The Concord Catastrophe

Or, how to squander two-hundred million dollars in less than a decade.

I’ve said before that I don’t play many video games these days. Outside of a smattering of mobile games and a quarterly return to my Animal Crossing island paradise on the Switch, I don’t play a lot. These days, most new titles just… don’t interest me. Some look like fun, sure - I’m still thinking of you, Baldur’s Gate 3 - but not fun enough to either fork over the cash a new gaming rig or risk relapsing on my erstwhile favorite drug of choice.

But I do keep up with the news in the gaming scene. Part of it just trickles down to me through friends and gossip. But, also, the constant cavalcade of fuck-ups coming out of the industry these days is more entertaining than most of its output.

Take Sony, for example. Talk about guys who can’t take one step forward without taking two steps back. For example - did y’all hear about the new Playstation?

Okay, well, it’s just the Playstation 5 - again - but with the word Pro tacked on to swindle gullible gamers into plonking down seven crisp Benny Franks for the privilege of buying a Playstation 5 again… but hey! This one has marginally better graphics. Apparently. And it doesn’t have those pesky CD drives, either. Oh, but you can buy a CD Drive module - which the standard PS5 comes with pro bono, mind you - for another few hundred bucks.

The slow and insidious attempt to strangle physical media continues at pace. Remember, kids - companies hate it when you own something that they have the copyright for, and if they could charge you every time you went back to rewatch Caddyshack or put on Frozen for the kids for the ten-thousandth time, they would. They absolutely would. And they will. So, buy physical media while you can.

Movie studio executives wake up in a cold sweat from nightmares about collections like this.

The only reason that Sony isn’t in a death spiral is because Microsoft is too incompetent to figure out what to do with the Xbox brand. Just today, they announced they’re laying off 650 employees, mostly from their video game development decision. And mostly at Blizzard Studios, who they own.

Why? Because they’re bored, I guess.

Meanwhile, Nintendo continues to somehow outmaneuver the competition and stay one step ahead by implementing the genius strategy of doing fuck all.

“He can’t keep getting away with it…”

But that’s neither here nor there.

Let’s loop back to Sony. They’re the object of our focus today.

The Playstation 5 is famous for having a dearth of exclusive titles to draw in prospective customers. It’s always kind of been that way - I remember the same jokes being made about the Playstation 3 when it came out, too. I’m not sure if it was true then, but it certainly rings true now.

Most of the exclusive IP’s that Sony could once reliably pump out are either dormant, dead, or have transitioned to multi-platform approaches that have left Sony without any proprietary killer apps. Oh, don’t get me wrong - they had and have IP’s. They just choose to do nothing with them.

This episode of Smiling Friends struck a chord with a lot of people.

And then they complain about it.

On September 4th of 2024, Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki said the following in an interview with Financial Times:

Whether it’s for games, films or anime, we don’t have that much IP that we fostered from the beginning. We’re lacking the early phase (of IP) and that’s an issue for us.

These comments are hilarious, coming from the same studio that let Square Enix escape from under their thumb and turn the once wildly popular and Sony-exclusive Final Fantasy series break escape velocity into a multi-platform franchise, chased out eccentric Japanese auteurs like Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid) and Yoko Taro (Drakengard and Neir), and somehow convinced the once robust and creative powerhouse of Naughty Dog to drop development on series like Jak and Uncharted and Crash Bandicoot so they could do nothing but re-release The Last of Us and The Last of Us II until the end of time.

Someone (Neil Druckmann, most likely) deserves to be marooned on a desert island for this crime.

They even had Hidetaka Miyazaki of Dark Souls and Elden Ring fame develop a proprietary IP for them - Bloodborne, which, in my opinion, was one of the sickest original games to come out in recent memory. Then again, I am an easy mark for Lovecraftian cosmic horror, eldritch abominations, Victorian aesthetics, and goth baddies in tricorn hats, so, perhaps I may be a tad biased.

My (Lady) Maria… don’t you know I’ve come a long, long way.

