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A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed (kotaku.com)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Sony's Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn't it news?

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lol i cant even with the whole thing.

However, even with all those factors, no one could possibly have predicted the scale of its failure.

I didn't hear about it UNTIL the failure. I think it wasn't expected to do well, i don't think it was advertised well, and it was a lazy cash grab in a filled market no one asked for.

Just because a game gets made doesn't make it good, wanted, or timed well.

Stardew Valley came out in 2016, but I didn't see any traffic for a few years outside people who had been waiting for it. It took off around 2019 according to google trends.

Most devs wont give the game time to even improve anymore, let alone join friends in a multiplayer game. Concord's google trends start the day before it released.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

lazy cash grab

This seems quite reductive for what appears to have happened. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars over an 8 year development period is anything but lazy. Cash grab, maybe, but so incredibly ambitious.

Plus it wasn't the dev's decision to not "give the game time to [improve]."

Sony pulled the plug when they realized they were bleeding money out of the ears offers server time for a handful of people.

They're biggest problem was the complete lack of advertisement. I might have heard of it once some few months before release and then silence, as if they thought they were keeping hype up for the next installment in an already established series that everyone was expecting.

The other big problem was the genericness of it, bringing nothing new than slight variations on characters, abilities, etc. into an already oversaturated genre.

This whole thing has been like Sony throwing their kid, that looks like every other kid, into a crowded public pool with no assistance and wondering why they drowned, acting like it's everyone else's fault.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

You hitch your pony with Sony, whomever is there when it drops gets to present it to the world unfortunately. You lose any ability to be independent and you're release ends up being remembered and known by what gets sent out.

It was lazy in the end stretch no matter how much time was sunk into it at any one time. How long was Starfield in developmen after all, it still felt lazy and so did what I saw of Concord.

Sucks to work on something and have the group you teamed up with tank the whole thing, but you still gotta know who you signed up with, and Sony was clearly done working on the project.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

This rather long article, which uses Concorde as its main hook, doesn't tell us hardly anything about how or why the game flopped. What did critics say about it? What were user reviews like? Was it buggy? Did Sony completely misjudge the market? Etc.

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

That's because the article is about the lack of coverage of Concord's flop and gaming in general in mainstream news not Concord.

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

Seems kinda disingenuous when the article discussing a lack of coverage wouldn’t actually do some coverage itself.

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

Articles tend to cover a single topic in order to keep the writing focused. Kotaku, the website the article is hosted on, is a video game website and blog. It has covered Concord extensively.

https://kotaku.com/search?blogId=9&q=Concord&timestamp=1729444691620

Here is one article that covers it flopping a week after launch.

https://kotaku.com/concord-flop-low-player-count-steam-psn-sales-fps-ps5-1851631800

Here is another with users' reacting. edit: typo

https://kotaku.com/concord-shutdown-playstation-offline-delisted-store-1851638956

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

I don’t really see how mentioning at least some coverage for the sake of context would be “a different topic”.

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

The point of the article is that Concord's flop not getting coverage is a symptom of a larger problem. Considering it was a $400 million flop after refunds, the lack of coverage is particularly striking. But why Concord flopped isn't relevant to the meta discussion of video games not being covered by the mainstream media in general.

In general terms, the article is about story x not being covered by mainstream media outlets, not story x. The analogy that comes to mind is when someone accuses the mainstream media of not covering a topic (even if the mainstream media actually is covering it). The person making the accusation doesn't typically go into the topic they want covered, because that's not really the topic they are trying to discuss.

The article is about how mainstream media covers video games, or often doesn't. Not video games. Talking in terms of specific video games highlights the problem with examples and makes the article less general. Saying something like story x is quite useful for an internet comment, but would look weird in an internet article. edit: typo

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Even in your own reply, you provide some context for what you’re discussing. For it to be lacking in the article is just lazy.

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

That's because we are having a meta discussion about a meta discussion. To put it another way, we are engaged in a self-referencing discussion. To talk about such a discussion in solely general terms would render the rhetoric useless to anyone outside of academics. We would have to write in completely mathematical terms.

Again, it's not laziness, but off topic. The term in essay writing is paragraph drift, but since it would be off topic for the article as a whole a more accurate term might be article drift.

A hypothetical complaint about cat memes not getting mainstream coverage is a meta discussion about coverage not cat memes.

