I’m 100% of the opinion that the main reason Concord failed is because it didn’t get any advertising. The first time I heard about Concord was the news that it completely flopped at launch and I wasn’t the only one. When that’s the first thing people hear about the game they’re not even going to bother to get interested in what the game is about. To this day I don’t even know if Concord had any redeeming qualities because I haven’t even seen any gameplay outside of 5 second no-context clips. Even bad games receive better numbers than Concord.
Highguard is going to have more staying power than Concord solely on the fact that it actually had an advertising budget.
What advertising though? They didn’t have to play for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising that Highguard, with multiple devlogs and previews, IIRC.
Concord didn’t have any advertising because the data was showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been throwing good money after bad.
But after they revealed it? Yes. From their reveal to their beta test, it seemed clear the game was not going to find an audience; definitely not enough to recoup $200M-$400M.
You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.
I’m 100% of the opinion that the main reason Concord failed is because it didn’t get any advertising. The first time I heard about Concord was the news that it completely flopped at launch and I wasn’t the only one. When that’s the first thing people hear about the game they’re not even going to bother to get interested in what the game is about. To this day I don’t even know if Concord had any redeeming qualities because I haven’t even seen any gameplay outside of 5 second no-context clips. Even bad games receive better numbers than Concord.
Highguard is going to have more staying power than Concord solely on the fact that it actually had an advertising budget.
What advertising though? They didn’t have to play for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising that Highguard, with multiple devlogs and previews, IIRC.
Concord didn’t have any advertising because the data was showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been throwing good money after bad.
So they knew it was going to be a complete failure before they even released it?
But after they revealed it? Yes. From their reveal to their beta test, it seemed clear the game was not going to find an audience; definitely not enough to recoup $200M-$400M.
If it seemed so clear I’m sure you’ll have no problem backing that up with some actual sources.
You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.