How would you feel if you worked on a product for 8 years and it got cancelled within two weeks of its launch? That’s what happened to Concord, a multiplayer game published by Sony Playstation. The game has just been pulled from sale on the PS5 and PC platforms.
This is probably one of the biggest gaming flops in recent years but we gamers and industry veterans all saw it coming. Here’s my take:
IT LOOKED BAD
Check out the YouTube videos of Concord gameplay. It was your standard multiplayer fare, but gamers complained about the unaesthetic character designs. Diversity doesn’t mean one has to go for edgy looks, diversity can be found in beautifully designed characters such as those in Overwatch and Apex Legends.
MULTIPLAYER FATIGUE
Since the Internet connected PCs and consoles over 20 years ago, game publishers have cashed in on multiplayer and free-to-play titles with microtransactions. There are success stories like CounterStrike 2, Overwatch, Call of Duty, but there are way too many of such games on the market. Concord was so poorly-received, it had only 697 peak concurrent players on Steam. Compare that to Black Myth: Wukong’s peak concurrent number of over 2 MILLION gamers.
POOR MARKETING
I didn’t see any marketing around Concord. Maybe it’s because I’m not the target market. Or maybe because Sony already knew it was a train wreck and saved their dollars for another game like…
WUKONG
Concord chose to launch around the same time as Black Myth: Wukong. Personally, I wasn’t sure if Wukong would do well, as it was heavily hyped for several years but came from a little-known China game studio. Wukong went on to become the year’s biggest game without any multiplayer or microtransaction features. To all product managers, never underestimate a new competitor, especially one with more hype than your product.
For more details, read the BBC story.