Concord: The Biggest Flop In History

this video was sponsored by fatic more from them in a bit what is the biggest flop in video game history I mean the first answer that comes to mind is like what ET for the Atari 2600 a game that was so bad that millions of unsold copies were apparently buried in the desert led to the collapse of the entire video game industry okay part of that's true part part of that is not entirely true but either way no ET is not the biggest flop in gaming history for one the game actually sold kind of well

I mean it didn't sell as well as Atari expected but it sold over a million units and also it didn't cost that much to make in the early days of video games the average cost to develop a game like this was hundreds of thousands of dollars and then the rest would go into marketing nowadays it's pretty common for a lot of games to cost hundreds of millions of dollar and then they still got to pay for marketing since we don't normally get exact budgets and sales numbers for a lot of games we got to do

some guesswork and one of the easiest ways to do this is to look at the concurrence player count on Steam how many people are playing at the same time yes I know most people who are playing video games probably aren't just on Steam but it's the only metric we have and we can kind of extrapolate from there the biggest games will have a few hundred th000 players playing all at once some will even manage to break into the millions of course it's extremely embarrassing when a game like suicide kill the justice ice League a AAA

massive live service by WB only managed to have a peak player counts of 13,000 players this game probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and for a live service this meant it was basically Dead on Arrival but even single player games can flop for spoken remember that yeah that had a peak of 12579 players for context the 5-year-old indie game Risk of Rain 2 has almost 40,000 players as of the time I'm writing this Skull and Bones ubisoft's Infamous quadruple a pirate Adventure reportedly couldn't even sell 1 million units it sold way less

copies than Hot Wheels Unleashed which did not cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make and at least so far these three games have been easily the top contenders for the biggest flops of all time in terms of money spent and money earned except for maybe babylon's fall but no nobody talks about that but this all changed with Concord when I want to ride a bike or row a boat or imagine I'm rowing a real boat I find the easiest way to avoid public indecency charges is to wear clothes this is why I'm glad fatic

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off sitewide when signing up to be a VIP member link is in the description so this game was developed by X bunch G staff it had a lot of hype surrounding it because of that fact a few years ago couple this with the fact that it was a PlayStation Studios game and people expected this would be the next big thing but that hype died away the moment the first trailer dropped it looked like another generic hero shooter you know a game where players select from a cast of characters with unique powers and work as a

team to complete objectives another OverWatch clone in 2024 not only that the game looked like like an obvious Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff it was clearly inspired by the films which is just weird cuz it's like it's it's it's not Guardians of the Galaxy and of course there was other problems but I'll I'll have to get to that in a bit now honestly most people did expect Concord to be a flop I think everybody with the exception of maybe a few journalists knew this was this was going down but nobody knew how bad it could

do I mean after all the main competition OverWatch 2 isn't really doing that great at the moment valve is developing its own hero shooter but that's not publicly available right now and Marvel Rivals yet another hero shooter is set to arrive in December so it's not out yet so this game did have competition but not really now this game was $40 and those other titles are free but Sony just released a live service for $40 that turned out pretty well for them this game also bypassed the micro transactions and battle passes up front just offering

a complete package which is something a lot of people said they wanted but even still this game is almost definitely the biggest flop in gaming history we don't know the exact budget it could be 50 million 100 million 150 or even 200 or more we don't know but we know it cost a lot of money Sony had huge expectations for this project it took 8 years to develop they already approached Amazon's gaming Anthology TV series secret level to make a Concord episode the only other franchise that has a dedicated Episode by PlayStation is God of

War this was supposed to be a big deal less people are playing Concord on Steam than the number of developers who made the game now to be fair on Playstation where the game is plastered all over that storefront page there is definitely more players but probably not to too many this was not in the top 10 games sold for the week or the top 20 or the top 30 and for a new game for a AAA game for a AAA live service console exclusive game this is Dead on Arrival I would be astonished if it's

still around this time next year and it's difficult to convey how big of a disaster this was this is the kind of game that will live in the history books something that the executives will study relentlessly to figure out what went wrong wrong so what went wrong so I bought the game uh wanted to see what's what's the big deal and honestly there is a time trial mode in the game where you go around and shoot targets and Dodge obstacles and stuff and I did terrible in my extremely unoptimized run and I'm still in the

top 20 players in the world that's how few people are playing this game come on come on let's so why did it fail uh I guess first of all we we could talk about the pricing the game cost $40 that is a barrier of Entry that the other competitors don't have the competitors that are free to play just doesn't look very unique looks kind of generic people are not going to pay $40 for something that looks like a Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff when the competitors are again free but number three that the third thing

the most important thing is the culture War that's it Go and mask off knowledge husk exposed so if you don't know the culture War started back in the 2010s when the hipsters had a great schism amongst themselves half of them were really into sler Kenny and Frapp hazee and the other half was into electro swing in hand brewed coffee they started fighting and it kind of just went off the rails from there most people don't know anything about Concord except for two things they know that it has these character designs and that the robot has

pronouns in its bio this got the game memd into Oblivion from the moment it was revealed it was doomed to be labeled as Peak cringe by the Internet by the Target demographic yes if it was a free game it would have more players yes if it was a single player game it would have more players if it wasn't a hero shooter or wasn't so generic it would have more players but the problem here is not that the game didn't have enough players it's that it didn't have any players this is a disaster unlike anything the

gaming industry has seen before and I you just got to ask yourself what makes this game different than so many others a lot of it's the character designs it is if Concord had the same character designs as the first descendants if each hero looked like this do you think that the game would have sold more or less copies and of course I can't ignore the monkey in the room black myth Wukong a game from a Chinese Studio based on Journey to the West managed to sell 10 million copies in 3 days this week yes many

