Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
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.
All ten of them
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.
All 15 of them
Being a little generous there, bud
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.
Yeah, they definitely didn’t market it very well, at least to the PC crowd. It seems the PlayStation version is doing much better, with advertisements in the PSN store.
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’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
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.
It was featured in a PlayStation showcase last year. The most notable part of the trailer was a burger. I’m not kidding.
Anyone who paid any more for this game should get their money back immediately.
They are. The makers announced refunds along with the cancellation.
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.
The Culling 2 shut down completely in just 2 days
It remained online for six weeks, though.
And they didn’t have quite the same budget
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.
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.
How does a f2p game cost $30?
Executive said, “Fuck it, we’re charging $30”. He thought people would pay that even though its main competitors were f2p.
So it’s not f2p then?
Ultimately, no. It was going to be at first but prior to release, it changed models and ultimately stayed at $30 until it died.
You know what f2p means to me? It means you can play the game for free but the experience is guaranteed to be miserable because you’re going to have relentless ads crammed down your throat for skins and other bullshit I couldn’t give a single fuck about, and no matter how much you pay it never stops.
So if it’s between that and just paying $30 for the game, I’ll take the $30 every time. I avoid f2p games like the plague.
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.
Freegunners never die, hell yeah 😎 fucking cool tweet
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.
Even if it’s an absolute shit game.
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.
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.
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.
I feel it’s rather fair to give them a pass on this one. Games with a player base and longer than a passing fart of time in the market? Sure. This was a failed product. They issued refunds. This is a situation where pushing your luck just backs someone into a corner.
We can hope they’ll flip the assets and remodel into another title.
So did anyone manage to platinum it?
I heard from someone on Discord that there are 7 platinums.
Not sure if that’s wholly factual, but if so those are the rarest plats…ever?
Looks like 17. Doubt they had much fun at the end.
Yeah that looks like quite a grind. Woof.
Did this post receive more engagement than the game itself?..
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).
