That didn’t go so well by wow standards. Paying extra to “avoid the late access” and the xp nerf after early access didn’t go over well with the players.
People can only spend so much time on a Live Service style game. They aim to be "The game you log into daily", but usually only kids have the kind of free time to grind these out week after week, let alone keep up with multiple.
Then, each have their own $10ish Battlepass, and you need to grind to get to the end of it. Aside from a new map or character, these are the bulk of 'new stuff' that gets added.
Gaming as a Service doesn't scale well on most people who can afford to whale out, once they've already found their slot machine.
Yeah I remember doing nothing but playing video games, especially these shooter games, as a kid, but now I only play games rarely and they tend to be of the “avant garde” variety—meaning, they’re often free or very low priced indie games from small developers (think of LISA, Undertale, Nikke Yumi, that sort of thing).
I have a little nerve damage, so it's hard for me to even play these kinds of games anymore. Combined with the fact that I like these kinds of games as it's usually been reasonable to drop in, play for a while, have fun and not dedicate a portion of my life to leveling up or mastery.
For me, the peak in terms of time investment are around Q3A and Unreal Tournament. So it's been a long while since I played regularly. What's funny is I want to play, it just gets frustrating when your hands/fingers just don't respond right.
Absolutely... I also played the original Team Fortress mod for Quake as well. Just a fun time to play in general. I think it was around Doom 3 that it was less fun to me. I mean, the more realistic looking environments (for the time) were really nice. And not to call out D3 in particular, just seemed that by then a lot of the fun in FPS games had waned a lot imo.
It will be cool if GPUs can maybe double/triple current performance on the high end and that reaches mid-tier. The opportunity for really immersive environments. That said, we need more compelling gameplay and too many studios seem trapped in the exercise of trying to extract maximum value over a compelling story. I think some of the politics in games holds them back as well. Of course, I'm no longer the audience for reasons in my prior post.
I bought a steam deck, I play old sega racers (Daytona, sega rally, outrun 2, scud race) mostly due to only having a few mins of free time a day. Also dedicating large amounts time to games feels really wasteful given how little time I have. (I'm in my forties with two kids)
Yeah but is that the only game you play? If so this is a typical amount of time to dedicate to a hobby or whatever, but an atypical time use pattern for gaming.
If it's only one of many games you play idk. Depends on how your wife and kids feel about it I guess, none of my business.
If I'm gonna grind some multiplayer thing, I just prefer for it to be MtG these days. I can spend my week casually thinking of a decklist, and see how it performs with live players on the weekend. Still leaves decent time for Elden Ring or something.
I've dropped maybe $500 on Valorant, but it takes too much mental energy for me to enjoy casually playing it anymore. I also don't want to rely on getting a full squad in order to have a good time.
Most games require a dedicated hardware device or beefier PC hardware. It is also easier to veg out on the alternatives than games which require more active engagement on the part of the player.
All can greatly filter your audience vs doom scrolling.
Sure but the comparable idea with Netflix is like one show. You watch that show and then it's done. It took you maybe 8 hours. This kind of game expects a player to log in week after week, dedicating hundreds and hundreds of hours over the course of years.
But players who want to do that are already invested in other games. They're not going to split out time to play this new one unless it's amazing. This thing was $40 and not well regarded. No one is really surprised at this result.
Yes, it really comes down to motivating users to play your game, either through network effect or by just being that good.
I was just pointing that the amount of time isn't the real issue, it's the competition for that time. Of course, the tighter that time is the tougher the competition will be, and the better a singular live service game needs to be.
Yep. I love gaming, and game nights with a squad, but I can't ass myself to follow every single option.
Also, back when I played Valorant, a regular match could be anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes long. Add up queue times, waiting for people to group up (because there's usually one more person who's almost online, etc), and waiting for the potato-pc users to load in, it could easily turn into 3 hours for 2 to 3 matches.
These days, I'd rather watch a movie, and be in a different chair than the one I'd spent my working day in.
You can't play competetive matchmaking with small kids around though. I had to drop Dota since too many games got ruined by the kids needing care and I was about to get dropped into the punnishment games bracket.
