4mo ago

Concord Is Estimated to Have Sold Only 25,000 Units. Here’s Why Analysts Think It’s Failing

www.ign.com Concord Is Estimated to Have Sold Only 25,000 Units. Here’s Why Analysts Think It’s Failing - IGN

What happened to Concord? Why did a big Sony first-party game get sent out to die immediately? Is it actually selling badly, or are we just reading the numbers wrong? As usual when questions of this nature crop up, I asked a bunch of professional industry analysts to explain it to me.

23 comments

So basically, it's a poorly marketed $40 game facing a lot of free and popular competition.
- Did they market it at all?
  All I have seen is the post mortem articles. Deadlock has had more marketing.
  
  This is literally the first I'm hearing of this game.
  
  Honestly, deadlock doing the whole Fight Club marketing strategy really paid off for them. I heard so much about "the game you weren't allowed to talk about" on various streams.
  
  Not sure they did… I’ve never even heard of it before until just now
  
  They marketed it on their state of plays
  
  I’ve been seeing ads for it for a long time, but the ads don’t even make it clear they’re for this game until 20+ seconds in, at which point I’ve stopped watching.
  It’s very likely you too have seen plenty of marketing for this game but ignored it like I did.

Not really surprising given how it looked (like a generic ripoff), how it's priced (should be free), and how it was marketed (every conversation I enter starts with a chain of comments saying it's the first they've heard of it).
What is surprising to me is how much a Sony first party game missed the mark. I can't think of any other recent examples.
- I had never even heard of the game until a couple weeks ago when I saw some articles posted here on Lemmy about it.

Hero shooters rely on appealing memorable designs, compare the characters in this game with any of it's competitors (TF2, Overwatch, Marvel Rivals) and it's obvious why it failed. That combined with questionable allocation of dev time (why put so much work into the planet info and story cutscenes?), poor map design, and a $40 asking price ensured it would flop.

Never heard of it until now, but I figured the hero shooter genre had already died off.

I feel like there's just too much competition. They would've needed some hefty marketing budget to get across why people should play this instead of Overwatch et al.

First I even heard about this game was a comic talking about it's unattractive characters. I looked it up out of curiosity to see if this was an exaggeration like it has been with some characters like Aloy, and....ehhh...mostly true.
One of the big draws of these types of games is cool character designs people want to play. This game definitely doesn't have that for me. Overwatch quickly pulled me in with cool character designs, this one...does not.

Yeah, IGN will explain to you why the game is failing 🤣. They forgot one thing though, here's a good comment:
- What is DEI? Is this some forced diversity "woke" rant?
  
  Basically. DEI (Diversity, ~~Ethics~~ Equity, and Inclusion, IIRC?) is the new "woke"/SJW bogey.
  Having an woman (with exposed skin, no less!) is causing all entertainment to be ruined forever, etc etc, that kind of thing.
  EDIT: Equity, not ethics, whoops! Thanks for the correction.
- Deadlock has a nonbinary character lol
- They didn't forget to include reasons that definitely did not cause it to fail, that the analysts they spoke to did not attribute to its failure.

23 comments