Since 2015, they’ve done a grand total of nothing with the IP and even sued an indie developer who tried to make a joke game called Bloodborne Kart.

But what made these comments from Mr. Totoki all the more rich was the fact that, only a day before he gave them, there was some big news pertaining to Sony’s fist exclusive release in years.

On August 20th of 2024, Sony would release the game Concord to the Playstation 5.

With a staggering eight years in development and a production budget estimated to be an eye-watering one hundred to two hundred million dollars, the game was pitched as the new hotness in the gaming scene. If you didn’t have a Playstation 5 yet, Concord was going to be your reason to pony up and buy one. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the new it thing in the gaming world, would you?

The game was developed by Firewalk Studios, who were purchased by Sony from the video game company, Probably Monsters, in 2023. By that point, Concord had been in development for years, and the acquisition of the studio by Sony shows that they weren’t just confident the game was going to be modestly successful - they thought it was going to be a smash hit, and they wanted it all to themselves.

The game did release on the PC gaming platform, Steam, a few days after it dropped on the PlayStation, but hey - it was still a Sony exclusive property. It was owned by Sony. They could do whatever they wanted with it. And man, were they proud of it, too.

And, yes - we did see a lot more of Concord. In fact, despite being out of the video game loop, I saw a lot of Concord. But no one would be seeing a lot Concord for very long.

On Steam, the highest number of concurrent players - players playing the game at the same time - never breached the 1k mark. Usually, it hovered around somewhere in the mid-200’s. At its lowest, it would dip into the 30’s. Two digits.

While the number of concurrent players on Playstation are not so easy to track, sales were dismal and what scant players did fork over $40 for the privilege to play it groused about how difficult it was to find a game to join since there were so few players online.

On September 6th, Sony was forced to sit down and not just eat crow, but devour it when they admitted that the game was just… not doing the numbers it was supposed to. They also admitted that everyone who bought the game would be getting a full refund. Why? Because the game was being shut down. Taken off-line. It’s exclusively an online multiplayer game that relies on Sony keeping servers up to play in any capacity. Once those were deactivated, there would be no way to play the game. At all.

No one expected Concord to last very long. No one expected it to die so quickly, though.

Concord was online for a grand total of twelve days. Less than two calendar weeks.

Fruit flies live longer than Concord did.

There’s been a lot of discussion as to why Concord flopped as monumentally hard as it did. And it’s no wonder as to why. Concord’s failure is of historic proportions. I can’t think of another game that had as much money, time, effort, and artificial hype pumped into it just to peter out like a weak fart, and just as quick as one, too. There have been scads of live-service games that survived for years, if not decades, on a skeleton crew of a playerbase that were single-mindedly dedicated to keeping the game alive. Popular MMO and Warcraft’s arch-nemesis, Everquest, has been online for over twenty five years. Fuck, I didn’t even know this until right now, but Everquest has a new expansion on the docket for release this year.

When they said Ever-quest, they meant it was an ever-quest.

This is to say that many, many other games have subsisted literal decades with less support, publicity, and cash than Concord. This is the type of catastrophic failure that companies will sink millions of dollars worth of research into to try and find out exactly what went wrong and how it never happens again.

I don’t doubt that Sony, at this very moment, has a crack team of specialists collected from various fields, tasked with collecting data and drawing it all up in a nice, concise, easy-to-digest report for the stock holders to explain why Concord crashed like it did.

If I was a fat cat sucking on the Sony tit, I would want to know, too. But, here’s the thing… they could waste all that money on the quote-unquote experts to tell them what they want to hear. Or they could, y’know - as literally anyone who took one good look at Concord and did basic, surface-level research into it like me, and we’d tell ‘em. Maybe not for free, but, I certainly think I can identify the factors that contributed to Concord’s humiliating and premature demise.

What were they?

Well, after a few days of research, deliberation, and little more than a spoonful of critical thinking, here’s what I found.

EXHIBIT A: It was knock-off that came too little, too late.