Yup, I pretty much stopped online gaming altogether once my son was born for this exact reason. And there's plenty of high-quality offline games out there if you're inclined to spend time playing and trying games. Game companies are in for a rough decade if they continue this $100million+ dollar outlay before game launch. MVP is a sound model.
To expand on that: there's also the issue that these games have to be (somewhat) competitive multiplayer games: multiplayer because otherwise there's no way to create enough content, and competitive since otherwise there's less of a reason to play the game for long periods of time.
If you've ever played a dead/dying competitive game as a newcomer you will know the problem this creates: since the people that stay around are either new or very dedicated players, the skill gap becomes gigantic, which turns of most new players.
if your game wins the Life-Service race, you draw other players in. If your game dies the very same structure that keep players around will prevent new players from joining.
Well it launched up against Deadlock, another shooter by a company people actually know, and which dominated streams for a bit. If nobody plays your game live on launch, then you don’t make sales.
Concord is more of an Overwatch competitor, not much to do with Deadlock which is more FPS LoL. Overwatch is basically dead already, for reasons that Concord didn't seem to have tackled, so not sure what their plan was there...
There are tons of indie shooters that sold way better than this game, saying this didn’t sell well because of a saturated market is just being dishonest. Read the actual reviews for the game and the reason it did poorly is glaringly obvious. The answer is not politically correct but it is true nonetheless.
Everyone I've seen actually review the game say the gameplay is just alright and the characters look pretty bad. Even if the characters looked like they were made by the overwatch team "alright" gameplay isn't going to sell for 40$ when literally all of your competition is free though.
Actually blaming it on the "politics" is also being dishonest. The game had 700 concurrent players on launch and then kept dropping all the way down to 60. Unless all but 700 of the gamers are caught up in taking ideological stances, there is no other explanation except that it was a mediocre game with unmemorable gameplay and characters that launched 8 years too late in a saturated genre with nothing new to offer.
They're not blaming it on politics. However the explanation can be politically hazardous (if you at all care what Twitter says, which you shouldn't).
Wanting to play as conventionally attractive/cool characters is not some sort of political stance. It's perfectly normal and unpolitical.
The act of saying the above out loud has become political in a few English-speaking places. However for the most part people just like to pretend it's been turned into a taboo subject.
Generally, there isn't a taboo political topic here at all. The few outliers on either far end of the spectrum are easy to ignore.
- already saturated competitors space (Overwatch and dozen of OW clones)
- very recent controversy of Helldivers game requiring a Sony account
- social justice politics
So it's mostly politics, but I really don't believe Overwatch clone could be successful, unless it tries to do something very unique. Concord had nothing. Their main hook was 'nextgen graphics' and a movie-like trailer. And as we can see, good graphics isn't enough to sell a game.
It's insane that they are giving up so soon. They released it with basically no advertising. Even if you ignore the real issues with the game, people not liking the character design, the live service aspect, etc. It's pretty obvious something like this is going to fail if they don't put any effort into hyping people to play it.
I'm way more into gaming than a lot of people and the first I heard of it was headlines about the launch being so unsuccessful.
I suspect they're not completely giving up, and will try to run it back with some minor tweaks as a free-to-play title in a few months. It's a time-honored failed-launch tradition and probably worth a shot once you let the bad publicity clear. I can't imagine it working well here though, you can't really fix bland bones with a some cheap touch ups, and free is not really a unique selling point in this genre.
I wouldn’t say there was no effort. Sony made it the flagship announcement of their summer games presentation, and it apparently has its own dedicated episode in the anthology series by Amazon and the Love Death Robots showrunners coming out in December. They had betas. Even other majorly botched games have had literally orders of magnitude more players at launch. At the time of this announcement, there were 24 total players in the game on Steam, which, assuming all were in a game, is literally only enough to fill two lobbies. It really is an unprecedented failure.
My guess is that the show is their Hail Mary. They are sending out refunds now given the absolutely calamitous release, and are banking that the episode in December will drum up enough interest that if they release it as a free to play game at the same time they might have a better shot at getting some kind of player base.
