Concord Devs Maintain Radio Silence, Which Isn't Helping Matters

I am a vocal critic of this game, but my heart does go out to the devs, they’ve really tried the best they could with a failing formula that they wouldn’t have known all those years ago would quickly become so stale and unliked by many in the community.

If heads do roll (which they should), it should be execs only, but sadly I think we both know that’ll never happen, hoping the dev team has a great support network around them and they aren’t punished too harshly as a result of this disaster.

To be fair if I worked on a game for 8 years only for to have 100 concurrent players a week after release then I'd be too embarassed to talk about it too

Asking the devs to wade into social media to boost player morale demonstrates a complete disregard for the morale of the devs. Put yourself in their shoes for a second and ask yourself if you'd feel like tweeting anything right now. No, thank you.

I think, they missed the chance after the beta tests to make a longer break, to rework stuff and keep the public impression that they are in control of their product.
Now the public disaster is complete, and both the devs and SIE look helpless and out of control.
What’s clear: They have to do something. This current limbo is highly dangerous to the future prospects of this game and rhe studio in total.

The Call of Duty beta, Smite 2 launch, and new season of Overwatch all happening within a week was a recipe for disaster unfortunately.

Call the game a bust and give them factions to revive.

The open beta numbers should have had them rethink things imo

Yeah I get being concerned about the lack of communication but at the same time use your head. The game has flopped spectacularly unfortunately. What is there to say? I would imagine moral is at an all-time low at the studio. Give them some time to collect themselves and decide where to go from here. Wading into the waters of social media right now will only hurt morale further.

A lot of people say that they feel sorry for the devs, but honestly some of them were so Toxic when replying to people, I don’t really care that this game is failing miserably. I hope that the higher ups at Firewalk get booted out.

I hope all the ground floor devs keep their jobs as there is actual talent there seeing the graphics (not art style though), sound and gameplay more or less. The top people that were directing the game and making all the important decisions need to find a new home somewhere else.

The worst thing is they knew, at least from earlier this year, that this is gonna fail but didn't do anything for it. Too many veteran cooks burned the whole food. Sony, please close the studio!

@bossuche9 Which is also part of the problem. The fact they held their cards so close to their chest for so long is part of the problem. (I bet good money that is purely Sony's arrogance.)

They should have been having a MINIMUM of a year of alphas and betas of various degrees of openness to collect feedback and make changes.

They thought their ***** didn't stink and they were delivering the next big multiplayer hit. Had they actually engaged with the market more than a month or so before launch, they could have pivoted. But alas...

So how long before servers are shut and refunds are giving out? They aren't getting new players and those it does have will jump soon so Sony might as well take the loss.

I don't feel sorry for the devs though as they jumped on the hero shooter live service train long before Sony got involved. They saw Overwatch and thought they could copy it while offering nothing new of its own. Jim Ryan was a fool for taking this Dev on.

@DonJorginho Back in 2016 the hero shooter train was already crashing unless you were Overwatch. This was just cocky Devs thinking they could just copy the current trend and never backing down from it.

People are gonna lose their jobs. But at least everyone who wanted the game to fail got their wish 🤷🏾‍♂️

Gonna start calling this site PushConcord. 😩

@DonJorginho "execs only" a failure like this means a failure of the whole dev team. They got 8 years ffs

Firewalk know it's game over for them after they seen the abysmal open beta numbers. Then the game released with less and less active players on Steam is pretty much the nail in the coffin for Concord and the studio.

So right now Firewalk are waiting on Sony's decision if they gonna pull the plug for Concord and put the studio in the chopping block or not. My guess is Concord probably will live for another month or two but Firewalk is finished.

It’s not ‘the devs’ fault, it’s execs for pushing a tired genre to its brink. If they hired a community manager, I’d assume they’d rather not even attempt to wade into this disaster.

@DennisReynolds "They aren't getting new players and those it does have will jump soon"

They are jumping by the day, each day the 24 hour peek gets lower and lower. By Tuesday it should be sub 100, I have never seen this before at some point I would love a documentary about this game.

It feels like they released the game with free common and uncommon skins. The store will have higher quality skins. Skins they should've used as defaults to get people interested in the game. Instead they wanted to pose as the "good guy" dev that gives everything on release, instead of a cash grab f2p

I genuinely think Sony are hoping now to divert attention away from this with Astro launching this week.