Hell, even calling Concord a knock-off seems too kind. Do you ever go to the store and see the cereal that comes in bags rather than boxes, and, even though you might not ever buy it, you just know, on some level, the Fruit O’s or Sugar Flakes in those wax bags are almost identical to Fruit Loops or Frosted Flakes (respectively) in almost every way, but just… slightly worse, even though you’ve probably never tasted them?

Yeah - that’s Concord to Blizzard’s Overwatch.

Overwatch released in 2016, and is a first-person shooter with a cast of quirky, colorful characters in a sci-fi setting that all have unique abilities. In the game, teams of competing players choose one of these characters - called heroes - to play as, in which they work together against an opposing team of players to achieve an objective.

This genre of games is called the hero shooter. While there is some contention over which game was the first hero shooter - Valve’s seminal classic and a personal favorite of mine, Team Fortress 2, is often cited as one of the first examples of the genre - it is undeniable that Overwatch both typified the genre as we understand it today and set the standard for all those that followed. As far as most are concerned, Overwatch is not just a hero shooter, it is the hero shooter.

Many have tried to take that title from Overwatch. Pretty much all of them have failed. Hi-Rez had Paladins. Riot Studios has Valorant. There have been dedicated pushes for these titles to muscle in on Overwatch’s territory, but, given that Valorant is relegated to second-string Twitch streamer fodder with an infamously toxic community full of idiots and Paladins is almost unheard of outside of certain circles, it can be safely said that the throne Overwatch established has never been swiped from it.

Concord was yet another attempt to do so.

But… here’s the thing. Paladins began beta tests in 2016. It released in full in 2018, two years after Overwatch debuted. Valorant released in 2020. By the time Concord showed up to the scene, it the scene wasn’t already just saturated with competition - the competition had already dug its heels in, and trying to make a dent in their market share was a fool’s errand. The genre itself, as many have said, is already played out, past its prime, and the golden age is gone. People who play hero shooters already had their hero shooter of choice, and they weren’t about to abandon Overwatch, Paladins, or Valorant after years of playing them to jump to a new game that was showing up to the club while the music was fading and the lights were being turned out. Especially when all of those games are, to some extent, free-to-play. Concord cost forty US dollars on launch.

And, keep in mind, it made sense for Sony to develop Concord when they did. As stated above, Concord entered development in 2016 - the same year that Overwatch released. If they had managed to strike while the hero shooter genre was printing money and at its peak, there’s reason to believe that it would have done better. But, after dragging their feet over almost a fucking decade of development, they were showing up to a party that was already effectively over.

EXHIBIT B: Overwatch wasn’t the only thing Concord was ripping off.

Concord's main conceit is that the story - what little there is - features a quirky cast of misfit space bounty hunters taking odd-jobs in a colorful sci-fi setting. As I said - it entered development in 2016, when the concept off-the-wall, zany, eclectic space bounty hunters doing jobbing for spare change in an intergalactic setting was still white hot with the impact of a certain movie that had dropped in 2014.

There’s a lot of revisionist history surrounding this film these days, after it became one of the hottest movie franchises of the 2010’s, but, make no mistake, when the first installment dropped in 2014…

No one was expecting the D-tier second-stringers of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy to rake in the profits that they did.

I’ve said before that the cultural impact of Guardians of the Galaxy on the wider American zeitgeist has been largely understated. People can say what they want about it being a B-tier Marvel movie, but the Jackson 5 did not notch another number one hit on the Billboard Charts quite literally a half-century after their hey-day and almost a decade after Michael’s death because everyone simultaneously remembered that I Want You Back goes hard as hell.

The influences of James Gunn’s Guardians movies are plain to see on Concord’s base conceit. It makes even more sense when you take into consideration that, when the game went into development in 2016, the second Guardians film was still yet to release and, being that it was at the height of Marvel-mania, hype surrounding it was not insignificant. Again, if they had wanted to cash in on the Guardians craze that followed the release of the first and second films, they made it to the metaphorical station years after the metaphorical train departed.

Oh, and they did it badly. Of course. I should mention that.

EXHIBIT C: The developers were massively out of touch with the consumers.

