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TOAs is tradition, just after I sent out my Pushing Buttons article last week, some big gaming news broke: Sony pulled its hero shooter Concord from sale just two weeks after its release, because no one was playing it. Everyone who bought it for PlayStation 5 and PC received a refund, and now the game’s future is unclear.
It’s a brutal sequence of events. Sony bought Concord’s creators, Firewalk Studios, in 2023. Concord was eight years in development and an expensive game, with bespoke cinematics and a long-term plan that would have cost $100 million or more to develop. In its two weeks on the market, it sold fewer than 25,000 copies, according to estimates. That’s a surprise, even compared to the other bad news of the year for developers and studios.
A lot It has been written As for why Concord failed so miserably, as Keith Stuart noted in his review of the game, it was launched into a crowded genre – hero shooters – where many players already have their go-to game (Overwatch, Valorant, or Apex Legends, to name three). Sony’s marketing strategy for the game also seemed to fall flat, as almost no one knew about Concord before it launched (I barely knew about it, and it’s my job to know these things). There was also criticism of its characters and design – it was generic and didn’t have any particularly interesting gameplay ideas.
Concord’s failure is also symbolic of the existential problems that exist in modern game development: they are so expensive to create and take so long that a game can lose its historical momentum years before it is released. All of this makes publishers reluctant to take risks, but if you simply try to recreate what is popular, it will be outdated by the time it is finished.
Concord isn’t the first high-profile multiplayer flop of the year. Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League also disappointed its publisher by failing to sell well, and its players by shoehorning an otherwise potentially interesting game into a live-service multiplayer model. Sega’s Foamstars flew completely under the radar. And let’s not forget Hyenas, Sega’s live-service shooter, which was cancelled Just a few months before its release.
My sense is that people simply don’t have time for another eternal game. Destiny, one of the first games in the current generation of eternal live services that aim to keep players playing for years, turned 10 this week — it’s become a part of millions of people’s lives and routines. Overwatch, Fortnite, and, heck, even the decades-old World of Warcraft are dominant in their genres. What would it take for those players to either abandon it for a new game or add a new game in their spare time? And with these kinds of titles, people aren’t just abandoning the game — they’re abandoning their friends, too.
The craze for live games reminds me of the time in the 2000s, when almost every publisher was trying to make a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. Every day I’d get a press release saying that so-and-so had raised millions in funding for a new Warcraft killer. Some of the resulting games were good (Guild Wars, for example), but most of them enjoyed mild to moderate success at best. Online games are not It’s easy to succeed at it. They never have been.
It’s surprising that this is coming on the heels of huge sales for Black Myth: Wukong, a decidedly single-player game. Many factors contributed to Wukong’s success, as I wrote last week, but there is nonetheless a huge demand for that game, and by extension a huge demand for single-player games in general. Speaking personally, I don’t want a game that takes years to play. I want one that has something to say, an experience to convey, and one that eventually ends. A game whose art comes from one player. before your business model.
Partly, this is a matter of taste. There is clearly a huge market for live multiplayer games, but most of those people are already playing one. I highly doubt there are millions of untapped players desperate for a hero shooter or battle royale game who haven’t found the right one yet. It’s time for publishers to try something new.
What to play?
My family remains fascinated with Astro Bot, particularly my youngest son, who now wakes me up every morning telling me about his favorite power-ups (“frog punches” are his favorite). But he needed a break, so on a long train ride recently I gave him Baker An action platformer with a distinctly Japanese flavor, in the vein of the forgotten 90s series Ganbare Goemon. For the 98% of people to whom that means absolutely nothing, that means punching a beautifully animated character. Yokai with drumsticks as you walk through a comic book version of Japanese cities and landscapes.
The difficulty is definitely geared towards kids, so I found the first few levels almost entirely frictionless, but it was a welcome trip back in time to platforming nonetheless, reminding me of the screenshots of similar Japanese games I’d look at in the pages of my Nintendo magazines back in the ’90s.
Available in: PC, Nintendo Switch
Estimated playing time: 10 hours
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What to read
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In more positive news for Sony, details of the long-awaited PS5 Pro They’re finally here. For an extra £200 on top of the current price of the system, you can get improved specs, a 2TB solid-state drive and much more.
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As mentioned, Bungie’s space opera shooter Destination turns 10 this week and, as Christian Donlan writes in this anniversary essay, it’s a game that people always I have something to say about: not just one of the first games to ever play, but a conversation to ever play.
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The wonder of rubber keysa new film about the development of the ZX Spectrumwill be out early next month.
What to click on?
Block of questions
Reader Maisie ask this week’s question:
After years of happily gaming on the Switch, I decided to broaden my horizons and invested in a PS4 and a gaming laptop. The PS4 is great, but I’m having a hard time getting into Steam gaming. Working at a desk is not the same as relaxing on the couch with my husband. Do you have any tips for making PC gaming feel less like work and more like fun?
I have exactly the same feelings about PC gaming: I hate playing games on a desk. It was a bit different when I was a teenager and played Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims, and Age of Empires II non-stop after school, but now I sit at a desk all day, and aside from it being the last thing I want to do after work hours, it’s not good for the body. But I do play a decent amount of PC games these days, because you can plug an HDMI cable into your TV and play almost all of them on any Bluetooth-enabled controller. PS4 Controller will work, just like any Xbox controller; I use a Xbox One Controller Now for PC gaming, but for many years I used an old wired Xbox 360, which are cheap second hand. Steam cover It’s also a radical change: I wholeheartedly recommend saving for one.
As for a PC-exclusive game that might make all this seem worthwhile: these days almost everything is cross-platform. But Baldur’s Gate 3 It actually works better on PC, and if that doesn’t make you willing to put up with a keyboard and mouse, nothing will.
If you have a question for Question Block, or anything else to say about the newsletter, please reply or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.