Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
Every game executive and investor wants a Fortnight. That’s why no matter how many times gamers reject it live service games will continue to be developed. Because AAA games are made for investors not players.
I mean sometimes it works. Pubg was the big Battle Royale in town until Fortnite (as a battle Royale) came along. League of Legends too. The problem with Concord is it took about 6 years to come out so it couldn’t draft on the hot trend.
League of Legends is a pet peeve of mine, since one bad person took down DotA forum, stole ideas from it, created LoL, and acted like a big shot. He wasn’t alone, but you know what I mean.
To this day I think that Blizzard hates esports, because they left DotA with 0 support, and only after many years of Dota 2 they created Heroes of the Storm, which was even more watered down than LoL.
And LoL is such a simple game, which is OK, but once you actually understand Dota, it doesn’t come anywhere close. It brought nothing innovative. Which is sad.
Source: I played hundreds of hours, and put hundreds of dollars into LoL back in the ~2010.
It’s not like any game is completely original anyways. They all take inspiration from games that come before, some more than others.
While that is true, the issue is that they are trend chasing for a quick cash grab and put in next to no effort to make the game good or listen to consumers saying that this isn’t what we want.
I wonder what all the big publishers are pushing now. A Genshin? A Palworld?
actually yes, there have been alot of games in the rpgmmo ish game like genshin and the ark / survival builder games like Palworld.
Whenever a game becomes popular people and studios try to make thier own. Palworld is an example of one that worked (it being Ark survival evolved: pokemon editon)
Genshin-likes are being very popular in the east, this year we got Wuthering Waves (which is actually much better), and 2-3 years ago we got Tower of Fantasy (which was terrible), now the same studio from ToF announced Neverness to Everness which is the same concept of an open world anime action rpg but in an urban setting, suspiciously years after Project Mugen had been announced which is has the exact same premise.
Problem with trying to get a Fortnite was that Epic was wanting to get it’s own PUBG after realizing that trying to get their own Minecraft was a failed endeavor. They quickly pivoted the game formula from a Minecraft type tower defense to a battle royale game.
Concord should have seen the writing on the wall early on and pivoted it’s game into something else thats flavor of the month.
Wait wasn’t the original concept for fortnite actually a wave based tower defence game? I remember being excited for that and then battle royal happened and I lost all interest.
People paid for that original game too, it wasn’t free. I don’t assume they got refunded. It was basically a massive bait and switch.
Yeah, the original trailer made it clear they were trying to go after the Minecraft style of gathering resources, building up a base and fortifying it, then defending from zombie mobs at night, like the Minecraft mobs.
Maybe not so much the pixel/block graphics, but the ideas behind Minecraft, with an actual objective, which Minecraft lacked.
It’s not like gamers are rejecting live services as a whole, because there are still quite a lot of successful live service games. And when a live service is successful, it’s really successful. So much so that it’s worth it to investors to keep gambling on them, one hit can compensate for a dozen flops.
Can they stay solvent through a dozen flops when each one costs them hundreds of millions of dollars?
Usually they don’t completely flop though, they just underwhelm expectations but if they can stay active long enough with the right amount of whales and fish they can usually break even or make a small profit. Concord is just a high profile legitimate flop that was turned off before it could do anything.
This is the truth people don’t want to admit, but Final Fantasy XIV being successful carried square enix through their darkest days when everything wasn’t making a profit. Cygames using all the money they got from the granblue gacha to finance an action rpg and a fighting game, etc.
They serve as a safety net, we lost mimimi last year, I don’t think anyone would say they made bad games, but they just didn’t sell enough so they closed.
You just made me realise I’m a gamer, not a Fortniter. But I probably should’ve realised that based on my Steam "years of service* and disgustingly large catalogue.
I’m a proven guaranteed money pot, publishers! Make me something good and I give the moneys!
Did this post receive more engagement than the game itself?..
Even if it’s an absolute shit game.
This game could be a great resource about what not to do.
Didn’t they give out refunds? That seems like the right thing to do when a massively multiplayer game is dead on arrival.
Yeah, they did handle it correctly. All things considered. Even in an utopian future where the stopkillinggames.com campaign is successful. Personally I would still prefer to keep all games alive.
Honestly, I’m a bit skeptical of StopKillingGames. It feels like a good thing, but it also comes off as naive. Like the whole “just distribute the server” requirement is impossible with the way modern games are developed, and may be cost-prohibitive to implement for most developers well into the future. Besides, some games really are less like a painting and more like a musical; performance art necessarily has to end at some point, so it’s all about the experience and the memories. Nobody complains when the actors take a bow, because that’s the expectation.
Louis Rossman sometimes rubs me the wrong way, but he usually makes really good, nuanced points: https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8?si=m4QGHfHY1fOtITpw
Keep the debate alive, because we all love playing games.
Doesn’t change the fact that the few fans it had can’t play it ever again, game is still killed because it had no support for community servers, just matchmaking.
I for sure would prefer to host my own The Crew and not getting a refund.
I feel it’s rather fair to give them a pass on this one. Games with a player base and longer than a passing fart of time in the market? Sure. This was a failed product. They issued refunds. This is a situation where pushing your luck just backs someone into a corner.
We can hope they’ll flip the assets and remodel into another title.
It’s definitely not the fastest but it’s really close.
The fastest full shutdown currently belongs to The Culling 2 which only lasted 2 days between launch and being closed completely.
The Day Before is another big example of a game that lasted an incredibly short time but despite that game lasting 4 days before no longer being sold, the games servers stayed on much longer than that meaning that it was shut down after Concord despite being cancelled before it.
Including joke reviews, the game had a 16% rating and was so poorly made that within those 2 days it killed the popularity of both Culling games extremely quickly.
The first game was popular because it was a twist on the genre while the 2nd one was a quickly thrown together (almost exact) clone of DayZ.
The word scam was thrown around a lot in those 2 days.
Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.
The Day Before only made it 4 days.
On 11 December, four days after The Day Before launched to widespread criticism, Fntastic announced their closure, stating that as their game had “failed financially” they could not afford to continue operating. The Day Before was removed from sale on Steam later that day.
Day Before was basically a scam though, and they kept the servers up for a few weeks.
By all accounts this was a real game. It’s just that nobody wanted to play it.
In the last 2 years we’ve seen these live-service games fail at launch time and time and time again. The execs need to just accept that Fortnite already exists and you can’t force that kind of success.