After Jim Ryan left Sony (+ 1 more exec deeply involved in the GaaS push if i remember right), i wonder if those that took over arranged the release dates of this and Astro accordingly. Then it gives them a distraction to work out all the many things they did wrong, and work out what they are going to do.

Also bare in mind this game was being used by JR's Sony as their 'Poster Child' for GaaS - so fans upset by this direction used this game as a target too.

That's terrible that the Devs are silent; the 1 thing you should not be when you're developing a life service game.
Obviously you have to get your ducks in a row and figure stuff out but the state of the game has been in the cards since it's reveal. Completely unacceptable

Concord taking 8 years to make when it's just a multiplayer game but The Witcher III only taking 3.5 years when it's a huge RPG (and a modern classic) is bonkers. The time didn’t go into character creation so where was it spent? As for its future, I honestly think the best thing to do is refund everyone for starters.

Poor horse flogged again. It’s dead already. Don’t need an article on every minuscule thing.

Of course they are going to stay quiet.

What else can they say? There’s nothing. They’ve poured years into a game they are (I would assume) proud of and thought people would like.

So yeah the articles on everything is pretty boring. Plenty of games flop.

@Frmknst I disagree. The Saints Row Reboot for example. Most people could have told you that ''waffle maker and student loan jokes'' is not the correct basis for a Saints Row game. That is not 80% luck.
Same here. Most people outside of whatever bubble the Concord devs were sitting in could have told them that these character designs were boring and the game average.

meanwhile pu$h$quare has been maintaining them clicks though .

i love it, this games gonna go down in history

There's probably a lot of anxiety and low morale within the studio right now, it must he playing on their minds if they are getting layed off or not which is not good especially if they have families to feed.

But unfortunately there's no other way this is going to go.

@nomither6 This criticism makes me chuckle. It is obvious from the amount of comments that people are interested in following this dumpster fire of a game. Why wouldn't PushSquare keep on making articles about it? Supply and demand.

Not sure what you expect the studio to say. If anyone should be talking right now, it's Hermen Hulst. He might or might not be responsible for this mess (we don't really know), but that's his position now.

I mean what are they supposed to say? They're prob feeling a little bit dejected atm, anything they post in support will absolutely get dogpiled on within seconds, you might as well be silent until they know whats going to happen. Bad situation all round tbh.

'Amidst the headlines decrying shrinking player numbers and abysmal sales figures..'

@Khayl, no one is decrying that. 'Decry' means to condemn or criticise as reprehensible. That's not what the articles PS put up did, they just reported on the news.

@breakneck "Japan Studios was mismanaged with most games not being successful except for BB and Nioh which were second party developments"

A bit correction.

It's true that Japan Studio was mismanaged especially with the work structure where they divided into multiple small teams who worked independently.

But outside Bloodborne and Nioh, they did produced a bunch of IP's that sold pretty well to the point they got multiple games or turn into a franchise such as:

• Ape Escape series
• Wild Arms series
• ICO trilogy with Shadow of the Colossus the best selling one
• Patapon series
• Everybody's Golf series
• Parappa the Rapper series
• Forbidden Siren series
• LocoRocco series
• Dark Cloud series
• Arc the Lad series
• Alundra series
• Gravity Rush series

Sure they didn't sold gangbusters like GOW, Uncharted, GT, Horizon, Spidey, or TloU. But they're definitely a success cause if not i doubt Sony greenlight a single sequel let alone turn those IP's into a series and keep Japan Studio alive for decades. Heck, Sony keeps porting, remastering, or remaking some of Japan Studios games because they knew those games sold quite well without them breaking the bank and spend AAA budget /game.

Also, Legend of Dragoon is definitely a success since it sold more than 1.1 million copies on PS1 and sold well as PS1 classic too. According to Shu Yoshida, a sequel was greenlight and in pre-production but it was cancelled for unknown reasons, which is unfortunate :/

They shouldn't fire the developers. Technically they are very talented. Played the beta and animation quality, fidelity, sound design etc are all top notch.

It is everything else that is lackluster and execs should take responsibility here because they made all the wrong decisions by letting this art design pass and didn't fight for a better business model that isn't outdated by 4 years.

Firewalk is 180 people according to the internet. They should replace top execs for this failure and make it a support studio to help out Sony their other main studios. That way everybody 'wins' from all this mess.

