Concord fans -- we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar. Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us. However, w...
Wow, I expected they'll go straight to free-to-play but I guess the game has such a bad reputation that they decided to take it down completely. Refunds being issued is awfully nice though.
Some quick math, steam takes a 30% cut (10k * 40 * .7 = 280k), and since this is a sony published game sony got to keep 100% on their platform (15k * 40 = 600k). Sony made less than 1 mill in revenue on this game which allegedly cost 100M to develop.
Yeah, ain't no monetizing scheme is gonna save this one.
This is the key marketing fail. They released an OW clone, and then failed to highlight the differences. I might have thrown $40 at it, if I’d known that there wasn’t going to be a battlepass or something equally asinine to come with that price tag.
I played through their free weekend beta some time in July and didn’t hate it, but it was clunky and the designs were uglier than OW. That said, I had expected them to clean it up before release; anything except let it stand with its overarching veneer of greyige+olive green over every character.
I think they just released it to say it was released and be able to do the write-offs. Otherwise, any game that had been in development this long would have seen a huge marketing campaign that highlighted why players should abandon OW, et al for Concord instead.
Free-to-play is often a lazy comment from social media that represents an incomplete business plan. Developers have to get paid, and you need a plan for how players will be pushed into that.
The assumption is often on a vague “skins and charms” type of thing but it depends on whether the game was built for that expectation. They likely knew they wouldn’t be putting out compelling reskins of their characters.