My jaw dropped. God, this is almost endlessly fascinating. This game is going to be mentioned in gaming investment circles and pitch rooms for the next decade, minimum.
And I don't think it's a dev issue - by all accounts the game was perfectly competent, enough so that you'd think it would garner enough players to sustain it while they work out the kinks, like most PvP games do - for example removing the requirement to change characters or whatever else reviews focused on as negatives. Because as a non-multiplayer guy looking at vids of it, it looks no better or worse than any other such game, and many reviews were quite glowing about the gunplay, which seems like it should be the most important part.
And I hope that will stand to the devs - this was a properly made game that was a failure of concept and marketing, not execution. It reminds me of Federation Force, where Next Level was handed a shit concept, and did it as well as it could have possibly been done. The game still failed because the concept
was shit and the marketing was shit, and both games even took similar criticism on art style. From the moment both games were revealed, people said "No, we do not want this. Go away." How well the idea was executed was then irrelevant. Incredibly, even the forum titles and sales numbers guesstimates are similar:
Federation Force Global Sales less than 30,000
Obviously charging full price for a game that the market now expects to be free is a big deal, but the two things that stand out to me that haven't been mentioned as much are:
Sony's fans failing to turn up. I think Sony would have assumed that they had over the past decade created an audience of hundreds of thousands of fans who will try almost any competently made first party game on trust and loyalty. People clowned on Days Gone, but on release it sold like crazy. But in reality, the loyal first party fanbase Sony has cultivated is one that's there for prestigious narrative single player games, super-hero single player games and classic PS-style platformers. That's it. It doesn't extend outside of that. For there to be only 25k Sony fans willing to try this out - I will be honest, I never would have predicted it.
Secondly is something we've known for years, but these games live and die by their character designs and you simply can't afford to get them wrong. It is the primary factor. You have to be almost ruthlessly focused on pleasing the largest segment of your audience with these, even if it's unpleasant to do so. There are countless gatchas that thrive on having people pull for limited time summer swimsuits for teenage girl characters. There are others - including Genshin Impact - that survive by getting people to roll in the hopes of getting a cute pale little girl on their team. Enormous amounts of cute little girl characters that would make you very uncomfortable with their intended audience. There are endless versions of these archetypes in gatchas - one of the reason I don't play any. It feels somewhat disgusting but it's a successful business model.
But you can't go with "modern, realistic, diverse". That doesn't work for the audience, not for this genre in particular imo. You need "outrageously hot, ludicrously cool, stupidly edgy" - lowest common denominator stuff. You need designs where losers on twitter immediately start saying "This is my wife. Do not talk to her" and posting lewd fan art. Remember the Overwatch launch trailer? The moment I saw Tracer appear, I thought "whatever this is, it's going to be a success". Unfortunately it was a PvP game, so it wasn't for me. But people have been obsessed with those characters for almost a decade. Those designs were almost immediately beloved. The initial reaction to the characters in Concord was the exact opposite - that they were ugly dollar-store rip-offs of GotG that were 5 years out of date. It was history for Concord right then and there.
Not focus testing the character designs, or not focus testing them with the correct audience is the biggest marketing miss by Sony here, imo.
.
www.famitsu.com
