Imagine you are a Concord dev.

[Chosen Mimes]

I'm really worried about the people and in particular the developers that have worked on Concord for the last 8 years.

Just imagine, you are a young game dev, maybe 22 years old and you strike gold and can work for a huge studio and publisher.
Fast forward 8 years (probably the best 8 years of your life) the most energetic, most creative, most mentally flexible years of your life.
Your game, concord releases,….and after 8 years within which you slowly but surely realized that you are making a terrible game, it garners a total of 1200 players and is taken offline after 12 days.

Imagine. Imagine the sheer sense of loss and futility.
Imagine raising a child for 8 years only for it to ♥♥♥♥ itself to death.

And that‘s not all.

Yes, the sheer time loss is already brutal. 8 years, that‘s probably 10% of your life, 15% if you are unlucky, 20 % if you are unlucky and enjoy an american diet.
You just spent a huge chunk of your FINITE life on developing a complete and utter failure so monumental 30yo youtube video essayists will turn over the web and go to town.
Imagine how that must make them feel.

But it gets worse.
Those years didn‘t just pass you buy. They formed you, molded you. You are now a certified, seasoned expert in making the worst games imaginable. By now you probably do it on a subconscious level.
It‘s in your psyche, it's in your muscle memory. And worse, it‘s in your resume.

Of course you are laid off. Your freak accident of a studio just cost the publisher 200 mil (and yes, obviously they will shift blame to you).
Now what you gonna do?
Look for a new job as a game dev? Tell potential new employers that you personally had a hand in and were partly responsible for this atrocity?

Anyone hiring who has even an ounce of sense will invoke 2020 style social distancing on you and send you on your merry way, lest the incompetence is contagious.
The ones without sense will just have you develop another flop.

It‘s over man. Done and dusted.

What can you really do?

[Arto3]

Go woke go broke

[Krieger]

The developers have nothing to worry about. The game, as I understood, was technically in a good shape, so they just programmed what they were asked to program.

[Bonnie]

Just say you worked at Costco as a stock boy off the books for 8 years and you're solid 👌

[DefectiveByDesign]

Originally posted by hypehype:

They spent 8 years making fun of their customers and relishing in the fact that they knew stuff they were implementing into the game would annoy them.

They were probably embolden by the fact games like The Last of us 2 and Spider-Man was still successful despite the backlash, not realising they were piggybacking on past success and name. Also, people were yet to know about DEI companies like sweet baby INC or Blackrock.

Now they are playing the sympathy card, don't be fooled.

Oh. you hit the nail on the hard.
StarCraft 2 was Spider Man without politics. The devs left to make a copy paste knock off, nobody cared. Hero units never belonged in strategy games. Blizzard put it in Warcraft 3 because it was a backdoor for WOW, not that it was a good idea. The Koreans flat out told Blizzard NOT to change StarCraft 1. They were the only ones who understood gameplay over IP, and held the line.

This entire time, we've allow companies to change fundamental mechanics away from actual FUN, to money making scams. F2P. Fishing for whales. Battle passes. Loot boxes. The community REFUSED to take a principled stance and not buy it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JoRjBjq8nA

Woke games are NOT a different concept, they're a SPIN on the existing scam. They're not even scamming YOU, they're scamming the publisher. I'd argue it's MORE ethical. They're not scamming addicts into spending all their money. They're even taking a stance that you can't BUY skins that remove the woke. I guarantee this game would NOT have failed so bad if you could buy better skins, and they said NO. Current gamer philosophy is that woke is OKAY if it's an option you can ignore like Baldur's Gate.

Problem? Bernie Madoff. You scam the rich, take harder consequences. Except that there is NO legal consequence for them, publisher eats the failure. If they get fired, they just move to a different game. The entire state of California is completely on board this ideology. So ultimately it's up to the publisher to do ANYTHING, and they don't understand the grift, or are okay with the message, and it's literally common practice to eat the cost of failed games. They don't understand it's ON PURPOSE.

Now while I think it's great gamers are finally taking a stand, you all actually DESERVE IT, for allowing the entire industry to turn into scams. It was just a matter of time before a scam went TOO FAR, and now it has and the entire industry is compromised. These f2p trash games SUBSIDIZE woke games. You are FUNDING the failures.

Now if you're all never going to change your habits, what does that leave? China. China has no woke and promotes gatcha. They're just going to take over until AI destroys everything.

[Cats Are Friends Not Food]

They better get used to hearing I want fries with that, or I am here to pick up the door dash.

[More Dakka]

Rumour is that one of the senior character design devs supposedly shared that the reason the way the characters in the game are the way they are is because they are "design by committee". That's to say, they are a result of input by devs on the team and probably by outsiders as well (eg "diversity consultants"). Naturally, some or many of those opinions are coloured by political biases (read: "woke"). The issue with such a method of doing things is that the characters could end up being a nondescript slurry of a mess, something akin to too many cooks spoiling the broth.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that they took everyone's opinion into account EXCEPT THE PLAYERS they are trying to sell it to. The ones whose opinions actually matter the most and the only ones that matter. They ended up making a game that is essentially only for the dev team, a commercially non-viable one.

[ONI]

Originally posted by Chosen Mimes:

Fast forward 8 years (probably the best 8 years of your life) the most energetic, most creative, most mentally flexible years of your life.

lmao you got me there lol,

[DefectiveByDesign]

Originally posted by Whats Cookin:

They better get used to hearing I want fries with that, or I am here to pick up the door dash.

