EPTHow do.you fuck up publicising a game that badly?
The Games Industry And ATVI - Page 58
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23314 Posts
How do.you fuck up publicising a game that badly? | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
The game developer guy who called players "talentless freaks" no longer works for Firewalk Studios. He is doing the Studio no favours by pretending to speak for them. The Studio leadership should have distanced themselves from this person's off the cuff comments. This developer could be working for a competitor of Firewalk Studios and he could be intentionally damaging the Studio while pretending to support them. He could easily be "controlled opposition". Who knows. Studio leaders need to address this former employee insulting their customers. By co-opting causes like "gay pride" or "palestinian sovereignty" or whatever the latest cause of the day is... these Game Studios and their publishers damage and add poison to the well of whatever cause they claim they favour. In extreme cases brands like Bud Light damage their own brand and whatever "rights cause" they superficially claim to support. Please note that Sony removed the LBGT tag from Concord off of Steam. So does Sony really support gay rights? Or does Sony just parrot random talking points in whatever jurisdiction they are marketing in order to maximize profit? These massive corps like Sony ain't got nuttin' to say about homosexual sex outside the bounds of marriage when they're marketing in Saudi Arabia or Iran. In another area highlighted by Sony's Concord, Hollywood and the Video Game Industry is having a problem creating black female characters that their male customer base thinks is cool. You want males to see a black female as cool? This is how its done boys... The male customers are rejecting the stupid idiotic black female caricatures the video game industry tries to push. Stop doing it and learn how to create cool characters like Jackie Brown and Foxxy Brown. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21224 Posts
A dozen of those happen every day. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
Firewalk spent 8 years and 100s of millions of dollars on it. Sony bought Firewalk. It is fascinating to observe massive scale failure. The video has 0.6 million views so I am not the only one watching this flaming Led Zeppelin crash into the ground. I can't wait for Sony's next big "live service" game! | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21224 Posts
He could post a 1h still image of a pigeon and it would get 600k views. So what that its a big game that failed? I can get the first post about a game that no one cared about, the second post to keep harping about it just gets weird. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/25/the-ten-reasons-playstations-concord-has-failed-disastrously/ The topic is fascinating for the reason Tassi brings up: he has never seen a failure on this scale in the past. I reject your claim that this is 1 of many failures that happen frequently. You must back that claim with evidence. On August 29 2024 03:23 Gorsameth wrote: the second post to keep harping about it just gets weird. No, I am just fine. It is weird that Sony failed this badly on this large of a project. Hopefully, Sony examines there errors and allocates resources better in the future. It makes me wonder if Bungie 's live service project , Marathon, is set to meet the same fate. Sony decided against making Destiny3. | ||
hexhaven
Finland899 Posts
On August 29 2024 03:30 JimmyJRaynor wrote: I reject your claim that this is 1 of many failures that happen frequently. You must back that claim with evidence. LOTR Gollum, BF2042, Artifact, 2021 GTA remaster, WC3 remaster, Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, a bunch of the Assassin's Creed titles, Aliens: Colonial Marines, SimCity 2013 (a game so bad EA gave me a free new game to make up for it), Rise of Kong, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana, The Day Before (it lasted less than a week?), Skull and Bones, that Suicide Squad thing, Redfall, Immortals of Aveum (Avernum?), Battleborn (ironically), Quake Champions, Starfield... e: And a whole bunch of hero shooters and extraction shooters that were immediately forgotten after release. double e: I think CP2077 did redeem itself, mostly. | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2486 Posts
I don't really know much about Concord but if it started production 1 year after Overwatch and took 8 years to make that seems like someone wanted a hero shooter while it was hot and made a team do it with little enthusiasm and poor management. Compared to Deadlock which feels like some guys at Valve that really wanted to make a game again and decided to see if they could cobble together two of the most successful genres of games into a playable tech demo. If people at the office didn't like it they would absolutely have scraped it before alpha, if the alpha players didn't like it they would have scrapped it at that point. Since the players really like it now it's going to get the full Valve treatment instead. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23314 Posts