General observation but I've basically seen two "camps" when it comes to the developers: those who sympathise with the devs and those who say they've all failed. I feel like that's too simplistic, as not all of them do the same job.

The devs responsible for the technical side of the game clearly haven't failed. Those responsible for the moment-to-moment gunplay and the animators bringing the characters to life, etc. They've done a fantastic job, and Sony should hold on to them, even if it's not at Firewalk in its current form.

But the creatives who came up with visual design and those responsible for higher level design, that's a different story. Might seem harsh, but I don't think much of value would be lost if they weren't involved in the video game industry anymore. They've done a questionable job at best, and a spectacularly bad one if we're being less generous.

Whatever comes out of this mess, I hope the right people end up in the right places. Not holding my breath though.

Let’s hope Herman and co take this as a message to move away from their push into gaas games.

@breakneck Okay, insert literally any original game that took less than 8 years to make then. Bloodborne. The Last of Us. Overwatch (technically). Fortnite. Destiny. Take your pick.

If the game was a f2p ps5 exclusive it would fare 1000x times better. Also free battle passes for ps+ subscibers and you are golden.

They weren't radio silent when calling people "talentless hacks"

All that is happening right now is a long discussion on how to shut this embarassment down and avoid as much damage as possible. The game is completely dead. There is no saving it. No, the F2P option will not work. They are busy writing a very carefully worded announcement that will attempt to shift blame and make excuses to the market and toxic gamers. They will never admit that every decision was bad. Character design alone should have been a flag. Someone put it out of it's misery so everyone can move on. I'm sure the developer is blaming everyone else for being toxic.

I've seen several posts about how the developers have been toxic towards gamers now. What is the story here? I genuinely have no clue.

@Ainu20 One of the devs tweeted (which has been removed) calling people who critizied the game as "talentless hacks"

@Oram77 I've seen it now, obviously not a smart thing to do. But on the other hand, it's also my problem with social media (one of many). One person associated with a developer can tweet something and suddenly it puts the entire studio in a bad light, while we don't know if that sentiment is shared by the other devs.

@Steel76 THANK YOU!!!! THIS!!!!!!

A week? That's nothing.

They are all getting fired and the studio closed. That's how these things go.

@zebric21 I don't think poor food served on golden plate with decorations for free makes it any better...

Must have crawled back under a rock or something

Lots of people saying “of course they will be silent” or “put yourself in the devs shoes”… lots of empathy which is nice but nowhere to be seen when Redfall released. Funny that.

Anyway yea the devs were pretty toxic in the replies I have seen on twitter. Think it’s just a disaster all round unfortunately.

@Nem they will probably find jobs at another studio and do the same unfortunately

@K1LLEGAL I have no idea how it was on here considering the game didn't launch on Playstation, but there was an enormous amount of sympathy and goodwill for Arkane Austin, so I'm not sure how that's supposed to be a "gotcha". They were widely perceived as being forced by Zenimax into a project they didn't want to do.

@djlard Gameplay is king and concord isn't bad in that department. Gunplay is more than solid.

Current state of worldwide gaming is pretty serious material for research. Someone should sit and make overall summary of it. Count everything and put it together. That should give us, and especially developers, a picture on which we can seriously predict future projects. Or did it somebody in last, let's say, 3 years?

@zebric21 Immortals of Avenum may be good game too, but I had to stop it playing simply because of extremly ugly characters.

@breakneck Sony didn't gave enough marketing push for Japan Studio games in the end of PS3 era because they put heavy focus on their western studios. This is why amazing game like Puppeteer doesn't sold well despite it got very positive reviews (80% at metacritic). It's a shame that Sony didn't market Puppeteer like they did with Astro Bot.

The same can be said for other Japan Studio games like 3D Dot Game Heroes, Rain, Tokyo Jungle, or Africa. They all good, fun, and unique AA games but there's no marketing push from Sony that makes people aware of their existence.

The Last Guardian was in development for 8 years not 10 and it has overall 82% metacritic. Some mixed review because Trico played like a wild animal that kinda hard to control. But it actually managed to sell between 1 or 2 million copies, which is better than ICO and SotC numbers on PS2 and in the same range as SotC remake on PS4.

GR 2 didn't sold a million which really unfortunate. But nonetheless it still a solid AA game that shows Japan Studio / Team Gravity quality. For GR 2, i didn't blame Sony because they gave decent marketing for the game with free anime interquel, free DLC Raven episode, and live action ads.

