PloverNutter

@get2sammyb to play devil’s advocate here, does Hulst have a track record green lighting unpopular games? This could be a case where the game lined up with his personal tastes as although Concord was far from popular it did have some fans. It is fair to say at one time or another every gamer has really enjoyed a game that the majority disliked or outright despised. It could be in this case the gamer liking the unpopular game was in a powerful position to fund said game. Just giving a different perspective before the gaming community gets the pitchforks and torches together to go after Hulst.

@Kienda This one seems less like a money grab to me than the Zero Dawn remaster. Right now if you look up reviews of Days Gone they are all about the PS4 version that got launched with a bunch of game breaking bugs that were eventually fixed so it paints the game in a bad light. If they release a true PS5 version then it wipes the slate clean of the bad launch. People would look up Days Gone PS5 version reviews which are likely to score higher due to the lack of bugs as that was the main issue with the original release. This feels like a do-over for the IP with the recent news that the SIE CEO wants more franchises on PlayStation and Bend Studio finally clarifying after all these years that Sony didn't cancel a sequel to the game

Maybe this is Sony's way of seeing if the IP could become a solid franchise. The launch of the game with all the bugs really hurt its sales on the PS4 so remastering it for PS5 with (hopefully) zero issues, adaptive trigger/rumble support, and no load times could get people interested in the game. If it sells well then Sony could then greenlight a sequel. This could also be why Bend Studios recently clarified that they decided not to go ahead with the sequel and it wasn't Sony who cancelled it. Seemed odd that they would clarify that point now instead of sometime in the last 2-3 years it has been going around.

@Areus I am happy to oblige. Honestly Days Gone was a sleeper hit for me last gen and probably in my top 3 favorite exclusives of the PS4 era, behind Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank 2016.

I am guessing this would add the hd rumble and adaptive trigger support which would be interesting with the bike mechanics as well as get rid of the load times. The PS4 version definitely runs great on PS5 with 60fps and checkerboard 4K resolution but I can see this version as a do over for the IP in Sony's eyes.

A big problem with the game's release was that it was on the PS4 hardware that really couldn't handle it well and the studio was forced to release it in a very buggy state which they eventually patched out. If you look at any review for the game and the negatives boil down to performance and glitches, nothing about the game content. Sony could be testing the waters to see if a PS5 version that is actually working at launch sells enough to warrant a franchise. The SIE CEO did say that playstation needs more franchises after all.

You forgot that All 4 One and Full Frontal Assault exist

@PsBoxSwitchOwner yes after they had to zoom in and enhance the images and even then the differences were minor. This isn’t stuff people are going to notice while playing games and only matter if you spend time analyzing every frame as your job working for Digital Foundry.

@themightyant this isn't people "overreacting because they got priced out" from buying a PS5 Pro. It is because at $700, which is $200 more than the disc base PS5, there isn't even a guarantee that all games can run at 4K 60fps. Sony already admitted that not every PS5 game will be capable of doing that on the Pro so really what is the point of the upgrade if it only offers a marginal upgrade for some games. At least with PS4 Pro it advertised 4K with HDR for all supported games with the option to keep base PS4 resolution but at a locked 60fps. The PS5 Pro feels like Sony just put out the Pro due to a sense of obligation as it is halfway through the PS5 lifecycle and to make money despite the tech not being advanced enough in this time to provide an actual upgrade over the base model. Unless there are a bunch of extra features Sony has yet to advertise then there has yet to be anything shown off to justify the PS5 Pro's existence.

@__jamiie Honestly I do and I think the reason people think Sony hasn't pushed the limits of the PS5 yet is because they are still thinking with an old mindset. For most of video game history game console generations have been defined by their graphical upgrades. 8 Bit to 16 Bit. 2D to 3D. SD to HD. With each iteration though the graphical differences between generations gets smaller and smaller, reaching a point of diminishing returns. There is a reason that 8K video has been abandoned by pretty much all types of media since the difference between it and 4K is so small that the general consumer does not care.

If you look at the PS4/XB1 era the differences between games released at launch and the games still releasing for them today do not look much different in terms of graphics, while there was a much larger difference between the looks of games released at the beginning and the end of the PS3/360 era. Now developers are focusing on such minor things to make games realistic, such as characters' pupils actively reacting to changes in light, that most gamers don't notice but claim that devs aren't doing anything new. We also need to look past just the graphics resolution and polygon counts to realize how much of a step up this generation is. Loading times are pretty much non existent for most games these days, especially first party games. That is a huge deal that most people simply ignore for some reason. Then there are the physics engines making games react in a way that they would in the real world. Ray tracing alone is insane in that games can now simulate realistic light particles in real time. As someone who studied optics for years and had to use advanced engineering computers to run simulation of light particles, having it be done well in a console while also running an entire game should be blowing people's minds but instead they have gotten so numb to things that all they care about is pixel count.