On August 29 2024 04:40 hexhaven wrote: LOTR Gollum, BF2042, Artifact, 2021 GTA remaster, WC3 remaster, Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, a bunch of the Assassin's Creed titles, Aliens: Colonial Marines, SimCity 2013 (a game so bad EA gave me a free new game to make up for it), Rise of Kong, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana, The Day Before (it lasted less than a week?), Skull and Bones, that Suicide Squad thing, Redfall, Immortals of Aveum (Avernum?), Battleborn (ironically), Quake Champions, Starfield... e: And a whole bunch of hero shooters and extraction shooters that were immediately forgotten after release. double e: I think CP2077 did redeem itself, mostly. I’d add Anthem to that non-exhaustive list I don’t think Starfield completely bombed, just underwhelmed a bit. Gollum and Rise of Kong were at least amusingly terrible, but I don’t think they were like big budget games Hopefully publishers can learn at least a few lessons moving forwards: 1. Don’t try to capitalise on whatever the new trend is. Most times the games that got in early are the big hitters, and by the time you get your game out you can’t dislodge them, or the trend has died down 2. Don’t take teams that excel at a particular type of game and have them make something completely different 3. Not every game is going to make all the moneys in the world. Closing talented studios who botch a single project, or hell deliver a good product that just doesn’t sell, I don’t think is a sensible move in the longer term. If a team wants to do something else and has a clear idea and a kind of passion project that’s a little different. But imposing it doesn’t always deliver great results. All of Anthem, Redfall and Suicide Squad you see that in action | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
On August 29 2024 04:40 hexhaven wrote: LOTR Gollum, BF2042, Artifact, 2021 GTA remaster, WC3 remaster, Fallout 76, No Man's Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, a bunch of the Assassin's Creed titles, Aliens: Colonial Marines, SimCity 2013 (a game so bad EA gave me a free new game to make up for it), Rise of Kong, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana, The Day Before (it lasted less than a week?), Skull and Bones, that Suicide Squad thing, Redfall, Immortals of Aveum (Avernum?), Battleborn (ironically), Quake Champions, Starfield... e: And a whole bunch of hero shooters and extraction shooters that were immediately forgotten after release. double e: I think CP2077 did redeem itself, mostly. Not on the scale of Concord though. 125+ people worked on Concord for many years. WC3 remaster was a small team. Fallout76 still has enough of a player base to justify DLC packs and continued support. Here is Fallout76 years after release. https://steamcharts.com/app/1151340 Days after release Concord has 100 people playing it world wide in a multiplayer game that requires low latency. Battleborn? c'mon man. A small team at Gearbox cooked that up in less than 2 years as a way to get better with the new Unreal Engine so they could ramp up for Borderlands3. Gearbox half-assed Battleborn. Firewalk took 8 years to make Concord. The entire Firewalk Studios is dedicated to making Concord. You could play games of Battleborn many months after release. You can't find games of Concord a few days after its release. Aliens Colonial Marines was playable with a single player mode. Concord is not playable days after release. On August 29 2024 05:48 WombaT wrote: If a team wants to do something else and has a clear idea and a kind of passion project that’s a little different. But imposing it doesn’t always deliver great results. All of Anthem, Redfall and Suicide Squad you see that in action As Paul Tassi noted this is far worse than Suicide Squad. SS had 15,000 players at launch while Concord had under 700. No game this big that was in development this long failed this quickly with this small of a player base. This is why Concord is a fascinating train wreck. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/08/24/playstations-concord-did-not-break-700-players-on-steam-on-launch-day/ If this continues, this will be one of the worst major game launches...ever. No exaggeration, especially when you compare it to time spent on the game (eight years) and cost (no firm reports on this, but again, eight years, plus this is a game using pricey mo-cap tech for lots of detailed cutscenes). Add this to the Bungie purchase and Sony is making some big mistakes. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23314 Posts
