Concord Didn't Fail In A Vacuum

“Being a Freegunner means…well…you’re free”

Nov 02, 2024

Concord is officially not coming back. Sony shut down Firewalk Studios this week. It laid off all 174 members starting November 1 (bringing Sony's total gaming cuts up to 1,290 for the year). I reported, based on two sources familiar with the agreement, that the game's development deal was $200 million, putting the total cost of Concord even higher. It might be the most expensive failure in PlayStation’s history.

"Firewalk’s innovative approach to connected storytelling and its commitment to high-quality gameplay continues to exceed our expectations.” That’s how Hermen Hulst, described the game in 2023 when the studio was acquired. "I think fans will be very pleased when they see what Firewalk has in store for them.”

But they were not pleased. "Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional, but others did not land with enough players,” he wrote in an email to staff just 18 months later. "I am a big believer in the benefits of embracing creative experimentation and developing new IP,” Hulst continued. “However, growing through sustainable financials, especially in a challenged economic environment is critical."

That’s a big 180 for the person in charge of Sony’s first-party portfolio. It almost made it sound like he played no part in the Concord saga. “We did not hit our targets with this title,” the executive added. Who is we? It was similar to the trick Jeff Bezos pulled after lighting 10 percent of the Washington Post’s subscriber business last week.

“It’s our duty to look at our our resource planning, and make sure that we run a sustainable business,” Hulst told Variety prior to the shutdown announcement. “That’s part of being CEO. We never take that lightly, because we know these people personally, and it’s very close to our hearts and the teams and good working atmospheres. But yes, we’ve had some layoffs.”

Concord's very small but very loyal fanbase came together to say goodbye one last time in the game's Discord server before it permanently went offline as well. Just like the game which was deleted from players' PS5 libraries, there is now no trace left of the Concord community that briefly existed earlier this year, its fans scattered to the winds just like its developers. But you can find some of their brilliant work on ArtStation.

A Sakhal true crime confession

Last month, DayZ broke its Steam concurrent record with 78,000 players a decade after comiong out thanks to its recent Frostline Expansion adding an entire new map called Sakhal. It's still not in the top 15 games for player engagement on Steam, but it's clear DayZ's best, most vibrant days are still ahead.

The immersive zombie survival sim born of an Arma 2 mod arrived in late 2013 with a rocky alpha release. After an initial explosion in players, interest dropped off during a protracted early access period. At the end of 2018, with only the most diehard players still circulating through its austere, hyper-realistic zombie apocalypse on a regular basis, DayZ finally went 1.0.

"DayZ is still broken, still beautiful, and still unfinished," declared Polygon's Charlie Hall at the time. It took the following six years to slowly and methodically win old players back and find new ones. The before and after pics are impressive but don't necessarily tell the whole story. DayZ's unique blend of MMO and survival sim has yielded a meaningful social sandbox full of fascinating moments.

"After playing with this guy on Sakhal who was SUPER nice to me, for like legit a whole hour...I ended up smashing him in the back of the head while he was cooking meat for the both of us...." wrote Reddit user ThangGoManGo in one of the weirdest missed connections I've ever read.

"I remember him yelling 'Dude what the fuck, why?!' And I stopped talking and just beat him to death...After that I looted him. Ate all of our food by myself. Played alone for like 1.5 hours after that, until I ended up dying anyways…"

They continued, "Honestly, I felt bad the WHOLE DAY, in real life, after that. Yes it's a game but I still betrayed a real person who was super nice to me and after we both talked so much. Felt like an asshole. And then I decided I would bever ever ever do that again…"

Where is Apex Legends 2.0?

Apex Legends is one of the biggest new live service success stories since Fortnite blew up but it is not big enough for investors. The battle royale hasn't been a top 10 game by weekly active players on any major platform for the last two months, beat out by the much-maligned but still much-played Overwatch 2. Does that mean we can expect an Apex Legends 2 in the future?

No. EA CEO Andrew Wilson shot that prospect down pretty forcefully in the company's earnings call this week. "What we have seen in the context of live service-driven games at scale is the 'version two' thing has almost never been as successful as the 'version one' thing," he told analysts. Instead, the company will focus on a "large systemic innovation," whatever that means.

We've seen some major sequels stumble recently. Follow-ups like City Skylines 2 and Kerbal Space Program 2 have shown how hard it is to launch a sequel that does everything the first game did, lots of new stuff, and also feels finished. A year after it arrived, Payday 3 still has less than five times the Steam concurrent players as Payday 2.

The live service games feel like platforms, and asking players to jump to leave behind the one they spent hundreds of hours in and dollars on is like making them buy a new console that doesn't have backwards compatibility. It milks fans for more money but fractures the player community.

This is why we aren't getting a Sims 5. Despite some fans perennially begging for a sequel, the decade-old Sims 4 still added 15 million players last year leading to "higher than expected" earnings from the franchise. Instead, EA Maxis is working on Project Rene, a mobile multiplayer version of The Sims meant to complement the existing game, and some remasters of past games like MySims.