@Yozora146_ that 2 mil is made up by fans. Sony has not given a concrete sales number since 6 weeks after launch when they showed the headset selling 600k but with a graph showing sales already plateauing

@get2sammyb did you also test it with a pair of PS earbuds connected to the system? It appears that the hub can only show the battery level of 3 devices at a time so it would make sense to combine both VR controllers into one icon when you surpass that limit since you can't turn off one controller with the other staying on

@__jamiie This is just completely wrong. The reason there are graphics vs performance modes now isn't because devs are "lazy". The truth is that it is the opposite. The PS3/360 era may be the first HD era of gaming but the details on the models themselves were still very much as simple as they were in the PS2/Xbox era. Now devs are individually designing every strand of hair on characters' heads that have realistic physics instead of just doing a singular LEGO style hair piece. The ground and walls are modeled to have actual texture instead of simply having 2D texture images slapped onto them. Same with the clothes characters wear. Devs are choosing to utilize the increased processing power to put an absurd amount of detail into their games and that is why every game can't be 4K 60fps unless it is highly stylized such as Borderlands 3.

Also do you think every game in the PS3/360 era ran at 1080P 60fps? That most certainly wasn't the case. That was a rarity. If a game was advertised as 1080P it most definitely ran at 30fps and if it ran at 60fps it had a 720P resolution. This has always been a thing with gaming. At least now games are giving players the option to pick what they want prioritized instead of going "just deal with whatever we choose for you"

@Weebleman Bend admitted a couple years back that they pitched a sequel and Sony said no

@SMcCrae95 this guy sucks but Days Gone is a really good game, even great if playing on a PS5 so it’s does 4k at 60fps. The first hour is rough but after that the game really shines. The problem was that they released it as a buggy mess and it should have been delayed. Maybe even just had made it a PS5 launch title as the hardware makes it run better than a lot of games released even today.

@TheMysticOne this is never going to happen. The game failed and isn’t coming back. Plain and simple

I really wouldn't call this live service. First is that there is obviously no way for Sony to profit from these updates since there was no monetization at all. They just gave out a free update to the free tech demo installed with every PS5. Second is that these updates weren't planned in advance from the game's launch. It was simply a nice addition to a fun little game. You wouldn't call Ratchet and Clank 2016 live service because they eventually added the bouncer to everyone regardless of pre order years later.

I wonder what would have happened if Firewalk had stayed independent and released Concord on their own. It certainly wouldn't have sold better but how long would the servers been kept on for? Would Firewalk have kept the servers on for months in the hopes that they can gain a playerbase resulting in them going bankrupt. Sony owning Firewalk and having the foresight to shut down the servers immediately might be the only reason the developers have a job still if Sony decides to keep the studio open.

@CutchuSlow Nope and what would making it free to play accomplish anyways? People still aren't interested in it and to make it f2p they would have to remove a lot to put it behind a paywall so not very enticing. The only way to get people interested would be rework the game into something entirely different and that would cost way too much money for pretty much guaranteed no money made back.

This would be like calling Super Smash Bros a graveyard of dead IP since over half the franchises represented in that game series haven’t had a new game in over two decades. Wait, no one ever tries to say that about Smash Bros so why even bring it up about Astro Bot unless you are trying to start discourse.

@get2sammyb my thoughts exactly. This reminds me of the days when a game would come out and have not only a strong single player mode but fully fleshed out multiplayer and sometimes co-op. Like the Transformers Cybertron games

@DennisReynolds space marine 2’s early access starts on the 5th so a day before. Verdict is still out on that game though as Saber’s track record is really hit or miss. Reviews are supposed to come out tomorrow so we will see how much this will affect Astrobot which I think will sell really well as it has been a while since there has been a good 3d platformer

@Balaam_ oh those games are worse from a technical standard but the thing is that they still sold enough to at least keep the lights on for more than 2 weeks. Concord really is the new standard for biggest gaming flop of all time along with ET, and like ET I think it’s failure is indicative of a wider problem in the industry with another video game bubble burst imminent.

On a side note the new trailer for Mario and Luigi Brothership just revealed the game takes place in Concordia. Now we just have to wait and see if Astrobot has us finding Concord special bots on the day Concord shuts down.

@colonelkilgore not to mention their preview of concord that called the game great and their preview of Marvel Rivals that deliberately said it was not as good as Concord

@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

@SleeplessKnight not even just modern. An argument can be made this is the new ET of gaming.

@rjejr They are refunding the game only because they are shutting the game down within the first month. People could make fraud claims on their credit cards within this timeframe. If the costs to run the servers for a couple more weeks wasn't more than the amount of money made from the sales they would have waited until October and not offered refunds

@Frmknst Way more than that. I work in that industry and the amount of power and money it takes to run these servers is huge. It isn't like they can just add or remove servers to accommodate a playerbase as it is based on software limitations. It would be the same amount of servers for 10 players or 1,000,000. The servers would cost tens of thousands per month to keep online, especially if Sony was renting them out from a realtor which is a common practice for even major businesses.

@LordFunkalot not with that episode of Secret Level coming up all about Concord. Unless they convince Amazon to scrap that episode entirely it will be an everlasting reminder of their failure

I just remembered there will be a whole episode of Amazon's Secret Level based around Concord in December. The game won't even exist at that point anymore and Sony paid for that episode to be made. God damn that is going to sting for Sony.

