I guess they just couldn't find the magic formula to keep the game even longer in development like Star Citizen managed to do.
It’s still a disaster, it’s impressive that concord is somehow doing worse
which has amazing content - as judged by the sales of the ships and such in the game, even before gameplay existed.
The problem with concord is that there are a bunch of wokes at the helm, trying to push a personal agenda via this project, but failing to see that gamers aren't buying what they're selling. Gamers who, first and foremost, want fun games, cool graphics and immersion in fantasy.
Most games today are diverse, some more than others. Including many Sony games that sell incredibly well.
This is never the problem with games that fail due to "woke" things. You, probably like the Concord devs, have a different definition of "woke" to the critics, and until you realise that you'll continue to make this mistake.
The word has lost any specific meaning. “The game is bad because it’s bad”.
What exactly is the critics definition of “woke” that somehow is anything other than diverse?
When you can't criticize something that is diverse then it ensures it will be shit. You can have diverse things that are good, but not when it isn't allowed to be criticized since they will call anyone who criticizes it a racist bigot. That is what the critics means with woke.
So if the game is woke, the game is inherently hostile to your criticism? You, the consumer, are being attacked by the game? How can a game be made in a way that is hostile to your criticism without fourth-wall breaking finger wagging?
Hating on Concord right now is the literal safest opinion you could have about it. This makes it not Woke by your definition.
> That is what the critics means with woke
This is not what most people mean by woke. It's nice that you have a sunnier definition of it that criticizes surface-level diversity in place of substance, but anything with women or black people in it is considered woke nowadays, regardless of quality.
You will often see people change their minds about something being woke once it sells well because it goes against the narrative that if something is "woke" nobody wants it. We've seen this with Barbie, Baldurs Gates 3, and even Life is Strange. A game that is the closest thing to "woke" anyone could mean.
It's just a dog whistle for people that want to keep things white.
You could even criticize how it’s diverse. If it’s done in an insensitive manner for example. Maybe they changed a character after they were established, (as a gay man myself I hate when they change a characters sexuality). Could complain that something is too sexual for the target audience(hint, gay couples existing and showing affection isn’t “sexual” when a straight couple can do it and no one bats an eye).
But if your criticism is the existence of diversity, you’re a racist bigot and you should be called out for that. There is zero valid criticism on the mere existence of someone different than you in media.
Wasting a huge part of your life for your employer is what you get paid for if you have a job.
Nearly everybody has grandiose wishes.
Concord basically doesn't have fans, at least in any number that can support a moderately successful game. No matter what they did business wise, the idea and characters and world simply weren't appealing enough to justify the work put into it.
The marketing seemed to basically rely on "if they see 30s of gameplay, that will be compelling enough".
If we remember TF2, they launched with a bunch of really well conceptualized "Meet the character" videos which built humor and personality into the characters as well as taught some of the mechanics.
Overwatch launched a whole pile of interesting and very fresh player mechanics, as well as about triple the characters available with TF2.
Again, I can easily imagine they had players testing it. I'm not sure they had many people market testing.
Fallout 76, No Man's Sky (at least they managed to improved after release).
The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Redfall, Babylon's Fall (Dead after release?).
And many games just force player to do meaningless things (for example, cast one magic 100 times for an achievement or unlock an unique item). Do they actually think this is funny during QA or design stage?
I was playing Bioshock Infinite recently and it had an achievement along the lines of "Loot 200 Containers." Not a huge deal except it pops up every time, 200 times, as you are looting.
> Do they actually think this is funny..
What's funnier is that thousands of players discovered there was a word to describe what they wanted to do to the team: defenestration.
Well they certainly weren't dogfooding it after launch. The Concord credits list 1,972 professional roles [1] while a week after release the game had fewer than 150 players on Steam. [2] The game was so bad that not even the people who spent 8 years working on it had any interest in it.
--
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/229488/concord/credits/playst...
Did they ever do player testing or get outsiders to try it out before release? Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?