I don’t like the word woke. I think I’ve made that clear. It’s so overplayed it’s basically lost all meaning. I get why people use it. There is some utility still left in it, but - well, that’s a topic for another day. Just know that I would not describe something woke if it did not first tout itself as woke. Which Concord did.

There are - were - a lot of racially ambiguous characters running about in Concord, and Firewalk Studios paid a lot of money to make sure everyone knew it. There’s definitely a lot of strong women of African descent with aposematic hair colors who clearly need no man in their lives. The usual to-do was made about how diverse and boundary-pushing the characters were and how you wouldn’t see many straight, white males running around the Concord-verse. Each character had their pronouns listed in their dossiers on the character selection screen as if, somehow, being a blue haired they/them -

Was integral to the character’s play style.

The developers came out and did the customary finger-wagging to critics, telling them that this game wasn’t made for chuddies like them and if they didn’t like it, they shouldn’t play it.

The game, apparently, was for the fabled modern audience that’s always touted by these types of people who never seem to materialize and rescue this ill-conceived projects from obscurity and destitution.

Disney keeps waiting for that modern audience to show up and actually watch one of their new Star Wars projects.

Predictably, the modern audience, like Linus’s Great Pumpkin, failed to turn up yet again, and consumers likewise heeded the developer’s request to avoid the game.

Is there really any other term I can use other than woke to describe this behavior other than just resorting on the tried and true word stupid? If there is, let me know, because I am unaware of it.

And, look - I’m not the type of person who gets fired up about stuff like this. This isn’t me lapsing into an apoplectic fit because some idiots in Bellevue, Washington put pronouns in a game I wasn’t going to play in the first place. If you want that kind of content, YouTube is flush with ragebaiters who upload dozens of videos of week about the wokies ruining Star Wars for the Nth time that’ll be right up your alley.

The above display of childish outrage is not epic so much as it is puerile, pathetic, and a great way to totally undermine your argument by acting like the embodiment of a Reddit-dwelling manchild.

All I’m doing is stating the fact that the developers of Concord, by leaning hard on their progressive ideology, made the bone-headed mistake of alienating a vast pool of potential customers. They touted it as a selling point.

It’s less about them being woke and more about them being entirely out of touch with the current zeitgeist of the gaming scene, where the kind of woke material they were so proud of and using to market the game has been slowly falling out of fashion for years, now. This is why I won’t say, as many have, Concord failed because it was woke. The woke elements are just the window-dressing for their piss-poor business acumen. They weren’t pushing a political agenda so much as using that political agenda to push a game.

And it failed because the developers had no fucking clue what kind of game people actually wanted to play - not in genre, and not in content, either.

But… there’s one more key reason I believe Concord failed. And this one, more than any other, I suspect is what sealed its fate.

EXHIBIT D: The characters suck.

Part of what made the Guardians of the Galaxy films so enjoyable was, of course, the cast. Chris Pratt, for all the shit he gets in the media, is an immensely charismatic leading man when given the right material to work with. The rest of the cast helped flesh out the characters as a surprisingly relatable band of misfits with rough edges. They’re all easy to like.

Overwatch, too, has a menagerie of characters that I believe are now safe to say are iconic. The game itself is flawed - horribly - but the character line-up isn’t just solid, but probably it’s best asset. They’re likeable. They’re funny. They play off each other well. And, most importantly, their designs are eye-catching, appealing, nice to look at, and easy to identify at a glance. Say what you want about Blizzard, but they understand the basic concept of solid character design. Mayhaps a bit too well.

After all, there is an entire genre - and, no, I am not making this up - of pornography dedicated to the lovely ladies in the Overwatch roster.

Oh, Mercy, Mercy me… the joke is her call sign is Mercy.

But… here’s the thing.