The point about bringing up Concord's flop is that it in particular is comparable to other media that the mainstream news does report on, such as expensive movie flops, but it still isn't being covered. Why Concord flopped has nothing to do with that and that kind of context wouldn't add anything to the article's central point. The article also uses Joker 2 as an example, but doesn't go into why Joker 2 flopped for the same reason. Why Concord flopped would be as off topic as taking about Concord's game play mechanics, while possibly interesting, they aren't relevant to the discussion either. Just because Concord's flop is relevant to this discussion doesn't mean all things related to Concord are relevant.

These kind of meta discussions about media coverage are important as they are a self-examination of a critical institution. A self-referential discussion is its own kind of genre and has its own rules, or guidelines, for what it is and isn't relevant. So it's definitely important that people understand that and don't mistake this useful kind of journalism as lazy. Trying to placate this misunderstanding would render the article less rhetorically effective on delivering its central point. It's like Paul's analogy in Dune. He shouldn't have to cut his dominate hand off to please his space jihadists. That wouldn't be useful. edit: typo

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Discussing the topic isn’t off-topic.

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

The article is not about Concord's flop. The article is about the mainstream media not covering video games.

Discussing off topic details is off topic. One example being the main example does not make everything related to that example relevant to the discussion. Video games news media outlets have been discussing Concord's flop in detail. The mainstream news media has not. It's not a valid to criticism to point out that the article didn't discuss Concord's flop in the meta discussion about video game coverage. Kotaku isn't being lazy or hypocritical. The author wrote a rhetorically effective article. Everything in the article relates back to their central point. Which again is that mainstream media doesn't take video games seriously.

It's important to drive this home. Relating back to the thesis in a persuasive essay is a core aspect of that genre.

Sony's Concord might be the biggest entertainment failure of all time, so why wasn't it news?

This is the question that the article attempts to answer. Everything in the article should relate back to a thesis that answers this question. The details of Concord's flop do not relate back to the thesis to answer this question in anyway. edit: typos

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

You put more detail in your extremely verbose comments than the effort put into writing this article.

It’s a lazy, ridiculous article that fails to provide context, while also hypocritically failing to meet any kind of investigative standard that they’re criticizing.

Now, you can write another 500 to 1000 words in a comment, and I’m gonna ignore it because Because nothing you could possibly say will change that. It’s lazy journalism, and that’s that.

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

It's not the article's job to give the reader that context. It's a reader responsibility to be informed so that reader can engage in the meta discussion. What your argument is proposing is actual laziness. All your argument's criticism amounts to is an attempt to shut down discussion. Your argument depends on ignorance to make effective journalism seem morally wrong, in this case lazy. When in fact the lack of context provided by the mainstream media on this topic is what the article is actually about.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yes, it is. And they failed, because they were lazy.

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

That's the reader's job. There are other articles that cover Concord and Concord's flop in detail. Those topics have their place and it's not in the meta discussion about the meta topic, by definition. Having to do the reader's job of staying informed on a topic in articles about the meta discussion would prevent the discussion of the meta topic. Which is the goal of your argument.

In other words, your argument is intended to silence criticism of the mainstream media under the guise of imposing a moral value, incorrectly as it stands. If we followed your argument we would be unable to discuss anything because every discussion would have to have the context of what came before. What your argument calls for is lazy. If a reader wants to participate in discussions they have to take the time to get informed.

[–] tquid 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don’t see how vid o games are any harder to report on because their interactivity is somehow “untransferable”. Sports get reported on all the time.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Excluding things like yelling, doing the wave, or hitting noise sticks together, for the fans, sports are a passive experience. The fans have no real way to interact with a sport to determine a game's outcome. A person playing a soccer video game has control of one of the teams and their inputs determine how well that team does.

A news organization can play a clip of a soccer game and the experience is not that different than watching the game live. It's not even that different from being at a stadium, besides being quieter.

If a news organization played a clip of someone playing a soccer video game they would run into a problem. While the graphics might be impressive, the interactive nature of the video game is completely lost on the viewer. The news viewers seeing that clip aren't experiencing controlling a soccer team. edit: The experience would not even be that different from watching a clip of a real soccer game.

Video games have to be experienced firsthand. People who have never played video games or barely played video games probably aren't going to get it when shown a secondhand account.