I dunno if it’s a fascinating train wreck, it’s merely just a train wreck. Where are the tales of tortured development and starting from scratch multiple times like Duke Nukem Forever? The sneaky and basically fraudulent vertical slices of Alien: Colonial Marines? The penny pinching to launch a remaster of Warcraft 3 that destroyed the original servers, profiles etc while then launching with a mere fraction of the features of the original game. There’s some daft, baffling decisions in some of those flops to sink one’s teeth into. Concord just seemed to appear, then bomb. Perhaps the lack of marketing aside its flopping is quite intriguing given the lack of the usual tidbits you tend to hear of with other doomed projects. Also surely it’s pulling in slightly better numbers than those listed right? Sure, not likely to be good numbers but I’ve only seen Steam ones, not those on PSN? | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
On August 30 2024 22:33 WombaT wrote: There are quite a few industry practices I’d consider anti-consumer. I don’t think I’d count a multiplayer game launching so disastrously that players can’t find matches among them. Sure it obviously sucks if you purchase something and can not play it days later with no viable path making it possible to play it in the future.. ever. That is an anti-consumer practice. Of course, what is interesting about Sony is how they manipulate the meaning of words like "buy" and "purchase" in their EULA. Its funny how Rossman sounded like a conspiracy theorist lunatic 5+ years ago. Now, he's right. On August 30 2024 22:33 WombaT wrote: Also surely it’s pulling in slightly better numbers than those listed right? Sure, not likely to be good numbers but I’ve only seen Steam ones, not those on PSN? I've backed my claims with data. If you have some data outside of your speculation... post it. I'm not optimistic on Sony and they don't get any benefit of the doubt. Sony is straight up ripping people off. Steam's terms of refund should be altered for Concord so that any one can get their money back. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23314 Posts
And as I said, the industry has enough of those that I don’t think we need to reframe this one in that vein. If people can’t refund a game when it launches, only to have no players available to play with, then perhaps that’s a different question and a reasonable accommodation I’m not in the business of speculating, nor do I think there’s some giant cohort of PlayStation users hiding away somewhere. Just I’ve seen plenty of reportage that is quoting Steam numbers as the total playerbase, when it isn’t. I’ve also seen some saying ‘we don’t have the numbers of the PSN, but the Steam numbers we do have are x, and likely to be representative.’ Or something in that vein. It’s a minor tweak but it’s certainly more accurate Plenty of them do valuable, well-presented work but one issue the modern cottage industry of indie journalists have is that outrage and disaster absolutely drives clicks, and some can’t resist exaggerating or omitting things to push that angle even further. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
On August 30 2024 23:04 WombaT wrote: If I paid for a concert venue and nobody showed up, would I blame the venue for not filling it. If Sony had stressed there’d be single player options, only to not include them, then yes that would be anti-consumer. Sony stressed a great combat experience. That is not happening. For many, nothing is happening. On August 30 2024 23:04 WombaT wrote: Plenty of them do valuable, well-presented work but one issue the modern cottage industry of indie journalists have is that outrage and disaster absolutely drives clicks, and some can’t resist exaggerating or omitting things to push that angle even further. Rossman is on the money. I'm not looking for "outrage" ... I'm looking to remain fully informed so I can make proper purchasing decisions. Caveat Emptor On August 30 2024 23:04 WombaT wrote: Plenty of them do valuable, well-presented work but one issue the modern cottage industry of indie journalists have is that outrage and disaster absolutely drives clicks, and some can’t resist exaggerating or omitting things to push that angle even further. Paul Tassi isn't one of those cottage industry journalists though. I think his article is pretty much on the money. He is a very long term guy with very clear long term aspirations. I don't think he is looking for easy clicks from 1 article that will harm his long term credibility. Louis Rossman has done a solid job over many years. If he were an idiot he'd be gone by now. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23314 Posts
You’ve talked about loving Helldivers 2, there’s a pretty compelling game loop there, devs delivered their part of the deal. If in a parallel universe nobody was playing and it was DoA, is that on the devs? They built everything, it works there’s just nobody showing up? ‘Plenty of them do valuable, well-presented work…’ to quote myself. Perhaps I’m not talking about those guys specifically but a wider trend, or a more abstract point? If it’s about informing consumers to make better decisions, then why wouldn’t you strive for better accuracy re player numbers? Or at least concede that what is unknown, is unknown and can only have an educated guess at. It comes around full circle where consumers may be put off trying a game because the numbers are lowballed by the click bait machine, which ends up further killing the experience for those who’ve already purchased it. All you had to say re this angle was ‘hey that seems a more honest way to present it, x and y already do that to be fair to them’ and voila we’re done that tangent. It’s a pretty simple proposition, should commentators lowball numbers and lead with that, or not? | ||