Wow. This is really is the biggest failure in video game history

@PuppetMaster WB did force Rocksteady to make the game live service. Jason Schreier released an in depth article explaining how WB just told them to make a Suicide Squad game. Rocksteady’s ceo Sefton Hill decided to make the game a live service game after seeing Fortnite’s and Destiny’s success as development started in 2017. This was all on Rocksteady and not the “big bad publisher” like gamers always parrot when they don’t think for two seconds.

@Boxmonkey the people at the top who made the bad creative decisions all moved on from Rocksteady about 2 years ago. Sefton Hill and a bunch of the top developers and executives at Rocksteady left to create their own studio once they realized they made a ***** game. They realized that gamers are stupid as most believe because they weren’t there when the game launched then they had nothing to do with Suicide Squad, despite working on the game for 5.5 years.

@nessisonett I mean the QA department did drop the ball pretty hard with this game. When the game launched it auto completed the story for people, spoiling the ending as soon as they started to play. Then there are the several bugs that make the game unplayable. The fact that all of these major things got past the QA department means they definitely were not good at their job

@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.

@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.

@OmegaStriver Concord has always planned to have micro transactions. The developers stated that the cosmetic store would launch I. October. This is similar to how the new Tekken game didn’t launch with micro transactions so it wouldn’t be in the official game description.

@trev666 best case scenario is that Firewalk becomes a support studio for Sony to help with the development of other first party games from a pure busy work perspective. The game doesn’t have any bugs or technical issues so the developers could be helpful when another studio needs extra hands on a big project. I just don’t see them ever being allowed to make a game on their own anymore. This is arguably one of the worst video game flops of all time, on par to the Atari ET game being so bad they had to bury it in the desert.

If Netease is essentially dead already I wonder what that means for Marvel Rivals as they are the main developer on that game. Will it be the one part of the company spared so the game gets continued support as it is already popular, or will they launch the game in December but not update it ever?

@Zeke68 since there has been no official announcement for the console and this tweet is the first bit of information we are getting on it, then yes you did dream that up

No disc drive would be an incredibly stupid decision as it would deter any owner of the original PS5 with a disc drive not to upgrade, resulting in far fewer sales. My guess is that this person only just saw the digital edition and is assuming there will be no separate disc version or the dev kit sent out didn’t have a disc drive as the original PS5 dev kit didn’t as well

@Loamy the devs are the ones who decided to make this game what it is though. Firewalk worked on this game for 6 years as a fully independent studio before they got bought by Sony. The studio is made up of a bunch of ex Activision and Bungoe devs who got fed up with making COD and Destiny. This is supposedly their uninhibited artistic vision. At a certain point the developers need to be held accountable for when a game is poorly made instead of blaming it on the “suits” all the time.

@DennisReynolds Maybe after the leaks Insomniac pulled what my parents did with Christmas/birthday presents. "If you sneak a look at your presents early you get nothing for Christmas/birthday"

@DennisReynolds You would think but that Venom spin off is supposed to come out first in 2025 with Wolverine in 2026. With Insomniac waiting until just 3 months before Spider-Man 2's release date to finally show off gameplay I doubt we see Wolverine any time soon

@atoqir Sony really did think this game was going to be a huge hit for them with all the marketing they have done for Conord such as this tv episode and the aforementioned limited edition controller. This stuff is planned out years in advance. What is so funny as Sony clearly bet on the wrong horse as for Helldivers 2 they had 0 marketing for it. If Sony was smart we would have had a helldivers controller and this episode would be about the helldivers universe but we aren't so lucky. The only official merch from Sony are those shirts and mugs clearly thrown together quickly in photoshop

@8bitOG Just want to point out that this game was in development for over 5 years while Firewalk was a completely independent studio and there was no "upper management" to tell them what to do. Sony acquired the studio with a bit over a year of development left before release. I doubt in the last year Sony suits forced the devs to make drastic changes to the game that made it so unpopular. This one is all on the devs

@MFTWrecks Not even just dead on PC but PS5 too. On the PS store on the best selling filter it is currently #44 on the list just a few days after release. For context game like COD Black Ops 3 which came out 9 years ago are higher up on the list. There isn't any recovering from this awful launch. I really didn't think there would be a worse game launch this year than Suicide Squad but here we are.

@somnambulance you say all those games deserved to fail but their fans would say otherwise. Just because you like Concord doesn’t mean it deserves to be a success. In fact all those games you listed have a bigger fan base than Concord does. The Suicide Squad subreddit has 10x more members than the concord subreddit. The truth is that Concord released in a heavily populated genre and not only did nothing different than the existing hero shooters but also does nothing better, and in some design choices not as good. When your competition is objectively better than your game and free while your game is even just half the price of a normal game these days then it was sent out to fail.

@UnlimitedSevens hard to say as the devs actually did make several changes to the early access version on Steam to make it more like Helldivers 2 after its runaway success. The game’s community also hates how HD2 has gotten way more press and recognition from the film series actors while an official starship troopers game hasn’t, so I can see the devs being petty like this.

@DennisReynolds I think they meant a PS5 remake of bloodborne rather than a sequel. People have been wanting that game to be in 60 fps since the PS4 pro got announced