• mtlvmpr@sopuli.xyz
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    4 months ago

    This would be a perfect spot to advertise that EU petition. There must’ve been at least 1 person who liked the game and now can’t play anymore.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

        Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

        • DarthYoshiBoy@beehaw.org
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          2 months ago

          Well, I’m not above admitting that I was wrong. Kudos to you. I legit figured they’d let that corpse shamble along for at least a year as a F2P endeavor, but they seem to have reached a correct conclusion earlier than I would have credited them.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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            2 months ago

            Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

            I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

            I still doubt it.

            I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

            But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

            The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

            When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

            From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

            That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

            But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

            You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

            But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.

    • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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      4 months ago

      As much as I’d like to see this game preserved, I don’t think the dev can be held responsible when they’re refunding everyone who purchased the game.

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

        • s12@sopuli.xyz
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          4 months ago

          I believe another alternative would be to make it completely clear that you’re getting a temporary license. You shouldn’t be able to try to make it look like you’re buying a game when you don’t then even own.

          • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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            4 months ago

            No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

            If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

            If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

            If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

            Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

            That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

            It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

  • Chloyster [she/her]@beehaw.orgM
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    4 months ago

    I feel like short of making it free to play and having a complete art style rework this game doesn’t have great hopes of ever being relevant. I mean from what I’ve gathered the gameplay itself is decent to good. But yeah they just misfired so hard with this.

    Despite it all, I feel bad for the majority of devs who spent so much of their life working on this and who are likely going to be out of a job. Of course I don’t know anything about the inner workings, but I’d be willing to bet it’s not most of their fault’s that sony had been pushing so hard for live service stuff under their former leadership

    • 100@fedia.io
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      4 months ago

      they still got paid and made stuff for their portfolio, while executives get to explain why there is a hundred million missing and entire studios worth of manhours in the void

      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

        Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

        Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

        Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

        • luciferofastora@lemmy.zip
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          4 months ago

          Devs be applying like “Hi! I’d like to join your development team! My professional qualifications are that I’ve spent eight years working on a failed game!”

          Of course, it won’t be the individual devs’ fault but I don’t have any difficulties imagining that some of them have a harder time finding new jobs than people who were let go after the launch of more popular games.

  • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    I never saw a launched game unlaunch this quick. We talked about failures that got shutdown 1 year after launch. But now the record is what, 2 weeks? Question is, will they go back to drawing board and make changes to the game for a relaunch, such as a free to play model? Nothing is stated here, so probably not.

    I would consider playing this game, if it was playable on Linux (and without a PSN account requirement). But clearly Sony does not care about me.

    • djsoren19@yiffit.net
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      4 months ago

      I think the record still goes to Amazon’s Crucible, which was cancelled before release after a closed-beta that nobody played.

  • Gamma@beehaw.orgOP
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    4 months ago

    It fully released August 23rd. Beta started in July

    While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If you purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to your original payment method.

    Customers who purchased from other digital storefronts will also be refunded.

    • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.zip
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      4 months ago

      The Day Before was playable from release on Dec 7th until the servers were shutdown on Jan 22nd.

      47 playable days.

      All time steam peak player count: 38,104.

      Total Development Time: Approximately 3 Years, likely closer to 4.

      Concord was playable on release on August 23rd, and will shut down on September 6th.

      15 playable days.

      All time steam peak total player count (after release): 697.

      Total Development Time: Approximately 8 Years.

      Fucking amazing. At least they’re refunding it.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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    4 months ago

    Stop making live service games and “shared world” faux-mmos. If it’s not single player, P2P multiplayer, or providing the server executable for me to host, I’m not buying it. There are already enough good MMOs anyways.

      • azerial@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 months ago

        I worked in Star Wars: The Old Republic for ten years. It’s still running and the story is really nice. EA sold it to Broadsword.

          • azerial@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            I indeed did. I started working on it as QA and left the project as a software engineer. It was a really fun experience.

            edit: I have a lightsaber replica to show for it. Lol

            • AFallingAnvil@lemmy.ca
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              4 months ago

              That’s awesome! Thanks for making an MMO I personally have 500 hours in on steam. It’s actually the MMO that made me open to playing MMOs, I hated the genre before because all I knew was WoW and Korean stuff that’s all walls of bland text and dull repetitive tasks that don’t respect your time.

              The stories of SWTOR and full voice acting were something else entirely. I really enjoyed it and have some very fond memories of my first time playing it as a teen years and years ago, it basically absorbed my holiday vacation that year as I found a guild, made friends, got into some RP, and really just found some cool experiences. In a market starving for anything halfway decent that’s star wars I’m glad we have it.

              I request lightsaber pictures!

              • azerial@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                4 months ago

                I am definitely going to share this story with the team. It really touched my heart and I’m sure it will theirs.

                I remember when the title went on steam, it was a really big deal.

                As for the light saber, lemme look. The box is currently in storage, in it’s original box, neatly packed. I cherish those years.