Exactly How Everyone’s Concord Predictions Are Wrong

It is no consumers job to make sure that Concord is a good video game. And it is not up to any gamer to speak well of Concord. It’s not my job to “find at least one good thing to say about every game”. Anyone who has spent some time listening to me knows that one of my clichés is “Make your game, test your game, put your game up for sale on the market. If it sticks the landing, garners good buzz, then I’ll gladly pay to check your game out. I get paid to test software. I am not going to pay you to test your game for you.”

But, the opposite is also the case. It is no one’s job…no one elected any influencer…YouTuber, Live-Streamer, Twitter account…to tell you that you should be disinterested in a game because, by their oh-so-wizened analysis, they predict Concord will be a failure. So don’t even bother. Going so far as to say “I’m having a great time playing this game; not gonna pay for it though”. And so here is the case on why everyone who is in that end of the pool is wrong nine ways to Sunday.

People talk as if the entire fate of the PlayStation brand rests on the shoulders of Concord. It doesn’t. PlayStation’s portfolio outlook is that if Concord fails, it will be 1 of the 12 live-service titles that they have in development that does not work out. That’s WHY they have 12 of them in development. They expect that some of them will not catch fire. And success for those titles is not expected to be Fortnite, Warzone, Overwatch. The dev team is roughly twice the size of Battlestate Games. And Escape From Tarkov has a player-base of about 2 million players. Concord is only going to the PlayStation 5 on console. That and PC. The monthly active player count for Overwatch 2 is just now cresting close to 7mn, after years spent languishing between 1.6 and 3 million. I would say that if Concord captures and retains a player-count of 4 – 6 million active players, across both PC and PS5, it will be ok. Because that means that at an asking price of $40, the game will have made $160 – 240 million. And with a team that size there is no way it is even a $200 million budget game. And if it doesn’t do that, then the other 11 games that are in active development (including the ongoing work on Helldivers 2) will have a case-study to learn from. Which is another reason why businesses will sometimes take risks, prototype, launch new product lines, and see what there is to be learned.

The game should be free-to-play. Weird to me that they didn’t have that same energy for Palworld and Helldivers 2. Here we have two examples this year of games that asked for their money up front. And both have, to-date, been bonga successes that no one predicted. No one saw coming. In fact, many of the pundits who are projecting the failure of Concord were also equally pessimistic of Helldivers 2. But in the wake of that, most sane people agree that both of these games have achieved a level of success that must be acknowledged, even if it only lasts for a couple of years. Huh. By the way, also funny that the people who yammer on about how Helldivers 2 should be multi-platform (“Who does it help?”) have not also kept that same energy for Palworld . More on that later when we swing back to visit the causality of all of this Concord Sturm und Drang.

Under the paid regime of 2016 – 2022, Overwatch had a player-base of as much as 40 million worldwide. And an active player count in excess of 10 million monthly. Overwatch had earned $1 billion by 2017. They made that money by not only selling you the game up-front, but by also selling you loot-boxes. Remember those? You pay money, you get something random back in return, with no idea if it would be valuable or not. But…I know. That was then, this is now. Free-to-play is the way to go. Overwatch 2, under the free-to-play regime has struggled to retain favorable metrics and KPIs. Blizzard employees on the Overwatch 2 team have had their bonuses slashed, the game no longer occupies as prominent a place in the Activision portfolio. In its Q2 2023 earnings report, Overwatch 2 was referred to as being “not financially material for the company, with its emphasis and focus in investment then turning to ‘executing on the content roadmaps for larger core titles.’ (Active.io)

The Beta Player Counts were low. Therefore the game will be a failure. Maybe? Helldivers 2 didn’t have a beta and it did just fine. While here can be some corollary drawn between games with high player counts in beta, there is no clear negative corollary. In other words, it is not always the case that when a game has low player beta numbers it is not successful, which is the square the detractors are standing on. Neither Titanfall 2 or Gears of War 4 had beta player numbers that put them in the leading beta numbers for that year. And yet they charted at 18th and 20th of the best-selling games for that year in the US.

My argument here is not a proclamation that the game will be “successful”. But that people are applying their own notion of success to what the game has to do. And doing so on the basis of revisionist history at best, and at worst on things that are just plain wrong, false, and made-up. Concord does not need to be a bonga success. It does not need to be Helldivers 2, which no one expected. It does not need to be Destiny 2; the dev team is 1/3 of the size of the Destiny 2 dev team at peak, and that’s a very deferential percentage for those taking the opposing side of this argument. Concord needs to grab the attention of a core player-base and hold on to that, growing it slightly over the next few years. I’m also not arguing that it won’t ever go free-to-play. But it’s a stretch to assert that the game HAS to be free-to-play at launch off of the argument that everyone else in the market is. Because Rainbow Six Siege, the very definition of a hero shooter, is STILL charging a cover-charge, 9 years since its release.

There are hundreds of successful games that never get into the Game of the Year discussion. And never do bonga numbers the likes of Fortnite, Warzone, and Overwatch. And they are fine; they bring some money in, expend some via further dewvelopment investment, and the studio remains financially solvent. There is one reason that Concord is getting the Sour-Patch treatment on social media, and that is because it is PlayStation 1st party. Because if this game were 3rd party, we would not be having this discussion. And maybe that’s appropriate. Part of it is driven by PlayStation being mostly quiet on 1st party for a very long time. But it is also true that the result of their derived causality is that people are just talking to talk…to fill the air left empty . And their incorrect weighting of the importance of Concord and where it sits in the PlayStation portfolio will likely lead to incorrect predictions.

Let me end with an additional suggestion that we have to look at what Concord is trying to do in its appeal to the PlayStation install base . Knowing that there is a percentage of that demographic that finds story, creative narrative, and character evolution as a big get, Firewalk’s effort is to target that base. It’s week-to-week unfolding of an ongoing plot, reinforced by short video content, will harken the PlayStation user-base to pay attention to yet another franchise narrative that is evolving; that will lead to them falling in love with the game’s effort towards world-building. Only time will tell if this effort to use deep story to encapsulate a hero shooter and hope that it captures the tastes of the PlayStation user-base is successful or not.

Editor’s note: I did not have time to proof-read and do much editing, as I’m running to get to a podcast. I’ll swing back and do another once-over later

Written on my Lenovo Thinkpad P14s Gen 2

Edited, rev2, 2354, 24 July 2024