This game has been mired in some kind of controversy around over focus on social justice, aggressive responses from developers in response to critical reviews, and some other ‘woke’ criticisms. I find it strange that this is not mentioned in articles about this game being shut down. The social justice politics is very much a part of why this game did not attract gamers. I say that as someone who isn’t especially keyed into these political battles normally.
It is not so strange. Game journalism is mostly completely out of touch with majority of gamers and often part of 'woke' echo chambers with their fallback usually being blaming things on review bombing and other problems.
Black Myth Wukong and response to it is good proving point. By all reasonable metrics it was massive success in west as well. Million or two million copies sold at least to western market for new studio in freshly launched IP is nothing to scoff at.
It really tells you that buyers of games do not really care about stuff journalist talk about. It really has rather little affect on their purchasing decisions. And that is really what should matter when you are trying to sell something.
Yes but the social justice stuff is mostly overblown.
It's a case of the "go woke go broke" crowd taking themselves more important than they really are.
Who in his right mind would follow the 8 year development of just another generic Overwatch clone and remember anything the devs or some marketing dude said during that time?
Right nobody.
Gamers don't really care about any of that.
They lock onto Steam, see the store, which says: "Here is another generic Hero Shooter which looks like all the others, its completely unoriginal has no strong IP and no new gameplay. But it costs 40 bucks and is mostly Ok".
The gamer goes "jeah whatever, my library is long enough already" and plays something else.
It didn't even seem like that bad a game. The gameplay looked solid and the people who played it largely liked it despite the generic characters. I was hoping to try it sometime with the assumption that they'd eventually give up on buy to play and make it free to play. I was right about the giving up part, I guess ...
The characters were NOT generic. They were the most strange and bizarre characters ever seen. If they were generic Soldier man and Nurse lady the game would have done quite a bit better.
Heard about this from various social media angles.
Surprised the math makes sense. Obviously this is a financial rounding error. Yet they're ok with me as random receiving around 3x negative messaging this week?
Maybe the secret is association? Till this post concord and sony was not linked in my mind
Paladins, a well-made free-to-play Overwatch clone, was released in 2018, 6 years ago. Overwatch 2 has failed to attract serious audience last year despite also being a free game. Why would people spend money on yet another Overwatch, if it's not outstanding?
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[ 444 ms ] story [ 2346 ms ] threadThen, each have their own $10ish Battlepass, and you need to grind to get to the end of it. Aside from a new map or character, these are the bulk of 'new stuff' that gets added.
Gaming as a Service doesn't scale well on most people who can afford to whale out, once they've already found their slot machine.
For me, the peak in terms of time investment are around Q3A and Unreal Tournament. So it's been a long while since I played regularly. What's funny is I want to play, it just gets frustrating when your hands/fingers just don't respond right.
It will be cool if GPUs can maybe double/triple current performance on the high end and that reaches mid-tier. The opportunity for really immersive environments. That said, we need more compelling gameplay and too many studios seem trapped in the exercise of trying to extract maximum value over a compelling story. I think some of the politics in games holds them back as well. Of course, I'm no longer the audience for reasons in my prior post.
This whole discussion, btw [0]
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nN-ekLaHyuI
I stick to things that I can easily pick up or put down.
If it's only one of many games you play idk. Depends on how your wife and kids feel about it I guess, none of my business.
LOL... I am pretty much the same as you. Except I try, at a minimum, to get a few games per day in Rocket League. :-D
I find some time nights and weekends.
I've dropped maybe $500 on Valorant, but it takes too much mental energy for me to enjoy casually playing it anymore. I also don't want to rely on getting a full squad in order to have a good time.
Adult will still have time to watch netflix, youtube or tiktok, read books, engagement bait on twitter etc.
What these games are competing against is not "free time" but any block of 15min that would go to another activity.
Given the number of people binge watching Netflix, it's a decent marketing segment.
All can greatly filter your audience vs doom scrolling.
That's where other live services will try hard enough to be at least on the Switch, or even better, work on mobile.