of these sales are going to be from the game's home country but a lot are still from Americas in the eurs and whatever other places are out there it is by far the top selling game on PlayStation right now as opposed to the game that was made by PlayStation that nobody's playing so why are so many people interested in playing this random Chinese action game as opposed to Concord well I mean black myth Wukong looks fun but like not not 10 million copies in 3 days fun that is pretty much unparalleled numbers except for the

biggest releases in gaming history this game is getting absurd concurrent numbers on Steam and I think the reason for this is again the culture War we're seeing a reverse boycott so remember how the media covered GTA in the the early 2000s every news Outlet was saying how bad Grand Theft Auto was for the moral health of our society how the games were degenerate and evil and bad and so on and so forth now what did this do this gave GTA more publicity Gamers heard that this GTA was problematic it was a forbidden fruit and it

got them curious and now decades later GTA is as big as any game can get not because it's still that forbidden fruit it's really not but it got the ball rolling the same thing happened with Blackmouth lukong game journalists have had a bone to pick with this game for a while for reasons that I'm not really going to but long story short they kept saying don't play this game don't play this game and just like GTA it got people curious people started to ask why shouldn't I play this game is it really that problematic on

the other hand Concord was seen as the safe friendly broad marketable four quadrant style release corporate slap cringe you get to this point where there are two completely unrelated games and unrelated genres that are getting compared because one represents the establishments and the other represents the thing that the game journalists don't want you to know about did every single person who bought monkey game bu it simply because an article on IGN made them angry no probably not but it got people talking they bought the game they told their friends and just like GTA it only

got bigger from there as for Concord people just saw clips of it online they saw the means and they thought wow this looks bad I'm not going to buy that I'm not going to play that and if you want one short quick concise answer to why Concord failed that is it this is it but if you want a longer one I can provide that as well okay so do you know how long it took naughty dog to make the original Uncharted it took 2 years started developments in 2005 released in 2007 Concord took 8 years

to make this is astonishing this is baffling I mean i' I've played the game it feels polished I believe that a lot of work went into this but 8 years is wild a lot can change in 8 years that's a long time in terms of culture imagine if the original Uncharted took 8 years to make that would have meant that it started development in 1999 the gaming industry changed a whole lot in these eight years the top grossing game that released in 1999 was not some action game or some FPS it was Donkey Kong 64

and the original Pokémon games were still topping all the sales charts gamespot's game of the year was Soul Caliber if naughty dog did start developing Uncharted in 1999 they would have no idea what the gaming landscape what culture would even look like by the Year 2007 naughty dog was releasing games like crash team racing around this time so yeah a lot can't happen in 8 years so now in 2024 we got to go back 8 years ago and see when Concord began development what was going through their heads and oh it's 2016 the big game

was OverWatch the original OverWatch a game that was not initially free to play this is why it makes sense that Concord isn't free to play that standard didn't exist when this game began development Guardians of the Galaxy was one of the most popular IPS the idea of big team ups and wacky characters was ingrained in culture live Services were still a no an interesting idea on game consoles they were golden gooses that kept laying golden eggs the gift that keeps on giving and also there was there was a lot of culture War stuff going on

in 2016 remember Ghostbusters 2016 it felt like a new American Civil War was going to break out over discourse of this film maybe this is what the developers imagin people would want 8 years from then maybe these decisions were made later but clearly this long development cycle did not do this game any favors and what does it have to show for it the visuals the graphics I mean yeah it looks impressive a lot of work went into motion capture but that also meant that they couldn't change the character designs after the massive backlash all of

those fancy textures and particle effects and animations and Graphics did literally nothing to save this game from being the biggest flop of all time if you need proof that good graphics alone don't result in good sales figures this is it this right here but also this shows that you can't just have good game play either because the game play isn't that bad there's so many other external factors that contributed to this game's failure look this game is too bloated there's way too many cooks in this kitchen all trying to check off boxes of what they

imagine would result in the largest number of possible sales they wanted to appeal to everybody and by doing that they appealed to nobody I think it's horrifying to think about what Sony could have spent their time and money on instead of Concord like for one they could have not shut down Japan Studio a new Twisted Metal honestly I would have taken PlayStation Home 2 over this companies will Analyze This failure for years to come because it did everything wrong and that's unique this is a unique way to fail but I imagine Sony already knows this

see for a while Sony has been trying to push for more live service games from its biggest Fran ches Last of Us online Horizon online and Bungie who they acquired a few years ago was supposed to be in charge of managing all of this but it turns out the situation at Bungie it was it was just a complete mess financially management wise stuff was bad stuff is really bad a lot of projects from PlayStation Studios got cancelled a lot of Life Services a lot of Bungie staff got laid off and Bungie was basically restructured at

the time I thought this was pretty drastic I mean Sony had spent a lot of money on bu and looking back maybe this was in part due to Concord like Sony would have had the pre-order numbers on this game and like it would have been in the single or double digits for steam you know it would have been bad this this is astonishing to me I've never seen a game fail this badly in terms of you know just money this game was such a catastrophe it probably changed how Sony views live service games you should

have just made a new Kill Zone so should have made a new Kill Zone probably probably not with these character designs though I don't know if that I don't think that would go over very well again huge thanks to fablic for sponsoring this video go to fabletics.com knowledge husk to get 80% off sitewide when signing up to be a VIP member link is in the description [Music] n [Music]