Seriously? After 8 years of developer pay? Sony lost 100-200 Mil? That's ZERO loss for developers. They all own a house, truck, boat, sports car, the entire package. Plus stock options, retirement plan, job loss insurance, etc. Their unemployment checks will be bigger than any job, with easy access back in with another company to ruin. Sony foot the entire bill. All this accomplished was the game shutting down. Which nobody would have even complained if it had better skins. Wake up. This isn't a failure, it was the plan.

This was a minor set back at Sony's expense. The only win would be if Sony starts cracking down on their other games, which we have Fairgame$ coming out. Maybe it gets shut down too, but that's still on Sony, which hasn't learned and isn't preemptively cancelling.

This is a full working business model of making garbage at the publisher's expense. It is NOT a win until all publishers stop sponsoring it. Even at that, we all apparently give a free pass to the entire f2p model, so gaming as a whole is dead regardless. Scams are okay with us, unless it's woke. So hypocritical. F2P funds woke. It's pure profit for no work. Enables lazy game design. Publishers more easily accept losses that f2p subsidizes. They can coast indefinitely with f2p. No new games need to succeed, the existing games fund losses.

EA is the biggest example. Where's EA at for making new games? They're completely funded by sports games with micro transactions. Nothing can stop EA from making failures, but right now they're pro keeping money over losing it. Sony's on the other side, they don't care about losing money. There's no consequences to losing money.

Do you guys remember Windows 8? Microsoft team members went on news outlets like the verge, Steve Kaneko, and point blank said they had so much side business money they could get away with doing whatever they wanted to Windows. Ultimately, I think it was their side business money that told them to get rid of it.

You will have to boycott every new Sony game indefinitely until they lose enough money to get the message. We're playing chicken. Who blinks first. Disney is ALL IN.

What do we know about Disney? Are they fixing Star Wars or not? Just seems to me they're content with losing money. We have another Disney here with Sony folks.

[ONI]

you are giving too much credit to "the professor" lol

[Underprivileged White Male]

Imagine rubbing both brain cells together, and still thinking the character design wasn't awful.

[Underprivileged White Male]

Originally posted by More Dakka:

Rumour is that one of the senior character design devs supposedly shared that the reason the way the characters in the game are the way they are is because they are "design by committee". That's to say, they are a result of input by devs on the team and probably by outsiders as well (eg "diversity consultants"). Naturally, some or many of those opinions are coloured by political biases (read: "woke"). The issue with such a method of doing things is that the characters could end up being a nondescript slurry of a mess, something akin to too many cooks spoiling the broth.

Perhaps the biggest flaw is that they took everyone's opinion into account EXCEPT THE PLAYERS they are trying to sell it to. The ones whose opinions actually matter the most and the only ones that matter. They ended up making a game that is essentially only for the dev team, a commercially non-viable one.

Then they should be fired by committee... in mass.

[Underprivileged White Male]

It's even funnier when you think they spend 8 years polishing this turd, and this was the best they could do.

Look on the bright side, they spent 8 years not working on other games.

[Cats Are Friends Not Food]

Originally posted by DefectiveByDesign:

Originally posted by Whats Cookin:

They better get used to hearing I want fries with that, or I am here to pick up the door dash.

Seriously? After 8 years of developer pay? Sony lost 100-200 Mil? That's ZERO loss for developers. They all own a house, truck, boat, sports car, the entire package. Plus stock options, retirement plan, job loss insurance, etc. Their unemployment checks will be bigger than any job, with easy access back in with another company to ruin. Sony foot the entire bill. All this accomplished was the game shutting down. Which nobody would have even complained if it had better skins. Wake up. This isn't a failure, it was the plan.

This was a minor set back at Sony's expense. The only win would be if Sony starts cracking down on their other games, which we have Fairgame$ coming out. Maybe it gets shut down too, but that's still on Sony, which hasn't learned and isn't preemptively cancelling.

This is a full working business model of making garbage at the publisher's expense. It is NOT a win until all publishers stop sponsoring it. Even at that, we all apparently give a free pass to the entire f2p model, so gaming as a whole is dead regardless. Scams are okay with us, unless it's woke. So hypocritical. F2P funds woke. It's pure profit for no work. Enables lazy game design. Publishers more easily accept losses that f2p subsidizes. They can coast indefinitely with f2p. No new games need to succeed, the existing games fund losses.

EA is the biggest example. Where's EA at for making new games? They're completely funded by sports games with micro transactions. Nothing can stop EA from making failures, but right now they're pro keeping money over losing it. Sony's on the other side, they don't care about losing money. There's no consequences to losing money.

Do you guys remember Windows 8? Microsoft team members went on news outlets like the verge, Steve Kaneko, and point blank said they had so much side business money they could get away with doing whatever they wanted to Windows. Ultimately, I think it was their side business money that told them to get rid of it.

You will have to boycott every new Sony game indefinitely until they lose enough money to get the message. We're playing chicken. Who blinks first. Disney is ALL IN.

What do we know about Disney? Are they fixing Star Wars or not? Just seems to me they're content with losing money. We have another Disney here with Sony folks.

I doubt they know what financial responsibility is, I bet they were enjoying themselves, living and spending frivoulsly and not saving for a rainy day like most priveledged materialists do. It's reasonable to assume that if they live in California or similar they are only 1-2 paychecks away from losing everything even if they are making 100K+

[Kitt 🌟 Stargazer]

All you can really do is hope and pray they learn from the experience and decide to just be better going forward. This is probably going to be a huge wake up call that they need to do better research and better marketing if they want to make a product people will actually buy going forward. That is, if they want to actually make money.

[AutumnWolf]

Imagine you are a Concord dev

*Scratches head*

I dunno i think i would panic.