"Concord servers are now offline. Thank you to all the freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy"

Games@lemmy.world – 13 points – 2 weeks ago

Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.

It's definitely not the fastest but it's really close.

The fastest full shutdown currently belongs to The Culling 2 which only lasted 2 days between launch and being closed completely.

The Day Before is another big example of a game that lasted an incredibly short time but despite that game lasting 4 days before no longer being sold, the games servers stayed on much longer than that meaning that it was shut down after Concord despite being cancelled before it.

Why did culling 2 fail? Wasn't the first game pretty big?

Including joke reviews, the game had a 16% rating and was so poorly made that within those 2 days it killed the popularity of both Culling games extremely quickly.

The first game was popular because it was a twist on the genre while the 2nd one was a quickly thrown together (almost exact) clone of DayZ.

The word scam was thrown around a lot in those 2 days.

Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, "it would be cool to make a game that does x, let's do that and see if it will make money" while the second one was more of a, "all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we'll make a ton of money!"

They really know how to cull their player base.

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.

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.

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?

Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must've had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what's technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam's most played with 137k concurrent players).

Spawn killed

All ten of them

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.

When God of War was popular, they wanted a God of War of their own.

When Call of Duty was popular, they wanted a Call of Duty of their own.

When Overwatch was popular, they wanted a Overwatch of their own.

When Fortnite was popular, everyone wants their own Fortnite.

Rinse and repeat.

I mean sometimes it works. Pubg was the big Battle Royale in town until Fortnite (as a battle Royale) came along. League of Legends too. The problem with Concord is it took about 6 years to come out so it couldn't draft on the hot trend.

League of Legends is a pet peeve of mine, since one bad person took down DotA forum, stole ideas from it, created LoL, and acted like a big shot. He wasn't alone, but you know what I mean.

To this day I think that Blizzard hates esports, because they left DotA with 0 support, and only after many years of Dota 2 they created Heroes of the Storm, which was even more watered down than LoL.

And LoL is such a simple game, which is OK, but once you actually understand Dota, it doesn't come anywhere close. It brought nothing innovative. Which is sad.

Source: I played hundreds of hours, and put hundreds of dollars into LoL back in the ~2010.

Conceptually, LoL filled a hole. DotA was DotA, complicated, hard, lots of nuance. Some people wanted an even more complicated DotA. Heroes of Newerth filled that hole. Some people wanted a simpler DotA. LoL filled that hole.

I personally preferred HoN, but I can't fault people for preferring LoL.

Oppai Succubus Academy exists. So where the fuck are all of my Oppai Succubus Academy clones?

It’s not like any game is completely original anyways. They all take inspiration from games that come before, some more than others.

While that is true, the issue is that they are trend chasing for a quick cash grab and put in next to no effort to make the game good or listen to consumers saying that this isn't what we want.

It's not like gamers are rejecting live services as a whole, because there are still quite a lot of successful live service games. And when a live service is successful, it's really successful. So much so that it's worth it to investors to keep gambling on them, one hit can compensate for a dozen flops.

This is the truth people don't want to admit, but Final Fantasy XIV being successful carried square enix through their darkest days when everything wasn't making a profit. Cygames using all the money they got from the granblue gacha to finance an action rpg and a fighting game, etc.

They serve as a safety net, we lost mimimi last year, I don't think anyone would say they made bad games, but they just didn't sell enough so they closed.

Problem with trying to get a Fortnite was that Epic was wanting to get it's own PUBG after realizing that trying to get their own Minecraft was a failed endeavor. They quickly pivoted the game formula from a Minecraft type tower defense to a battle royale game.

Concord should have seen the writing on the wall early on and pivoted it's game into something else thats flavor of the month.

Wait wasn't the original concept for fortnite actually a wave based tower defence game? I remember being excited for that and then battle royal happened and I lost all interest.

People paid for that original game too, it wasn’t free. I don’t assume they got refunded. It was basically a massive bait and switch.

I was a sucker and my friend convinced me to get and pay for the orginal game. I think it was only like 3-4 weeks after the game was available when they shoehorned battle royal mode in. It wasn't long after that before they switched to free to play and gave us I think in game currency that was worth the $60 or whatever the game costed at launch. I stopped playing altogether because I paid for a co-op PvE tower defense game, not a free to play PvP battle royal game.

Yeah, the original trailer made it clear they were trying to go after the Minecraft style of gathering resources, building up a base and fortifying it, then defending from zombie mobs at night, like the Minecraft mobs.

Maybe not so much the pixel/block graphics, but the ideas behind Minecraft, with an actual objective, which Minecraft lacked.

https://youtu.be/hHTE5xg9E-g

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.

Did this post receive more engagement than the game itself?...

it really lasted less time than liz truss

I'm really happy that the one time I got to visit the UK was during Liz Truss' time in office. It was wild seeing the protestors, and when I landed back at home I heard she was gone.

It's like the UK decided to be welcoming by putting up a whole Chaotic Prime Minister just for the benefit of your visit.

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

Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.

The Day Before only made it 4 days.

On 11 December, four days after The Day Before launched to widespread criticism, Fntastic announced their closure, stating that as their game had "failed financially" they could not afford to continue operating. The Day Before was removed from sale on Steam later that day.

Day Before was basically a scam though, and they kept the servers up for a few weeks.

By all accounts this was a real game. It's just that nobody wanted to play it.

In the last 2 years we've seen these live-service games fail at launch time and time and time again. The execs need to just accept that Fortnite already exists and you can't force that kind of success.

It remained online for six weeks, though.

And they didn't have quite the same budget

Even if it's an absolute shit game.

https://stopkillinggames.com

This game could be a great resource about what not to do.

Didn't they give out refunds? That seems like the right thing to do when a massively multiplayer game is dead on arrival.

Doesn't change the fact that the few fans it had can't play it ever again, game is still killed because it had no support for community servers, just matchmaking.

I for sure would prefer to host my own The Crew and not getting a refund.

I believe the game was 10 days old when they shut it down. There are no concord fans. You can't have fans in 10 days.

Yeah, they did handle it correctly. All things considered. Even in an utopian future where the stopkillinggames.com campaign is successful. Personally I would still prefer to keep all games alive.

Atleast offer a self hosted option to keep it alive, don't even include the anti-cheat or denuvo as that can be proprietary stuff.

Honestly, I'm a bit skeptical of StopKillingGames. It feels like a good thing, but it also comes off as naive. Like the whole "just distribute the server" requirement is impossible with the way modern games are developed, and may be cost-prohibitive to implement for most developers well into the future. Besides, some games really are less like a painting and more like a musical; performance art necessarily has to end at some point, so it's all about the experience and the memories. Nobody complains when the actors take a bow, because that's the expectation.

Louis Rossman sometimes rubs me the wrong way, but he usually makes really good, nuanced points: https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8?si=m4QGHfHY1fOtITpw

Keep the debate alive, because we all love playing games.

"Just distribute the server" isn't a requirement. It has never been a requirement. Who said that's a requirement?

It's just a possible solution. And to me it seems to be the easiest since that is the exact way it used to be done.

What exactly publishers will have to do depends entirely on if the campaign is successful and how the resulting laws are written. And may be as simple as an expiration date on all future game sales.

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.

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

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

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

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.