Harddrive-by: Concord
Harddrive-by is particularly appropriate when discussing this game. It has been shot dead
There has been so much going on in the gaming scene and I’ve had so little time to pay any attention to it. I’d started to write a piece on Dustborn, the Wokest disaster in gaming when Concord, the second Wokest blew up in the wire.
Concord AKA Portland-Overwatch was in development for eight tragic years. Which means it started life back when Overwatch was the biggest thing in gaming. So the green light was understandable but the result was not.
This game was so inclusive that White playable characters were completely excluded. Every playable character was such a SJW caricature that you could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was satire. They all have or rather had their pronouns listed. There was a frantic and brief effort to scrub the LGBTQ tags before all hope was abandoned.
I honestly can’t do a better job making fun of these characters than the devs did themselves.
The highest praise there is for a character in this fifty-car pile-up of a game
Her weakness in diabetes
Cocord is from Firewalk Studio which is owned by Sony and I wouldn’t be surprised if Sony gives Firewalk the ax for this. After all, somebody has to be blamed.
Usually, you blame marketing for this bad of a crash like this but in this case, the marketers are going to be able to pin this all on the devs due to the fact that UGLY WOMEN HAVE NO MARKETING VALUE!
I think they knew they were in trouble at Sony. Some of the legendary skins were just color palette-swaps. That reeks of slashed budgets. Although this budget cutting appears to have been a last-minute thing. The game is rumored to have had at least a $250 million budget.
Concord had a soft launch in July with an open Beta. It didn’t exactly blow the doors off at a peak of 1,124 players. But when it went on sale there was a 70% drop off from when it was free. As a reference, Doom had a peak player count of 75,000 this February. And I don’t mean the new Doom either I’m talking about the one made by Carmack and Romero back in freaking 1993.
There are literally hundreds of players as write. And it isn’t in the high hundreds either. Yesterday Sony announced that Concord was going to be sent to the Iron Vault of Tax-Write-offs, the live service will shortly be pulled off the servers and all purchasers will receive a full refund. Does it have anything going for it? Well, it’s not Dustborn.
I think the most disparaging comment I can make about Concord is that it was exactly what I thought it would be.