Sex sells. Good looking people sell. When people play a game, they don’t want to play as normal, boring people who look like someone you’d pass on the street. That’s not the point of fiction. There’s a reason that humans in World of Warcraft are one of the least-played races among the wide berth of playable humanoid species in the game. When people play a game of any kind, they want to play as someone other than themselves and go to a place where there are people who are a little more exciting than they are in the real world… and they don’t want the characters to be boring, work-a-day stiffs or podgy schlubs. They want the men to be larger-than-life, box-jawed giga-chads, and they want the women to be svelte and curvaceous vixens. At the very least, they want these characters to be interesting. It’s just the way people operate. It’s the same reason that night elves were one of the most played races in World of Warcraft.

In my every day life, I am an utterly unremarkable dude - why would I, when I boot up Overwatch, want to play as a character who’s just a guy when I could play as a grizzled veteran super-soldier with a hairline that I can only hope I have when I get to the age of fifty-five?

I got the beard going for me, if nothing else.

What I’m trying to say is that people wanna be cool. People wanna be powerful. Dare I say it, people wanna be sexy. And, when they play video games - which is an escapist, wish-fulfillment activity, in a way - they want to live out those fantasies. And, that’s fine. That’s human nature. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be better than what you currently are. In fact, I think that’s a good thing.

There’s probably a reason these two characters were the ones me and an ex-girlfriend of mine mained when we played Overwatch. I’ll let you guess who played which one.

The developers at Blizzard, for all their faults, have always understood this.

The Concord developers did not.

In fact, they went out of their way to make quite possibly the ugliest and least-appealing roster of characters ever seen not just in the hero shooter genre, but perhaps all of multi-player video games.

Now, I won’t go through every character on their roster here. If you want to go see the absolute travesty that is Concord's line-up, you can do that yourself. It’s not hard to find. But here’s just a sampling of the characters you had to work with when you booted up the game.

You’ve got a black dude wearing a wearing a cheongsam, holding something I think is supposed to be a weapon but I can’t really tell. Out of the line-up, his design, while strange and senseless, is the least offensive.

Then we have a green alien chick with a haircut I can only describe as the World’s Worst Karen Cut (and I fucking hate the Karen term), and, when you select her during the character selection screen, she literally says Let’s go-o-o-o! like she’s Da Baby. Might as well have her do a fucking Fortnite dance while you’re at it. Because none of that will age poorly.

There’s the just plain nasty-looking green lizard man rocking (poorly) one of those inflatable life-vest that they always tell you about on planes but you’ve never had to wear who wants to be Yondu from Guardians of the Galaxy so bad it’s embarrassing (right down to aping Michael Rooker’s Southern drawl), and, uh… I don’t even know what the fuck is going on with the black chick on the end.

She looks like the unholy lovechild of William Gibson’s Molly Millions and Homestuck’s Terezi Pyrope if the baby was cast by Netflix, which is a reference I think approximately none of you will get but I really can’t think of anything else.

There’s only room for one fashion-challenged psychopath with red glasses in fiction and it will never not be Terezi.

Some other greatest hits - or perhaps greatest disappointments - include Concord’s equivalent to Team Fortress 2’s beloved and iconic Heavy Weapons Guy, who comes in the form of an ambiguously brown woman with weird piercings and blue lipstick.

And, perhaps the most despised of them all, there’s also this ambiguously brown… guy. Who does… things.

He looks like his name should be Chet and he should be working at a beach side snack shack in Oahu.

Yeah - this poor glandularly-challenged fellow was reaping heaps of heat, even more that his blue-lipped woman-of-color comrade. A lot of it is because he was pushed to be the face of the game, and was in most of the marketing. He was supposed to be the mascot, I guess. And, sure - he’s certainly very… very fluffy, as a good mascot should be, I suppose. But this also mean that someone at Sony genuinely looked at this character and said, This one can compete against Overwatch’s mascot.

Who, if you don’t know, is a minxy English lesbian who wears yoga pants with an industrial-strength grip¹.

I remember when they had to edit her model in-game because she was so damn caked up it was almost beyond parody.

Stunning that they thought that they were gonna win that fight.

