FISCHER: When good isn’t good enough

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

Once upon a time, in 2016, a little PC gaming developer called Blizzard put out a little game called “Overwatch,” an online multiplayer first-person shooter where teams faced off against each other playing a variety of fun characters with different weapons and abilities.

While “Overwatch” wasn’t the first of its kind in the “hero shooter” genre, it is unarguably the most successful, drawing in tens of millions of players, generating billions in revenue, and even launching its own esports league.

And, of course, whenever something is successful, you’ll get people trying to ride that wave of popularity.

Enter “Concord,” a newly released game published by Sony that is quickly earning its place as one of the worst commercial flops in the industry’s history.

On paper, there doesn’t seem to be anything fundamentally wrong with “Concord.” No review I’ve read mentions any problem with the core gameplay. By all accounts the game plays fine, looks fine, and runs fine. Judged completely on its own merits, I’m sure it’s a perfectly enjoyable game.

The problem is that the market “Concord” is trying to break into is already saturated with perfectly enjoyable games, most of which are either more established or more interesting than what “Concord” has to offer.

Being “fine” just isn’t good enough.

As it turns out, “If you build it, they will come,” isn’t exactly the sage wisdom it’s made out to be. Sometimes if you build it, they will just shrug and walk away.

According to the best available numbers, “Concord’s” PC launch peaked with under 700 concurrent players and has only dropped since, dipping down to the point where fewer than 100 people are playing the game at any given moment.

Numbers that low are effectively a death spiral for any game built around online multiplayer. Without a critical mass of players, wait times between matches get too long for those willing to give the game a chance. They’ll get frustrated and leave, reducing the player base further, and so-on and so forth.

It’s a fascinating train wreck because somebody had to have seen it coming. In the years it took to develop this game, somebody had to have looked at what they were making and realized that they were late to the party before they even started.

Was it just sunk cost fallacy that pushed this game over the finish line?

Did somebody at Sony really think that in 2024 they could just do a less interesting version of what Blizzard did in 2016 and they, too, would generate billions of dollars?

Did they not heed the lesson of “Battleborn,” another hero shooter that had the misfortune of releasing near the same time as “Overwatch” and was immediately crushed under its overwhelming dominance of the genre?

Most importantly, what are the chances that the people who spent years throwing money into the abyss for this game are going to take away the right lessons?

In particular, on top of everything else, “Concord” has suffered from banking on a risky pricing model. While most other games in the genre have adopted a consumer un-friendly free-to-play model laden with predatory microtransactions, “Concord” asked for $40 upfront for the whole game.

It’s a business model that the consumers should be rewarding, but instead the failure of “Concord” will likely be used as a warning to other developers to not go that route.

Speaking of developers, I feel bad for the people at Firewalk Studios, who have spent the week watching the entire industry gawk at the cataclysmic failure of their first and probably only game.

It’s one thing to make a bad game and see it fail. At least then you can see what you did wrong. But to spend years of your life on something that isn’t technically bad, but just isn’t good enough, has got to be immensely frustrating.

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and honestly probably wouldn’t have played “Concord” in 2016 either.