The story of the shooter Concord ended rather quickly — Sony decided to close the online shooter a couple of weeks after launch.
Recently, ex-developers of Concord in the podcast A Life Well Wasted talked about what they experienced from the game's reception, and also shared their vision of the reason for the failure.
The creators of Concord believe that mistakes were made during the promotion and people simply did not understand the game, forming a mistaken opinion about it:
"The most unpleasant thing for me was that people had already formed their opinion about the game, and it seemed to me that it was based on... I mean, it's more our fault than [these people's], but we didn't get across to them well what we were trying to do. And it seemed to me that there was such a gap between us.
If I could sit down with anyone who said something bad about the game to defend our position, I would 100% convince them to support the game. We just didn't try hard enough to attract gamers, and it didn't work."
They also mentioned people who like other people's failures — they ended up "hitting the wrong people":
"It's just strange that there is such an audience that constantly wants to rejoice that something doesn't work out. But the reality is that we just look at our keyboards, and then we're like: \"Oh, there's no work today\"."
[...] There is a kind of gloating: \"Oh, a big game has failed, and that's amazing. We have to see something collapse, and that's great. That's really cool\". And being part of this process, it's very easy to give in [to the influence of the crowd]... to behave in the spirit of \"we beat the powerful, but we don't worry [about the consequences]\". Well, you really hit, but all these people who worked so hard [on Concord] are not the people."
Other remarks from the authors of Concord:
- "Many people wonder in the comments: \"What are they thinking!? How do these developers not know (how the game is perceived)?\" We know. We know perfectly well. We know what's going on. We agree with it in half of the cases. And most often it (changing the game) is simply impossible, given the circumstances, the stakes and the resources invested in it."
- "It was the most beautiful machine we broke."
- Travis from the art team stated: "Yes [I want people to mean that I worked on Concord]. And I want them to be surprised when I'm happy about it. That's what I want. We were proud, regardless of how it all went. We released a good game."