During PS4 era, Japan Studio only did a few games with other devs like Everybody Golf, Deracine, Bloodborne, Nioh, SotC remake, and Death Stranding, all those games sold really well except Deracine. But games that fully developed by them was only GR 2, Knack 1 & 2, and remaster of GR 1, Patapon, Parappa, and Loco Roco. Sony doesn't even greenlight Wild Arms 6 and Patapon 4 because Jim Ryan wants Japan Studio to do more AAA games after he became SIE president.

@DennisReynolds refunds will never be given out for Concord. Unlike the situation where Sony gave refunds for Cyberpunk 2077, Concord has 0 bugs and fully works as intended. If the game was unplayable from a technical standpoint then there could be a case made for refunds but that isn’t what is happening here.

The only thing wrong with the game is that there is not a large player base so the game won’t be supported long term. Even if Sony shuts down the servers next month no one who bought the game would be entitled to a refund. That is the thing with these always online live service games. There is a legal disclaimer that says the publisher has the right to end online services, thus making the game unplayable, at any time they see fit and the customer is agreeing to these terms with their purchase. As long as Sony doesn’t continue to sell the game on the PS store once the servers are no longer live since then the game would be unplayable Sony will never be in legal trouble and have no reason to give out refunds.

@K1LLEGAL Redfall was also riddled with technical issues. Its main issue wasn’t that it didn’t sell a lot but that there were so many bugs it was damn near unplayable at launch yet was released anyways. From a purely technical standpoint there is nothing wrong with Concord. Firewalk messed up from a creative standpoint but showed they could make a working game at launch (which is sadly not the norm these days), while Arkane Austin messed up from a technical standpoint as even with the final update the game is still a buggy mess. It is easier to have sympathy for someone making something really well done but no one is interested in, but not for someone who also did not make it well at all.

@PloverNutter If they turn of the serves by the end of the year as a sign of good faith i expect they dish out refunds.

Oh yeah those "legal disclaimers" and "T&C" they have in games are very sketchy at best and depending on the country don't hold up at all.

I think the best thing they can do at this point is shut this thing down. There’s nothing that can be done and the only thing this game is going to do is bleed more money. Any attempts to do anything is like CPR on a dead body.

The game on Steam has 38 players right now, less than even Suicide Squad. Not even enough for 4 games. Humiliation on a cataclysmic level. This will go down in gaming folklore with E.T. and Sonic 2006.

Imagine all the great single player, story-driven games we could be playing right now if studios would stop throwing these desperate, DOA multiplayer games at us.

I think they have bigger things to do then do a statement I think they are trying to fix the problem. If it's a mess they probably have more other important things to worry about the a public statement.

@DennisReynolds I font know why they should refund anything? The game just released it works and they are working on it. Cyberpunk didn't even run on a PS4 and it took Sony to make them do a refund. 😆

You really want them to kill of the game dont you. I have seen way worse games get let backlash from you.

I'm not one for multilayer games myself. But they cancelled Factions. The one multilayer game. With a huge amount of positive buzz from the community. And carried on to launch a new ip that no-one was interested in.

I'm just baffled at the state of Playstation at the moment.

Trouble is the main person who should be blamed is no longer at Playstation 'cough Jim'

So the only people who will really suffer is the devs which is such a shame. You can bet they put their everything into this game.

I don't know what could have been done differently. Whether better marketing would have helped. I don't know.

@PuppetMaster @breakneck here's a recent interview with the director of Silent Hill and Gravity Rush and according to him the reason he and a lot of his colleagues left was basically Sony wanted them to make a big budget AAA game but they didn't want to so they left and it led to the closure of Japan Studio.

https://gamerant.com/silent-hill-creator-leaving-sony-japan-studio-explanation/

@Flaming_Kaiser I'm being realistic this game is already on life support, it won't have a playerbase by the end of the year. Unless Sony put it on Plus i can't see this still being around this time next year. No i don't expect refunds but if the plug is pulled within the next few months Sony should do that even if they won't.

Yeah i am against this game why? I'm not a fan of over confident Devs/Pubs thinking they can follow a very crowded trend while adding nothing to it and expecting $40 for it.

You're starting to sound a bit obsessed, Push Square.

Rocksteady were also quiet after The Suicide Squad launched.

