2 and Valorant, are free to play. Nobody is very interested in the "hero shooter" genre anymore, and a significant price tag is a definitive turn-off for most people, especially when the more famous games are free.

Anyway, pretty much all of that I already wrote about before. What do I mean by this being "the gift that just keeps on giving"? Well, turns out that there's even more to this story than just the above.

You see, this is not just a case of Sony having thrown enormous amounts of money onto a game that ended up failing catastrophically. It was much more than that.

You see, apparently Sony wanted this game to become an entire franchise. And not just any random franchise, but their flagship franchise. What "Mario" is to Nintendo, and what "Final Fantasy" is to Square Enix, Sony wanted Concord to become the same for them. (After all, Sony Interactive Entertainment doesn't really have a flagship game franchise they are known for, like many other major video game corporations. Apparently they wanted this to become their version of it.)

According to Sony, Concord was supposed to "revolutionize gaming" (where have we heard that before...), and they wanted it to span multiple forms of media. In fact, besides the game itself, they had produced an entire Netflix series, which apparently is going to be published anyway, even though the game itself failed. The series introduced new characters that (purposefully) don't appear in the initial launch of the game and would be added later, as some kind of references to the computer-animated series.

Apparently a huge chunk of the over-inflated budget went to outright excessive amounts of motion capture work. Apparently they wanted weekly "cutscenes" of sorts, and a huge amount of time and resources went into making them. It's unclear what the purpose of these were (because, as far as I know, the Netflix animated series was created by some other studio completely).

What amazes me the most is why and how exactly the people at Sony, who decided to spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars on this project, thought that this particular game would "revolutionize gaming" and would become so immensely popular that it would literally become their flagship game franchise, which "Sony Interactive Entertainment" would be known for. There's absolutely nothing novel or unique about Concord that sets it apart from numerous previous games of the genre. It literally does not offer anything new, anything that has not been seen before.

At least other past games that tried to "revolutionize gaming", even though they invariably failed miserably, had some novel idea or design behind them. Evolve at least had a somewhat novel idea (one player controls a huge agile Kaiju monster and four other players control a group of humans trying to hunt it down, in a hide-and-seek and combat scenario in a thick jungle), and Anthem produced a huge amount of genuine hype and expectations due to its (what looked at the time like) innovative and exciting gameplay and environments.

What special unique innovative thing did Concord offer? Nothing. It's pretty much identical to the numerous existing "hero shooters" out there. How on Earth did Sony think it would "revolutionize gaming", sell millions of copies, and become their flagship franchise?

This entire Concord saga is not just the story of the failure of a video game. It's a story of a huge lapse in judgment by a megacorporation like Sony. And "lapse in judgment" is putting it mildly and politely.