But my biggest problem with Snorlax up there is his design. And not because he’s a bit husky. Being tons of fun has nothing to do with it. It doesn’t even disqualify a character from being a mascot. Out of the entire cast of the game, Valve’s Team Fortress 2 - the arguable progenitor of the hero shooter - chose the Heavy Weapon’s Guy to be their mascot for the game, and he’s what could be generously described as husky.

And he went on to be one of the most beloved characters of the game and become an icon in his own right. What’s the difference between him and the Concord guy? Well, for one, Valve actually knows how to market a fucking game and get people excited for it. But the other is down to just the most basic and simple design elements of the character. Look at this character again. Tell me, just from looking at him… what does he do? What’s his role among the game’s cast?

I thought he might be an engineer-type character who builds stuff, what with the goggles and gloves, but he has no tools or bags or any other features that suggest he works with machine. And I doubt he’s doing much sneaking with that extra heft, so I don’t think he’s a stealth character. I have no idea what he does, actually, because he looks like a dude who would work in a body shop or be really, really fucking annoying about collecting vinyl records.

That’s the biggest failing of Concord’s character designs - they’re not just ugly, but they communicate very little of who the character is actually is and what they do in the game. Let’s compare and contrast for a moment.

Here’s another character from Team Fortress 2. Can you guess what his title is?

You probably don’t need to be told he’s called the Engineer. The hardhat, the gloves, the goggles, the overalls - even if you took his wrench away, you’d know exactly what who he is and what he does for the team.

Let’s try Widowmaker from Overwatch. I picked this image specifically because she doesn’t have her very distinctive gun and, uh… not for any other reason.

Just by looking at her, without her weapon, you can tell she’s an assassin of some type. Everything about her design is sleek, svelte, and dangerous. Even if you don’t know what weapon she uses, you know she’s not on the field tanking rockets and eating bullets as a tank. She’s clearly built (and dressed) for slipping around unseen, where she can do a lot of damage without ever actually even touching whoever she’s about to merc.

Similarly, when you look at Overwatch’s Reinhardt, you know this mother fucker ain’t sitting back taking potshots with a sniper rifle.

Again, everything about his design tells you he’s built for engaging enemies up close and personal, and could probably rip your spine out through your asshole and beat you to death with it. But he wouldn’t, because you can also tell from his smile, his posture, the colors of his uniform, even the lion motif - an animal associated with courage, nobility, and honor - that he’s not the type of guy to do that.

If you want to step up to hard-mode, here’s one that’s a bit tricky. We’ll take an example from Rainbow Six Siege with the character Ela. The game is less colorful and flashy than the others, but still an example of a hero shooter. What can you take away from her design?

Well, give it some thought, and you’d be surprised what you can glean from her relatively pedestrian outward appearance. Her most striking feature the green hair-dye job, which, for a military operator, is a big no-no. This indicates she’s most likely a maverick - a loose-cannon who doesn’t play by the rules. The pose she’s depicted in indicates that she’s probably not too extroverted or chipper or perhaps even that confident. Maybe she does her best work when she’s not noticed or seen. She’s carrying only a pistol, which probably means she’s not mowing down enemies or blowing off heads from ten miles away. And, most importantly, the patch on her shoulder show’s that she’s a Polish national - in short, very dangerous and not to be trusted².

Sure, her design isn’t screaming information at you like the others above, but it does communicate most of what you need to know about her.

I could go on with more examples from both Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch and Rainbow Six Siege, but you can easily tell at a glance, without even thinking, who these characters are, what they do, what their personality is, and what kind of role they play in the game.

Now, here’s one last character from Concord.

Okay, so, they have a rocket launcher… I think. But, what about their design communicates anything else about their personality? Is she a good guy, like Reinhardt with his lions and bright colors and friendly expression? Is she a baddie, like Widowmaker with her dark colors and sinister grin and spider motif?

There’s simply nothing at all about this design that communicates anything about this character’s… well, character at all in their design. Honestly, I thought they were supposed to be just a joke character where a general mook or henchman got promoted to playable character, but no. She’s supposed to be her own unique character with her own unique story.