I have no sympathy for these people.

As I mentioned in previous comments about this disaster, they have more than enough money from Sony to do their own market research and trend analysis. Yet their ego and hubris not only made them went ahead with a dying genre (even back then if you're not Overwatch), charged a price tag for it (when most of your competitors are F2P), provided no single-player campaign (on a platform famous for its single-players), or AI bots to play with (to alleviate match-making if needed), and came up with some of the ugliest Marvel's reject characters I ever seen in any medium.

You don't need a degree in brand and marketing or be a product executive to see that the game would be DOA. You just need common sense.

The irony was also The Finals and The First Descendant were a launch success because they did provide something fresh on an already saturated genre. Something Concord yet again failed to provide.

This studio deserves to be shut down.

@DennisReynolds "Yeah i am against this game why? I'm not a fan of over confident Devs/Pubs thinking they can follow a very crowded trend while adding nothing to it and expecting $40 for it."

***** exactly.

@QiaraIris "and came up with some of the ugliest Marvel's reject characters I ever seen in any medium."

and in a few months the actual Marvel hero shooter is out for free.

@DennisReynolds Yep, I actually am looking forward to Marvel Rivals more and more. The final nail on Concord's coffin.

@QiaraIris Yeah i'm not a hero shooter guy but i'm excited for Rivals as i love Marvel.

@MrMagic Yeah i already read that interview. It's just sad that Sony / Jimbo wants Japan Studio to make AAA games when AA games always be their specialty. With limited / small budget, they can make experimental but fun games without too much pressure for reaching high target sales.

Also, Japan Studio games makes Playstation looks unique and really separate them from the competitors. Games like The Last Guy, Patapon, Loco Roco, Parappa, or Rain doesn't exist at Xbox or Nintendo platform. If Japan Studio only do AAA games then what we got probably generic games like Concord who follows the trend of live-service hero shooter.

@DonJorginho As someone who lost his job a year ago in the gaming industry because of executives' miscalculations. I agree with you. Those who will be laid off are those who carried out the orders, not those who gave them.

@Khwarezm89 sorry hear that hopefully you will bounce back

The odd thing is everyone at Sony knew this was coming months ago. They had the preorder numbers well in advance and would have known this game was on track to bomb spectacularly.

Explains the limited marketing in the lead up to release. Firewalk was ominously quiet before the game's launch. They already knew what was about to happen.

@Americansamurai1 Agreed, that game would sell no matter what

What do you want them to say? Nobody bought it and nobody is playing it, there's no point discussing any road map as it'll never happen. At this point I suspect they'll already be looking for jobs if they have any sense

What more can they say, their game is flopping, either they turn around and make single player games (which playstation gamers expected from ps5) or their studio will be closed maybe next month.

I think jim ryan kind of f sony with his decision, and he does it not caring for the result because he's already retired. Go out with a bang saying the future of playstation is bright because surely they will be swimming in mtx money from focusing on 1st party multiplayer games rather than one and done games (single player) and get really nice bonus before exiting the company.

@Icey664 yeah it would definitely be successful

@DennisReynolds Overconfident in what way?

They're talking now. Bye bye Concord.

@Flaming_Kaiser For going after a crowded market, offering nothing new and charging 40 for it.

@PloverNutter Yeah this didn't age well.

@DennisReynolds haha I didn't expect it to be shut down within 2 weeks. I was thinking they shut it down in December but 2 weeks is within the window where people can open fraud claims and sue the ***** out of Sony if they didn't offer refunds

@DennisReynolds Rather pay and have a decent release. But liveservice with the freemium model that is a bloody mess is probably the way to go then.

Those kids are trained well in the illusion of paying less and taking more from addicted people. With a dash of FOMO, time wasting and having to log is the way to go then I guess.

I don't even know if the game was that bad it looked like a solid quality game polished without a mess. I think personally the hate towards the game somehow was insane no idea why.

But people run through the fire for a payed €70 expansion like MW3. The message will be clear towards Sony I guess just make a free game that is a mess people like that better. Or milk and franchise to death.

And I do believe that they will go down a path that will no longer include anything but the standard build of main characters.

I do believe they should have had more basic/standard characters in the game the game looked good and fun. I believe with some love and time the could have had a chance.

The amount of hatred towards the game was off the charts the anti it's not a model is also somewhat baffling. I have so many games that are worse in every way still being around.