An important update on Concord
blog.playstation.com
Concord fans -- we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar. Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us. However, while many qualities [...]
  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
    0·
    4 months ago

    I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

    Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

    • DarthYoshiBoy@beehaw.org
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      4 months ago

      I think it’s too late for Amazon to be willing to take a bath on an episode of one of their new headline IPs. The show is coming December 10th. I’d be shocked if Amazon is going to be willing to just drop a whole episode of their show because the attached game launched flaccid. They’re doing a New World episode for goodness sake, so it’s clear that they’re very willing to push this vehicle for promotion all the way to the finish line even if the engine has dropped out and the wheels have ground down to nothing.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
        0·
        4 months ago

        I disagree.

        Amazon still owns and operates New World.

        All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

        They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

        The servers will be shut down in a few days.

        There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

        Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

        Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

        I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

        It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

        It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

        • DarthYoshiBoy@beehaw.org
          0·
          4 months ago

          They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

          All the more reason for Amazon to not give a fuck and release the episode anyway. They already expended the effort and money, they’ve probably already sold the ads to run against it, they’ve got streaming hour benchmarks to hit if they want to claim the show is a success, so everything is running in favor of Amazon taking a look at the shitshow the game is in and saying, “SHIP IT” for their Secret Level episode. Normies who aren’t super into gaming aren’t going to know that the game it represents is dead, and there’s a fair chance that Sony will pursue F2P explicitly so that it can not be when the episode airs so they can attempt to get some money from those people who will see the episode and want to play the game. The people behind “Love Death + Robots” are behind this series, they’re probably going to ship a good Concord episode that will make that bland mess of Live Service nonsense seem interesting whether or not the game is good or even alive.

          There are no announced plans to take it F2P

          The fact that the announcement says they’re taking the servers offline and looking at options to connect with “their players”, while Sony have also not just shut down Firewalk Studios (A wholly owned subsidiary of Sony) is more or less a full endorsement of the idea that they think they can make a go of this by going F2P. Studios that flat out fail don’t stick around in this day and age and the director of the game is saying that they’re looking at options to connect with “their players”, how is that not saying that they’re going to remove the one barrier to entry that everyone is talking about by taking the game free to play?

          Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

          I think you may have misunderstood, I didn’t mean to suggest that Concord was a headline IP, I was saying that Amazon considers Secret Level to be a headline IP for Prime Video and they’ve got zero fucks to give about what good (or bad) business the game their episode is based on is doing, they need butts in seats to watch their prestige video games anthology series from the makers of “Love Death + Robots” and I don’t think they give a single shit if Sony feels bad because their game didn’t make it and Amazon still launched an episode set in the same universe as the game.

          It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

          Not if ad sales has already written contracts for ads against a set number of episodes. Not if you have streamed hour targets that you need to hit for the show if you want to keep making future seasons of the thing. Not if you are not a gamer and don’t give any fucks about the stupid decisions that Sony made with the IP they probably paid you to make an episode about. There’s absolutely zero reason for Amazon to shitcan an episode of this show just because the game it’s based on was nonsense and everyone knew it years before the game ever launched, it’s an extra 30-40 minutes of space to stick ads and pump “hours watched” even if the episode is as bland as the game. Ads and hours are the only things that video platforms care about, they’re going to keep that episode unless there’s a contractual obligation to cancel it. I doubt that Sony had the foresight to put something in their contract that allowed them to shut things down if the game flopped, and even if they did, such a provision would usually mean that they’d have to pay Amazon some penalty to exercise that option which probably makes it cheaper for Sony to just allow it to move ahead.

          I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

          I would not take that bet. I also think the brand is dead. It’s got a year or two tops of being a shambling zombie, but you’re thinking too much like a rational person and businesses don’t think like that, they’re going to try to squeeze blood from this stone, it’s the only thing they know how to do.

    • DarthYoshiBoy@beehaw.org
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      2 months ago

      Well, I’m not above admitting that I was wrong. Kudos to you. I legit figured they’d let that corpse shamble along for at least a year as a F2P endeavor, but they seem to have reached a correct conclusion earlier than I would have credited them.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
        0·
        2 months ago

        Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

        I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

        I still doubt it.

        I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

        But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

        The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

        When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

        From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

        That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

        But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

        You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

        But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.