concord didn't fail because of diversity or because live service games are a dead end. instead, big publishers are trying to use live service to paper over the unsustainability of their development practices. you can't solve unsustainability with more unsustainability aftermath.site/sony-concord...

Concord did fail because of diversity. A terminal lack of it.

It's sad but hilarious seeing tools going "wuh wuh go woke go broke" as the reason Concord failed at the same time as Deadlock is gathering 100k+ characters in its invite-only pre-alpha

One of the big issues with gamedev is just how long games take to make. If you are sinking 200m into a project, you want some assurance of success. Concord took 8 years to make and 8 years ago Overwatch released, which was the hottest game on the shelf.

Not reading the market is a big problem. But executives are often on 2-5 year cycles with their contracts so that means leadership changes several times above the developers and that always causes problems.

The bit about Early Access as a way to build community and hype really jumped out at me, because like - I currently have two games on my radar (Hades 2, Fields of Mistria) that are in Early Access and I regularly check for updates. So you're onto something there

From what I've heard Concord failed because it was undermarketed + had poor brand identity, maybe because it was overproduced. Only the tiniest indie would be sustainable on a 20K player count. Sustainability is definitely a games industry problem...1/2

Without having something so special that it steals other games players long term an FPS game will inevitably fail. Valorant was successful because it took elements from CSGO, but did its own thing. Concord was just a discount OW. Too many game studios saturating the market with slop.