But players who want to do that are already invested in other games. They're not going to split out time to play this new one unless it's amazing. This thing was $40 and not well regarded. No one is really surprised at this result.
I was just pointing that the amount of time isn't the real issue, it's the competition for that time. Of course, the tighter that time is the tougher the competition will be, and the better a singular live service game needs to be.
Also, back when I played Valorant, a regular match could be anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes long. Add up queue times, waiting for people to group up (because there's usually one more person who's almost online, etc), and waiting for the potato-pc users to load in, it could easily turn into 3 hours for 2 to 3 matches.
These days, I'd rather watch a movie, and be in a different chair than the one I'd spent my working day in.
Singleplayer games or Netflix you can just pause.
If you've ever played a dead/dying competitive game as a newcomer you will know the problem this creates: since the people that stay around are either new or very dedicated players, the skill gap becomes gigantic, which turns of most new players.
if your game wins the Life-Service race, you draw other players in. If your game dies the very same structure that keep players around will prevent new players from joining.
More info from LMG: https://youtu.be/7GzzatlUNtE
Wanting to play as conventionally attractive/cool characters is not some sort of political stance. It's perfectly normal and unpolitical.
The act of saying the above out loud has become political in a few English-speaking places. However for the most part people just like to pretend it's been turned into a taboo subject.
Generally, there isn't a taboo political topic here at all. The few outliers on either far end of the spectrum are easy to ignore.
- bland character design
- already saturated competitors space (Overwatch and dozen of OW clones)
- very recent controversy of Helldivers game requiring a Sony account
- social justice politics
So it's mostly politics, but I really don't believe Overwatch clone could be successful, unless it tries to do something very unique. Concord had nothing. Their main hook was 'nextgen graphics' and a movie-like trailer. And as we can see, good graphics isn't enough to sell a game.
I'm way more into gaming than a lot of people and the first I heard of it was headlines about the launch being so unsuccessful.
the primary lure of overwatch always was the characters
they were bright, colourful and attractive, almost magnetic in terms of drawing you in
and they had something for everyone, and once you were in the gameplay kept you there
meanwhile the characters in this game just look off
You had a giant mech, could shoot like crazy and just cause total chaos. Different maps, and fun game modes.
Until toxicity hit and the Blizzard blizzard.
Maps were big and with a good team, it was a blast. Nothing else filled my void of Q3, now an dead genre.
Deadlock is okay, but I'm not a MOBA person.
My guess is that the show is their Hail Mary. They are sending out refunds now given the absolutely calamitous release, and are banking that the episode in December will drum up enough interest that if they release it as a free to play game at the same time they might have a better shot at getting some kind of player base.
Fortunatelly we have free market.
It really tells you that buyers of games do not really care about stuff journalist talk about. It really has rather little affect on their purchasing decisions. And that is really what should matter when you are trying to sell something.
It's a case of the "go woke go broke" crowd taking themselves more important than they really are.
Who in his right mind would follow the 8 year development of just another generic Overwatch clone and remember anything the devs or some marketing dude said during that time?
Right nobody.
Gamers don't really care about any of that.
They lock onto Steam, see the store, which says: "Here is another generic Hero Shooter which looks like all the others, its completely unoriginal has no strong IP and no new gameplay. But it costs 40 bucks and is mostly Ok".
The gamer goes "jeah whatever, my library is long enough already" and plays something else.
>They lock onto Steam
and see hundreds of steam discussion and review criticising the thing you claim nobody cares about.
Looking forward to trying Deadlock. I hope something pans out in this area.
I liked that acronym: yet another live service…
yet another live service failure
Failed, Another Live ServicE... FALSE
Sounds like something Sony would do.
Does "releasing it", allow them to write-off the 8-year investment as a loss (but if unreleased, they can't recognize the gain/loss)?
Just wondering if that's what's going on.
Surprised the math makes sense. Obviously this is a financial rounding error. Yet they're ok with me as random receiving around 3x negative messaging this week?
Maybe the secret is association? Till this post concord and sony was not linked in my mind
They really did reach the modern audience