Hell, the reason I thought she was some disposable goon was because Rainbow Six Siege just added two new characters who entire schticks is that they’re generic, faceless recruits who got called up to the big leagues. They have no identifying features. Their entire personality is that they have no personality outside of being a pair of mooks you’d see milling around in the background that got the opportunity to be playable characters.

And apparently they’re willing to kill each other for the opportunity.

And that in itself is perfectly fine… if that’s the intended effect, as it is Rainbow Six Siege. But, clearly, from what I watched of Concord’s gameplay, this faceless rocket launcher character was supposed to be some bombastic, larger-than-life schizo who just… loves shooting people with a rocket launcher because a thin lacquer of ha ha people go BOOM! is her one defining personality trait.

But there is nothing - and I stress, nothing - about her design that imparts anything other than this -

And if you think I’m being hyperbolic about how bad these designs are, I’m not. YouTube has been awash with professional artists from various industries, both video games and beyond, viciously critiquing these character designs. One of the most interesting I’ve seen is this here.

I’d highly suggest you give it a watch if you’re interested, as these character designs don’t just fail in communicating personality and role, but fail aesthetically as well. As the good gentleman above will explain - usually by using the term, this design is a nightmare - they’re quite literally designed antithetically to the rules of basic color theory and graphic design. As the man in the video above explains, if someone brought him these designs as part of a project, he would reject them. If a student brought them to him as part of an assignment, he would fail them.

The sad thing about Concord is that, according to people who actually played the game, it played fine. There was nothing technically wrong with the gameplay and, after ten years in development - yeah, I’d fucking hope it would at least play fine.

But it doesn’t matter. If the characters in Overwatch were plain, boring, ugly, and uninspired, people would not still be playing it. People come to a hero shooter for the heroes. And if they heroes doing the shooting are not fun, exciting, or even fun or interesting to look at… why would anyone bother playing?

Post-mortem:

Let’s keep this brief.

Concord was a perfectly serviceable shooter at it’s core. Like I said, many of the reviews from professionals and first-hand accounts from players said that it played just fine. But it felt cheap. It felt like a bad and uninspired Overwatch wanna-be dressed up in bargain-bin, Spirit Halloween-tier Guardians of the Galaxy cosplay, wrapped in progressive political posturing to earn brownie points with a nonexistent crowd that, much like an absentee father, always promises he’ll show up to your soccer games or piano recitals, but always leaves you disappointed in the end.

Most damning of all - it was fucking hideous, and no one wanted to look at it.

When it comes to Concord, the greatest tragedy for Sony and Firewalk Studios is that this costly calamity could have been easily and thoroughly avoided. If they’d taken feedback from the gaming community - the actual audience who would make or break the game - they might have been able to rework the characters until they didn’t inspire revulsion in most who saw them. If they’d done basic market research, they might have realized that they were never going to wrench the title of THE HERO SHOOTER from Overwatch, and retooled the game accordingly. If they’d eaten some warmed-over humble pie, they might have realized that they were offering a product that nobody wanted and no one was asking for. Hell, they should have looked at the budget as it inflated out of control and, at some point, just cut their losses and scrapped the thing before it became a gaping wound in their accounting books.

But, one man’s tragedy is another’s comedy. Concord’s humiliating and historic belly-flop into the annals of video game history may be Sony’s own personal 9/11, but, to everyone else, the game’s rapid collapse was the greatest show on Earth for a brief moment. It wasn’t just funny to watch Firewalk Studios run desperate damage control on their social media, or read through the frantic screeds of its small but dedicated cadre of defenders who typed paragraphs of premium, uncut copium explaining why their new favorite game was absolutely not going to die within months - it was hilarious.

So, in the end, while Concord demonstrably failed at being a successful, or even a good game, it did achieve one thing. For the scant two weeks it existed, it was nothing if not entertaining.

Just not in the way that Sony or Firewalk Studios had hoped it would be.

1. We in the business call this bringing a toy knife to a gunfight with an Apache helicopter.

2. As someone of Polish descent, I am legally allowed to make this joke without it being racist.