this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2024
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Is this the fastest video game death of all time? Not even Lawbreakers died this fast.

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[–] [email protected] 179 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

https://youtu.be/hHTE5xg9E-g

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Can they stay solvent through a dozen flops when each one costs them hundreds of millions of dollars?

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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!

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[–] [email protected] 101 points 2 months ago

Did this post receive more engagement than the game itself?...

[–] [email protected] 77 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Even if it's an absolute shit game.

https://stopkillinggames.com

This game could be a great resource about what not to do.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Didn't they give out refunds? That seems like the right thing to do when a massively multiplayer game is dead on arrival.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 72 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It remained online for six weeks, though.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

And they didn't have quite the same budget

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Exec 1: Should we do research into what gamers want to play?

Exec 2: Nah, just smush together whatever everybody else is doing, slap on a new coat of paint, and then ship that shit. The idiots will eat it up and we'll be rich.

Gamers: Who asked for this? I didn't ask for this. I don't want to play this shit. I've got better shit that I can play for free.

Exec 1 & 2:

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There have definitely been times that copying other people worked out well.

Fortnite and Apex copied the BR trend when PUBG wasn't satisfying everyone's needs. The former even lazily reskinned a zombie defense game for the battle royale approach. Lots of games reskin the theme of Dark Souls and do okay.

Even if it's lazy or uninventive, once in a while one of those reskins has a particular element of the concept it reinvents in a much better way. Seems Concord never came up with any such ideas, which could have been great since many people are currently tired of Overwatch specifically.

[–] Rekorse 13 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Those aren't re-skins though, they just used the battle royals game type as their main game type.

I can't really think of a similar game to fortnite before it in regards to the combination of building and competitive shooter, although I'm sure someone can point out an early example, and Apex is smashing together counterstrike and maybe overwatch or something similar for the gameplay.

Personally I don't think apex would have worked if it just looked like a re-skin but its got a lot of great artwork and the level designs are interesting at least to me.

Also fortnite has become the everything game, they have Lego and rocket racing and a guitar hero minigame, its sort of gone wild IMO.

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[–] [email protected] 62 points 2 months ago

So funny when a corpo is forced to seem positive about something where there is absolutely no positive way of spinning it. It has this surreal energy where the person doing PR seems almost uncanny, like some kind of lizard person.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I'm not entirely oblivious to gaming news, but the literal first I had ever heard of this game was when they announced that it was being shut down. Methinks after eight years of development it could've had a few more dollars tossed into the marketing budget.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Word of mouth of something great/fun and exciting should be all the marketing a company really needs. I personally don't trust or listen to any ads. They are cancer to the brain and eyes/ears because it's typically lies or false claims...or they make cinematic trailers which don't even represent the game at all because... cinematic.

See stardew valley for a prime example.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm not against basic advertising, it fulfills a very useful role, letting you know a product exists, with what functionality and pricing and so on. Of course that's a minority of advertising these days

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 2 months ago (2 children)

it really lasted less time than liz truss

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago

i think it's exactly 1 scaramucci

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm really happy that the one time I got to visit the UK was during Liz Truss' time in office. It was wild seeing the protestors, and when I landed back at home I heard she was gone.

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[–] scottmeme 40 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 months ago

Being a little generous there, bud

[–] arudesalad 37 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I love how it's worded like concord is a beloved game that is shutting down after a decade

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To the people that worked on it, even when the result kinda sucks, there's some level of attachment. They spent literal years of their life investing into it. That might be where the tone is coming from.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

Imagine working years on something and every time leadership has a meeting they keep asking you to add even more bullshit or change some stupid stuff. Must suck to be a game dev, I feel for them.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I didn’t know it existed until a popular streamer begrudgingly “reviewed” it at the last minute. Found it strange that there was zero marketing for such an expensive and long developed investment.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

My guess is that they knew it was going to be a shit game, but realized too deep in the development phase. So they just released it as soon as possible and didn't waste more money on it (marketing). My guess is that the released it instead of cancel just in case they were wrong and people actually liked it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The only reason I can think to release it as it was, was for tax write odd purposes with how much money it was going to lose.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

Honestly this reeks of corporate politics. I'm willing to bet at some point in development there was a regime change, and current management pushed this out the door just to clear the board.

Everything I heard about this came seems to indicate that it isn't terrible by any means, just mediocre and overpriced in an absolutely oversaturated genre. If management was invested in it, they probably could have spent a ton on marketing, achieved middling numbers, and then used those middling numbers to justify continued development for another few months.

I'm confident in saying that because there are a handful of shitty live service games being operated at a loss for no real reason other than shutting them down would mean management would have to actually admit they fucked up.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago

Holy hell that was quick from the announcement to shut down. Did they have a 2 week free trial on the servers so they had to get out today?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It's a shame. This was exactly the game my husband was looking for - Overwatch minus Blizzard

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (14 children)

Lawbreakers was an excellent game that was killed by executive stupidity.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Aside from all of the problems with the game itself, I think they must've had one of the most unfortunate launch moments. Hero shooters had been pretty much on the downturn and then just before they launched, Deadlock went public and suckered quite a lot of the hero shooter audience into playing a full-on MOBA/FPS hybrid. And Deadlock is very quietly breaking all kinds of silly records for what's technically an invite-only alpha (currently #8 on Steam's most played with 137k concurrent players).

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

Spawn killed

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

It's okay. They'll try again.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Honestly. I kinda would have liked to try concord, but I sure as shit wasn't going to pay to try it.

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