Redfall

Hey Folks. There has been a lot of discussion over the last week about the release of Concord and how poorly it is doing. Right now it has a 24-hour peak user count on Steam Charts of around 260 players with an all-time peak since the launch of 660. Granted this only represents numbers on Steam, but can be used as a way of extrapolating how well a game is doing in general. If it is performing poorly on PC, it is likely performing poorly on Playstation 5 where it is a console exclusive. Across the board, this seemed like a game that no one really wanted that was released into an already packed hero shooter genre, put up against games that were free to play as opposed to its $40 buy-in price. I remember briefly getting excited about the trailer only to lose all interest when I found out it was “yet another live service game” and more than that… focused on PVP combat. The trailer was this really cool science fiction heist thing and I felt like it could have been a really interesting game along the lines of the Guardians of the Galaxy game that came out a few years ago. Unfortunately, it was not and was part of the larger forced march that Sony seems to be on towards trying to mint a live service goldmine.

Why do we find ourselves on this path? The answer is simple… FIFA Ultimate Team exists and it was enough to make the financial types stand up and take notice and believe that live service games were an infinite money glitch. This feature went into FIFA soccer in 2009 and has been the prime revenue earner for Electronic Arts almost since that point. Just like World of Warcraft levels of success poisoned the waters for future MMORPGs, every game now is seemingly expected to produce “FUT” numbers. Just so you understand what this means… in 2020 during peak pandemic spending FIFA Ultimate Team brought Electronic Arts 1.62 Billion Dollars. That is from selling what are effectively digital trading cards that come along with a stat package for your game.

It was not until yesterday that I realized just how much money Sony has seemingly poured into trying to make Concord a thing. Secret Level is an Amazon Prime Streaming project from Blur Studios… aka the people who created pretty much every big-budget game trailer you have ever loved as well as the popular “Love, Death & Robots” anthology series. In the teaser trailer the text flashes by “15 Stories Inspired By Your Favorite Games”. So let’s take a look at the list of games that are going to be included. ● Armored Core
● Concord
● Crossfire
● Dungeons & Dragons
● Exodus
● Honor of Kings
● Mega Man
● New World: Aeternum
● PAC-MAN
● PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities)
● Sifu
● Spelunky
● The Outer Worlds
● Unreal Tournament
● Warhammer 40,000 There are a few of these that don’t really fit, that “your favorite games” bit. Firstly you have New World: Aeternum which I am guessing was included because Amazon is at least in part bankrolling the project and that they really want their console rebrand to work. Honor of Kings was new to me, but apparently, it is a really popular MOBA in mainland China from Tencent. Similarly, Crossfire is wildly popular in the South Korean market. Then you have Concord, which I am assuming was included in the list as part of the Sony marketing push behind this project or potentially part of a larger deal to allow for other properties to be included. This feels like an awful lot of money to put behind a product that had not been released and that is an IP that is unproven.

There has been a spate of large-budget flops lately. Suicide Squad for example looks like a massive winner compared to Redfall and Concord and reportedly it was an over 200 Million Dollar loss for Warner Brothers. Redfall cratered hard enough to effectively destroy the studio because Arkane Austin is no more. Concord will likely destroy Firewalk Studios as that seems to be the stakes that are on the line currently when a large game fails to find its market. 2023 was a brutal year for Video Game Studio layoffs and closures, and this year has reportedly already surpassed it. I don’t exactly revel in the death of these studios, but I do think that we have been on an untenable trajectory for a while. Video Games have been financed through the cult of green candles, and the belief that the line will always go up.

Even games that were large successes are beginning to flounder. Helldivers 2 was a massive success, but then as Sony pushed some unpopular practices like required use of the PlayStation Network…. it began to shed players. Recently they have been shedding players due to balance decisions, proving once again that a live service game is only one bad patch away from failure. Similarly, the title that Sony bought to herald its new Live Service push was Destiny 2, and it has been bleeding players for years. I know I used to be a massive supporter of the game but left more or less permanently after they removed the Forsaken content from the game. Now that the game has entered what is effectively maintenance mode after the release of the Final Shape and what is reportedly the last major expansion for the game, it is similarly shedding players.

The weird thing about “Live Service” games is that while the big budget money grabs are failing to gain purchase… a lot of the existing games are trucking along and doing just fine. If you search for “best live service games” you will find a ton of listicles and the vast majority of the games listed are all around ten years old. Warframe for example is potentially the best looter shooter on the market, and it has pioneered a business model that seems to have worked for them. Sure they do not generate FIFA Ultimate Team money, but they have reached a place where it is sustainable for the studio. Similarly, Path of Exile is doing amazingly well hitting brand new peak concurrency numbers for the Settlers of Kalguur league. Similarly, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and hell even the often-panned Fallout 76 seem to be hitting their strides. This leads me to believe that “big business” has been bad for games as a whole because they do not care about the sustainability of platforms… only about extracting the maximum amount of value out of the players.

I am sure this is terribly naive of me, but I would love to see more “Indie Darlings” like Last Epoch which is financed in large part through supporter packs similar to the model that Path of Exile pioneered. They are not massive successes necessarily, at least not in the billions in the sales department… but they are functional and enough to keep the studio churning out new content. Games have been a bubble and I am sure it will continue to burst, but my hope is that what is left in its place is something that makes more sense. The zero-sum game that we have been playing over the last few decades clearly is not working as intended.

Unfortunately, we are probably going to lose a few more studios before this tale is finished. Bungie recently laid off a massive number of employees due to “underperformance”. In this, they canned several projects leaving themselves with only Destiny 2 which is on life support, and placing all of their eggs in the Marathon basket which is an IP reboot turned extraction shooter. The thing is… it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of hype surrounding Marathon, in part because just like Concord it is attempting to launch itself into an already packed genre. The only people who really remember Marathon were Macintosh gamers from the 90s who subsisted on playing it when everyone was playing Doom. You know what a bunch of 40 and 50-somethings are probably not big on… extraction shooters. Those who are into that genre are already probably Tarkov stans. I feel like this is maybe not the right play for the already stratified ecosystem that the game is launching into.

Maybe I am being overly hyperbolic, but I feel like a lot of these games would have made really fun single-player and co-op PVE experiences. Suicide Squad, for example, seemed like it was itching to be the next game in the Arkham series, with similar gameplay. Concord, the game that started this post… at least based on the trailer felt like it really wanted to be a PVE game where you built up a team and planned and pulled off successively larger heists until you uncovered some plot where you had to save the world. Redfall similarly felt like given a bit more time baking and a story-driven focus… it could have leaned on the best parts of that Arkane DNA to create a memorable experience similar to Dishonored. It feels like these games are failing because they are being pushed into a mold that relies on massive player engagement to succeed. Anyways… I am done rambling and yelling at the clouds. Maybe I am off my base, but Concord feels like a gauge of customer sentiment more than some of these other games. We went from “low interest” to what feels like “no interest”. All of this said… what the hell do I know? I will very likely be over here in my corner playing the same damned games that have been out for the last decade or longer, and enjoying myself doing that. The post Live Service Gold Farm Over? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.