I’m 100% of the opinion that the main reason Concord failed is because it didn’t get any advertising. The first time I heard about Concord was the news that it completely flopped at launch and I wasn’t the only one. When that’s the first thing people hear about the game they’re not even going to bother to get interested in what the game is about. To this day I don’t even know if Concord had any redeeming qualities because I haven’t even seen any gameplay outside of 5 second no-context clips. Even bad games receive better numbers than Concord.
Highguard is going to have more staying power than Concord solely on the fact that it actually had an advertising budget.
What advertising though? They didn’t have to pay for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising than Highguard, with Concord getting multiple devlogs and previews across a few Sony hosted events, IIRC.
My bad, I meant marketing strategy not advertising budget. Concord definitely had a bigger budget considering they got a Secret level episode deal before the game was even launched. But the budget and bits of marketing don’t matter when it doesn’t gain any traction and whatever their strategy was it gained no traction what so ever.
As for highguard, they did pay for the TGA spot. They didn’t pay extra to be the premier trailer, that Jeff gave them for free. And they did had a weird strategy of going completely radio silent after TGA. But despite that people at launch knew this game existed and has already beaten Concord numbers (at least on Steam) by hundredfold and I don’t think that’s solely because this game is F2P.
Concord didn’t have any advertising because the data was showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been throwing good money after bad.
But after they revealed it? Yes. From their reveal to their beta test, it seemed clear the game was not going to find an audience; definitely not enough to recoup $200M-$400M.
You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.
Even still, its got more legs to stand on than Concord had, which was zero.
I think its serviceable unlike Concord, which required too many changes.
I guess we just have to wait and see if the server is shut down in two weeks. In reality, I don’t think we will ever see as monumental a train wreck as Concord was. Probably ever.
Its free unlike Concord, so having a large number of launch players is not surprising. Keeping them is the real challenge.
I’m 100% of the opinion that the main reason Concord failed is because it didn’t get any advertising. The first time I heard about Concord was the news that it completely flopped at launch and I wasn’t the only one. When that’s the first thing people hear about the game they’re not even going to bother to get interested in what the game is about. To this day I don’t even know if Concord had any redeeming qualities because I haven’t even seen any gameplay outside of 5 second no-context clips. Even bad games receive better numbers than Concord.
Highguard is going to have more staying power than Concord solely on the fact that it actually had an advertising budget.
What advertising though? They didn’t have to pay for The Game Awards spot, Jeff just gave it to them for free. I haven’t seen any commercials or ads outside of that either. I think Concord had more advertising than Highguard, with Concord getting multiple devlogs and previews across a few Sony hosted events, IIRC.
My bad, I meant marketing strategy not advertising budget. Concord definitely had a bigger budget considering they got a Secret level episode deal before the game was even launched. But the budget and bits of marketing don’t matter when it doesn’t gain any traction and whatever their strategy was it gained no traction what so ever.
As for highguard, they did pay for the TGA spot. They didn’t pay extra to be the premier trailer, that Jeff gave them for free. And they did had a weird strategy of going completely radio silent after TGA. But despite that people at launch knew this game existed and has already beaten Concord numbers (at least on Steam) by hundredfold and I don’t think that’s solely because this game is F2P.
Concord didn’t have any advertising because the data was showing them beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would have been throwing good money after bad.
So they knew it was going to be a complete failure before they even released it?
But after they revealed it? Yes. From their reveal to their beta test, it seemed clear the game was not going to find an audience; definitely not enough to recoup $200M-$400M.
If it seemed so clear I’m sure you’ll have no problem backing that up with some actual sources.
You can dig through This Week in Video Games episodes on SkillUp’s YouTube channel from back just before the game released. That’s where I got it from. Live service games are looking for the hockey stick shaped graph in order to take off, and it was quite clear that even when the game was free, it didn’t have the juice to make that happen. And even the lower bound of $200M is a tough bar to clear, but Concord was funded at a time when borrowing money was cheap and every asshole with a war chest thought they’d make a fortune by following the same formula; the problem with that is that everyone else thought they could do that too. And that’s not even to say Concord was the worst game ever made or anything. It was just a game that cost way more to make than it was ever, ever going to make back.
Even still, its got more legs to stand on than Concord had, which was zero.
I think its serviceable unlike Concord, which required too many changes.
I guess we just have to wait and see if the server is shut down in two weeks. In reality, I don’t think we will ever see as monumental a train wreck as Concord was. Probably ever.