The guns were a lie

Destiny 2's latest mass community puzzle was proving that a conspiracy theory about bad loot RNG was actually true despite repeated denials by Bungie. Ten years of loot inflation means the only thing players have left to chase are "god rolls," i.e. versions of weapons with the "best" selection of randomly selected perks.

This makes it a lot like Pokémon where hardcore players hunt for creatures with the best IVs–hidden stat spreads that indicate whether or not a given Pokémon will ever reach its highest battle potential. A gun without the right IVs, or perks, in Destiny 2 is usually considered garbage and instantly liquidated.

When a particular grenade launcher's "god roll" in the latest update seemed almost impossible to get, players felt cheated. They started crowdsourcing drop data, sharing elaborate graphs and spreadsheets, and theorizing about how perk RNG was coded into Destiny 2 such that the odds could actually be unfair but Bungie wouldn't notice.

They turned out to be right. A fix will arrive on November 5. "In the long-term, we're looking at a few options not only to thank many of you for your data-crunching, but to get some weapons in your hands that had perk rolls with lower RNG chances than intended," the studio wrote this week. Free VS Chill Inhibitors with Envious Arsenal and Bait and Switch perks for everyone it sounds like.

This ordeal is notable for a couple reasons. 1.) It was more interesting than anything actually going on inside the game at the moment. 2.) It underlined the deeper problem with Destiny 2's loot chase, which is both obtuse and bloated, as off-putting to newcomers as it is capricious for mid-to-hardcore player fans.

“Perkgate” was followed by a much smaller scandal: this year's Festival of the Lost event went live with busted loot from 2023. "It turns out that when you fire half your QA team, more things than usual slip through the cracks," wrote Forbes' Paul Tassi this week.

Live service interrupted

Pokémon Go recently launched Gigantamax raid battles but the fights ended up being way too hard and stingy with rewards though. Niantic promised to make the fights "slightly" easier and also improve the capture rate for the Gigantamax Pokémon afterwards.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launched with some miserable spawn point issues. Players were getting dropped into matches and killed before they could select a loadout, sometimes appearing right on top of opponents, and even dying multiple times in a single killcam.
The Elder Scrolls: Legends hasn't received a new content update since 2019 but it was still online and playable. That will soon change. The game has been pulled from storefronts and will go offline permanently on January 30, 2025. Until then everything in the store will cost just 1 gold. Bethesda's Hearthstone cash-in wasn't as slick or pretty as Blizzard's card game but it had some neat original ideas around board positioning and other mechanics.
World of Warcraft's rewards are getting buffed for the fourth time this year. The Blizzard MMO's 20th anniversary event was locking certain daily rewards behind weekly requirements which was messing everyone up and killing the overall vibe. More and better rewards have arrived to compensate for the timegating.
For Honor has the weirdest crossover I've ever seen. Ubisoft's seven-year old medieval combat game which still regularly gets meaty updates and maintains a very passionate fanbase received a Destiny 2 mode. It's surprisingly neat and helped fans rally to complete community orders at Helldivers 2 speeds.

Pokémon TCG Pocket Digest

We finally have a Pokémon trading card game on mobile that doesn't suck. Pokémon TCG Pocket nails the creature card collecting fantasy with cool art and fun battles. It’s not quite as effortlessly snackable as 2022's Marvel Snap and the game’s free-to-play microtransaction economy is a mess. That hasn't stopped casual players from getting demolished by OP decks featuring Mewtoo and others. And some fans have already convinced themselves that virtual booster packs sporting bent wrappers are much more likely to contain special cards. It's become the playground myth equivalent of holding the B button down on the Game Boy to make hard-to-capture Pokémon stay in their Pokéballs.

Patch notes

The First Descendant update 1.1.6 is updating the loot shooter's sexy nun costume to remove the coat tails and show more ass cheek. "The Dev Team is committed to providing skins that satisfy you," the devs wrote. The team also teased a pity system to protect against bad drop rate luck.
Helldivers 2 patch 01.001.201 continues Arrowhead Studios' apology tour. The SG-8P Punisher Plasma has been restored to its former glory. Ragdolling while crawling, meanwhile, has been nerfed. Also: "The Service Technician is no longer mourning the death of her beloved pet goldfish 'Goldie' and can now be interacted with again."
The Division 2 Shades of Red update introduces a bunch of new modifiers to remix old content. This is also the season that lets players go back to being level 40 instead of needing to create a new character from scratch. But the most important change is this: "Balaclavas now conceal player ears."
Escape From Tarkov patch 0.15.5.0 added a pin and lock feature that lets players manage their inventories much more sanely. It also changes the in-game season to fall and prevents the game from softlocking when two players try to grab the same weapon out of a container.
Guilty Gear -Strive- version 1.4 was a massive rework of its fighters and fans are loving the buffs to the revenge-seeing samurai Baiken. "God these buffs are dumb LMAO 2H Tatami now combos into c.S and cross up Yozansen Vacuum + new 6H bounce height now sets up Tether LOL," is how one player described them.