The Stillbirth of Concord

Showing up is not enough.

For two weeks in a row, Sony’s new (and now dead) “hero shooter” Concord has been a hot topic on my livestreams. It took eight years and supposedly 200 million dollars to make, and within two weeks of launch, servers are going offline, and Sony is issuing refunds to everyone.

What happened?

The graphics suck

Or, more accurately, the aesthetics. For decades now, the power of computer graphics has been presented as some measurable thing—render resolution, texture resolution, polygon count (touted on my Morrowind box), lighting effects, ray tracing, reflections—rather than as some qualitative thing. There are games for the Super Nintendo that remain beautiful, and there are games for the PS5 that look ugly as sin. Concord was in the latter category.

How we perceive “graphics” is not just a matter of fidelity or realism, but beauty. Take a look at some of Concord’s character designs:

No rhyme, no reason, no harmony at all. Rendering in great detail only showcases how hideous the game really is. Other pundits have pointed out that this is the result of diversity and equity programs or ideology, and that likely plays a part, but there is something much deeper wrong with the designs than the inclusion of an obese androgynous person.

Notice that the characters are overwhelmingly colorful. Every color is bright and mixed with white so that everything is sickeningly pastel. There is little contrast with anything dark. Characters have many colors on each of them, so they look like they are wearing clown suits. Purple and yellow, orange and blue, etc., are highly contrasting colors that would look good only on a comic page, not on a 3D-rendered model. In fact, most of the characters look like they were designed by modern comics artists—and that is not a good thing for the realistic 3D space. Everything looks amateurish, oversized, and ugly, an attempt to create zany, quirky, and unique appearances that, in context, become a sea of colored noise.

The truth is, graphics matter a lot in the gaming world, and these suck. Gamers, if they pay attention to them, are ridiculing them. Nobody was looking forward to looking at them on screen. So, they didn’t!

Concord is in a live service genre.

Going back eight years and seeing the success of a game like Overwatch might have spurred the creation of Concord. Live service games, especially starting with World of Warcraft, have been the obsession of the gaming industry because of their extremely high revenue potential. The problem is, as I addressed before: line does not always go up.

It is easy to look at WoW, with its 10 million subscriber peak, and think that making an MMO is the best idea in the world. It would be if you were able to either get all of WoW’s subscribers to get on your own game or conjure up 10 million new ones who have never considered playing an MMO before. Many games have tried and failed to unseat WoW because it’s not enough to show up. It’s not enough to be better. You have to be so much better that players will abandon the game they spend all their time and effort on to play yours. They have history in their game and sometimes status.

With live service games, most players play just one game in a genre and no others. One MMO. One MOBA. One Battle Royale. Perhaps they only play one online game at all. They can be time-consuming.

 In 2016, hero shooters were already an established genre. By 2024, they were mature. Few players are choosing to pick up games like Overwatch 2 or Apex Legends who haven’t played them or another game in the genre before. As a genre, it already had its peak some years ago. For Concord to be profitable, it would likely have to attract a large number of players away from those already successful, established games and attract a fair number of new players. It would have to be much better than Apex Legends to get players to abandon their contacts, leaderboards, friends, etc., and commit time to learning the ins and outs of a new competitive game and developing new skills to succeed in it.

The fact is, Concord was not good enough in the gameplay department to make anyone want to quit what they were doing and jump ship to Sony’s new project. I think it would likely be, given the budget, impossible for Concord to be successful given those limitations. The pie isn’t big enough, and Sony can’t add more to it. It was dead on arrival.

It’s a new intellectual property.

It is hard to build a fandom from nothing, especially when you are competing against either established games or extremely well-known licensed IPs.

I saw that Marvel was coming out with a hero shooter called Marvel Rivals. As a marketing point, all the interest is built in when you are using Marvel characters. The fandom will create buzz all by themselves. You have the advantage of using popular and time-tested visual designs from the comics and (importantly) the movies (which are in the 3D space). The game will look good almost by default. Notice the characters use fewer colors, they are more saturated, and there is more contrast throughout. The more stylized look improves the visual experience, and things “pop” more.

So, bridging the first two points, if you are going to be making a new intellectual property with new characters, they need to look at least as good as the established IP characters for people to gain an immediate interest in them, and Concord’s characters look like dollar-store knockoffs of more established games and properties. Beginning a property with a team of heroes is a challenge anyway. Marvel has the advantage of a roster of fictional heroes who have decades of stories and development behind them, usually in their own separate books and movies.

Sony could have helped themselves by including a solo campaign like Call of Duty, but they didn’t. The money is in selling skins, but if players don’t like the characters, they won’t ever bother buying them.

They won’t even buy the base game to begin with!

Conclusion

Concord might be a bigger flop than the ill-fated E.T. game for the Atari. It might be the biggest flop in the history of all media ever, which is quite a feat as it has the Star Wars show The Acolyte to compete with it. That show at least got a full season out and hasn’t been pulled from the streaming service. Disney can apparently do that for a tax write-off similar to destroying unsold inventory, which it did with the ill-fated Willow series on Disney+. Sony’s pull of the Concord plug only two weeks post-launch might be a similar maneuver to at least reduce their tax burden for what has been a down year globally, considering it might be impossible for Concord to ever earn back a return on investment. In that case, a few “lucky” people (less than 1,000 peak on Steam) got to experience the game before it was nuked.

But at least we got a cool controller out of it—probably the best aesthetic design to come out of Concord.

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