Concord: A Post-Mortem

Within hours of release, PlayStation’s Concord was labelled a failure of the highest magnitude. Analysts have suggested sales could be sitting at around 25,000 on console. Steam sales are behind that. And man, people are loving it.

Endless analysis from people without the information needed to give it and, huh, surprise of surprises, the analysis all points to exactly what their opinion on the situation is. Sony is focussing too much on GAAS, and this is their punishment. The marketing team just didn’t put in enough overtime, and the game is perfectly fine outside of that. The numbers are laughably low and PlayStation will put out a blog post any day now correcting the record – Concord has been played by a billion people and rising.

And I just can’t help but feel it’s a little sad about the whole thing. The glee with which people pick over perceived failures is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. This isn’t analysis: it’s fanboyism in disguise. It’s willing the industry into the shape you believe it should be instead of looking at it for how it is.

And of course, that’s nothing new. It’s just it used to be “I like PlayStation so Xbox is bad”. Now it’s become something else entirely, something insipid and clandestine. Because interest in the industry isn’t a bad thing. It’s one of the biggest entertainment industries going. But the lazy nature of discussion does far more harm than good.

And this is something that we’re seeing more and more.

Concord – Taking Off Again

Here’s some top level professional industry analysis for you. Any company quadrupling down on GAAS is going to be disappointed. Concord is a result of that.

People love these games, and put hundreds of hours into them sometimes each month. But you know how much movement there has been within this genre in the last five years? Barely any. Before a company can become successful with a GAAS, they have to create something original. Few of them want to do it. Risks are bad.

As a result, we have games thrown into the world to die. “Fortnite is successful, so we’ll make a Fortnite” the bosses say, without any hint of irony. Then they sit back in their comically large office chairs and prepare to count the money.

Except the money never comes. People who aren’t the bosses lose their jobs. Someone looks at the top 10 chart and spots a space for a Disney Dreamlight clone but with Rabbids. The process repeats itself.

And here’s the kicker. Concord isn’t in this part of the discussion yet. Service games have a habit of being difficult to judge. Who’d have thought No Man’s Sky would still be about?

Concord has not had a successful launch. We don’t know why. But we know the teams behind it are probably scrambling to fix the issues, and that with Sony behind them they might just manage to find their audience. Of course, the question then becomes will Sony get behind them?