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hexhaven
Finland899 Posts
On August 29 2024 05:26 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote: Both No Man's Sky and Cyberpunk 2077 also sold well at the start AND made comebacks. Yeah I guess No Man's Sky is generally well received nowadays, they managed to turn that ship around. And I almost forgot Anthem was a thing for a bit! Hard to keep up with all these titles, but as CP2077 and NMS show, it's certainly possible. Fallout 76 is also doing better nowadays, I think? | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland23314 Posts
On August 31 2024 00:32 hexhaven wrote: Well technically no other game that was released on August 23rd this year that was in development for the same amount of time, and with the same budget, and with the same number of people working on it, failed as quickly as Concord, I'll give you that. Yeah I guess No Man's Sky is generally well received nowadays, they managed to turn that ship around. And I almost forgot Anthem was a thing for a bit! Hard to keep up with all these titles, but as CP2077 and NMS show, it's certainly possible. Fallout 76 is also doing better nowadays, I think? I think both NMS and Fallout 76 benefited from some people liking the explore/loot/explore/loot/build some stuff loop It’s close to my least favourite gameplay loop, but hey some people love it. They probably bought enough time through that loop working well enough for enough people, to add the other stuff that would intrigue other gamers | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2486 Posts
On August 31 2024 00:32 hexhaven wrote: Well technically no other game that was released on August 23rd this year that was in development for the same amount of time, and with the same budget, and with the same number of people working on it, failed as quickly as Concord, I'll give you that. Yeah I guess No Man's Sky is generally well received nowadays, they managed to turn that ship around. And I almost forgot Anthem was a thing for a bit! Hard to keep up with all these titles, but as CP2077 and NMS show, it's certainly possible. Fallout 76 is also doing better nowadays, I think? Fallout 76 is also doing good. On the topic of games just being unlucky. Battleborn launched the same month as Overwatch. Smite 2 has their alpha test next week and Deadlock just lifted their NDA. Sometimes it's just hard. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
This game is 7 days old and its already dead. It was dead on Steam 3 days in. If any one is playing on Playstation they are keeping it a secret. | ||
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada16274 Posts
Here is Battleborn. https://steamdb.info/app/394230/charts/#max On August 31 2024 02:08 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote: On the topic of games just being unlucky. Battleborn launched the same month as Overwatch. Battleborn was no big deal for Gearbox. The company was expanding before, during, and after Battleborn's release and it sold. Battleborn had a decent player base for many months and then went F2P 1 year and 1 month after release. Randy Varnel headed up Battleborn and his work on the game was not considered a failure. He is still a top guy at Gearbox and a top guy developing Borderlands3 and Borderlands4. Battleborn was not much of a failure at all. As a Borderlands player I only agree with about 65% of what comes out of Varnell's mouth publicly. Privately, I guarantee you he is effective and he is effective in a studio that goes through managers like a hot knife through butter. Even though I disagree with him substantially.. the guy is good and he did a decent job on Battleborn. Gearbox grew before, during and after Battleborn. Firewalk is going to get decimated. Layoffs are coming and/or the studio is dissolved into Sony and Firewalk's top decision makers will be fired. No top person at Firewalk is going to move forward with the studio the way Varnell has @ Gearbox after working on Battleborn. THe #2 guy on Battleborn was Chris Brock. He is at Gearbox Frisco and went on to work on Borderlands3. he didn't get canned either. Most of the guys from Battleborn went on to work on Borderlands3 and Borderlands3 is a masterpiece. Battleborn is no where near the same as Concord. Firewalk is doomed. Sony shareholders will expect their pound of flesh. Gearbox rolled past Battleborn partially because it was a pedagogical exercise preparing the technical leads with Unreal ENgine experience. For Firewalk Studios this game Concord is all they have. This quote is great comedy. | ||
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