I was not part of the populace that wasted money on this game, nor was I willing to waste my time in buying it while subsequently getting an obligatory refund for said game. I was one of the vast majority that watched this game come and go like a terrible fart in an elevator. It can hardly be considered a fart in an elevator, it was gone 11 days after its release! This should have been an amazing example of what not to do when creating a game, and yet it seems to be the example that so many developers and publishers have followed ever since.
There are so many aspects of Concord that led to its extremely short lifespan: Catering to activists and their insecurities, releasing it with a $40 pricetag when its superiors were free to play, spending $400 million dollars and ten years to develop it and coming out on social media to shame their audiences for not wanting it, all of it should have been setting off alarms in Sony's head. This was a failure on such a colossal level, people barely even remember why we hated Atari's E.T. in the first place. This stomped every single competition on the road to the very bottom and it did so with such amazing ease that they never even bothered to rerelease it as free to play.
No one has come to the conclusion that, perhaps, they should have been listening to the public. You would think that there was a PR department looking through the comments and gamer buzz to see what players were doing at the time. The problem was that this was all developed in the vain of Overwatch because of its amazing popularity and the fact that it made Blizzard all kinds of money. The fact that Blizzard still ruined Overwatch and fired all of its lead developers in the process doesn't even enter into the equation. The fact was that the moment they made the decision to try and remake Overwatch when it was popular meant that they were already behind the times. Gaming culture changes like the wind and waiting ten years to release a game to catch the "current" zeitgeist of entertainment is like trying to grab water on its way out of the faucet. By the time Concord was released, that ship had left the port years prior.
The greatest games come about when a developer or a team of developers share a vision to bring something to gaming that wasn't there to begin with. Even if it's not an especially unique idea, if the vision is strong enough with the gameplay, there is a very good chance that it can be a huge success. These are games that come from a desire to exceed expectations in both design and aesthetic, making a vision come to fruition and polishing that game to a beautiful sheen.
So, why is it that there are spiritual successors to Concord already? The game bit the dust and we're already seeing others come out of the woodwork that look eerily similar. Not only are they creating disgustingly unimaginative characters and boring as hell gameplay, but they are also doing the same cardinal sin of going after the gaming public that they need to sign their paychecks. If you do not have gamers playing your game, your game is going to fail. Period.
Highguard made the same mistakes in spades. Every single aspect of Concord was brought back to the table, including the fact that they had no idea what gamers were asking for. They certainly weren't asking for a 3v3 hero shooter with gargantuan maps that they can't populate properly. Every single character basically plays the same aside from arbitrary abilities that unlock every so often. Beyond that, you get cookie-cutter weapons and ride horses that are astoundingly difficult to shoot from. The characters are unimaginative as ever. They either have modern day haircuts and/or look like they belong to other games, only made worse.
Whoever is signing these developers' checks should make a clause in their contracts that obligate them to shut the hell up on social media! These people look so pathetic when they go on the internet and just whine and cry about how they wasted half a decade or more making this game. They will swear that the game they made was awesome, but then go into how they never got any outside influence of any kind, so they had no idea that no one was asking for it. After the ridiculous fallout of Concord, that should have set off some serious bells that this was all a very bad idea. Even if they were so deep into its development, they should have cut their losses or at least not put so much into it from then on.
No one forced them to put the game at the end of the Game Award Show. They thought that including elements of every popular hero shooter was going to win them fans, but it just made it more generic. It made it fodder for memes and gamers coming out and calling it a sequel to Concord. This should have come as no surprise but it caused their development team to go radio silent soon after the Game Award announcement. All of a sudden, all of the echoes in their chamber started to truly doubt their creation. The release started with a promising 100,000 gamers playing it, but that number was brought down to a dismal 1,000 to 2,000 players within weeks. They accused gamers of not giving it a chance but that's all they gave it. The game was apparently so boring that people couldn't even make it past the tutorial which is REQUIRED at the beginning. It's evident that no one on the team had played a game in their lives or someone would have told them that this was a huge mistake.
If one live service game wasn't bad enough, now they've announced the gameplay and character roster of Horizon Zero Dawn's new game, Hunters Gathering. In this post apocalyptic world, apparently it's fruitful enough for one woman to eat her way to a diabetic amputation. The characters still look amazingly generic and unappealing. Nothing was learned from Concord's cataclysmic failure. Of course gamers aren't going to give this game a chance, nor should they. It already released trailers and every single one of them is just getting disliked at an amazing rate. The publishers can stick their fingers in their ears and go LALALALALALA all they want, but no amount of blaming gamers for their failure is going to make up for the money they are about to lose. This is not making assumptions at this point, this is just common sense and gaming Darwinism at work.
The boy can only cry wolf so many times before he loses his voice, and gaming companies are about to learn their lesson one game at a time. These games are not free to make and every single dollar may as well be burned for all it matters at this point. Give the money to charity if you want it to actually make a difference in the world. Stop wasting gamers' time. The only good thing coming out of this mess is the hours of content it is giving youtubers to make amazing videos. If that's the gift you want to give to the world, spend another 100 or 200 million dollars for our ironic entertainment. Stop torturing and crunching your developers and at least buy them some water. They're going to need it.
