Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
Every game executive and investor wants a Fortnight. That’s why no matter how many times gamers reject it live service games will continue to be developed. Because AAA games are made for investors not players.
You just made me realise I’m a gamer, not a Fortniter. But I probably should’ve realised that based on my Steam "years of service* and disgustingly large catalogue.
I’m a proven guaranteed money pot, publishers! Make me something good and I give the moneys!
The challenge is that requires creativity. Creativity isn’t a stable investment.
Viva La indie game studio!
Did this post receive more engagement than the game itself?..
Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?
Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and we’ll be rich.
Gamers: Who asked for this? I didn’t ask for this. I don’t want to play this shit. I’ve got better shit that I can play for free.
Exec 1 & 2:
There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.
Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn’t satisfying everyone’s needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.
Even if it’s lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.
Those aren’t re-skins though, they just used the battle royals game type as their main game type.
I can’t really think of a similar game to fortnite before it in regards to the combination of building and competitive shooter, although I’m sure someone can point out an early example, and Apex is smashing together counterstrike and maybe overwatch or something similar for the gameplay.
Personally I don’t think apex would have worked if it just looked like a re-skin but its got a lot of great artwork and the level designs are interesting at least to me.
Also fortnite has become the everything game, they have Lego and rocket racing and a guitar hero minigame, its sort of gone wild IMO.
Fortnite started as a sanbox “everything” game
Wasn’t until they added Battle Royale that it became big, but it was always intended to be a playground / creative shooter
What?
I only remember the wave-based, tower defense main mod. What playground mode was there?
You could build up your base (also a defense map) pretty freely, but it was never unlimited resources creative. You’re right to be confused by this comment
Save The World isn’t sandbox or everything and was the only launch mode for the game. It had more mobile gacha practices than anything tbh. I get thinking that seeing as it has taken cues from Roblox, but it isn’t reality
There have been a number of voxel shooter that have shipped lowkey since Minecraft that attempted to add block placement to the team v team ticket shooter, e.g. Ace of Spades.
Ace of Spades which, for the record, is open source (in the form of OpenSpades), totally free, has mod support, and self hosted servers.
Thanks for the reference, ever heard of that game!
So funny when a corpo is forced to seem positive about something where there is absolutely no positive way of spinning it. It has this surreal energy where the person doing PR seems almost uncanny, like some kind of lizard person.
I’m not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could’ve had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.
Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don’t trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it’s typically lies or false claims…or they make cinematic trailers which don’t even represent the game at all because… cinematic.
See stardew valley for a prime example.
I’m not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that’s a minority of advertising these days
Marketers actually place these into different categories of advertising goal. One kind might just exist to make people aware of a product and its role (eg, vacuum cleaner attachment) whereas others spend longer convincing customers it’s something they want/need. There’s yet another category that I think relates more to direct advertising and isn’t as common for mass products like games.
I don’t think this game even lasted long enough for word of mouth to have popularized it. I didn’t hear about it until it was dead. I am wondering how many players Helldivers 2 had at 11 days (not a great example because it was an existing IP with existing fans). Could they have made it if the game had actually been good? I am not sure. Shutting down super fast got them more publicity than anything else they did.
I’m not saying that would be a better experience for players, just that if they wanted it to succeed they should probably have done more marketing.
That can even be a guide to many things like tools, if it’s pricy but has good word of mouth and not heavily advertised (sometimes the biggest expense) then it might just be worth the cash
it really lasted less time than liz truss
i think it’s exactly 1 scaramucci
I love how it’s worded like concord is a beloved game that is shutting down after a decade
To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there’s some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.
Imagine working years on something and every time leadership has a meeting they keep asking you to add even more bullshit or change some stupid stuff. Must suck to be a game dev, I feel for them.
All 15 of them
Being a little generous there, bud
I didn’t know it existed until a popular streamer begrudgingly “reviewed” it at the last minute. Found it strange that there was zero marketing for such an expensive and long developed investment.
My guess is that they knew it was going to be a shit game, but realized too deep in the development phase. So they just released it as soon as possible and didn’t waste more money on it (marketing). My guess is that the released it instead of cancel just in case they were wrong and people actually liked it.
The only reason I can think to release it as it was, was for tax write odd purposes with how much money it was going to lose.
The Uwe Boll strat
Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I’m willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.
Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn’t terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.
I’m confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.
It’s a shame. This was exactly the game my husband was looking for - Overwatch minus Blizzard
Have him try deadlock. Valve is a much better option.
Oh don’t worry, there’s going to be more.
A lot of companies are working on live service games in hope of being the next overwatch/destiny.
Some even have multiple (like Sony) in the hope that even one of them takes off.
Holy hell that was quick from the announcement to shut down. Did they have a 2 week free trial on the servers so they had to get out today?
Lawbreakers was an excellent game that was killed by executive stupidity.
I thought it was killed by having stupid design around game objectives and not letting you tweak those rules yourself.
Don’t forget the fact that is was a free-to-play game with a $30 price-tag.
That’s what killed it for me. I really enjoyed the Lawbreakers beta, but paying $30 for a game that would either die at a fixed price or quickly shift to F2P made no sense.
Honestly. I kinda would have liked to try concord, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to pay to try it.
The game had an open beta and only 2 thousand people played it, no one cared.
It’s okay. They’ll try again.
