Overwatch launched at $40 as the hot new Blizzard game, not a bland no-name entry in a crowded genre dominated by free-to-play games.
Also, Overwatch 2 launched F2P
spoiler alert: no it won’t
I actually crunched the numbers some weeks ago. I put the top 50 steam games on a spredsheet, and then I added by hand the numbers of famous games that I know aren’t there (Lol, WoW, Fortnite, Genshin Impact, some others), and I think the final result was that almost 80% of players were in online-centric games.
I mean, of course, 2024 isn’t the same as 2016, but they’re trying to copy Overwatch, why not launch at the same price?
Of course, it wasn’t a good idea, but maybe they weren’t confident in F2P / the game wasn’t developed to be F2P…
So this harkens back to an earlier post some days ago about why games aren’t priced higher. It’s not only because entertainment is price sensitive, IMO - it’s also because the market has taught us that the prices will come down very fast.
If I can buy a game now at $70, or I can get it in the Humble Bundle (or for free) on Epic in a year or two, it doesn’t really make sense to buy it now. Especially not when I already have 50-100 other games on my Steam account that I still haven’t played.
I still do buy games at full price on PC, but it’s typically years between purchases.
In comparison, on Nintendo - where the prices drop far more slowly and rarely drop below 30% on first-party games until many years have passed, I buy a lot more full price games.
I kind of feel the industry has done this to themselves. A lot of companies in the industry treat games as disposable crap that loses all value after a few years… is it very strange that the customers do the same?
Presumably because they didn’t want to cram it to the gills with loot boxes and battle-passes.
So they wanted to do something different than any other squad based shooter.
If this was their goal, why did they not market it that way? The shooter you don’t have to get microtransactions for? I literally did not know that the game lacked microtransactions and a battlepass until I just looked it up. I assumed it was the same as all of the others. I think they could have pushed that marketing a lot harder than they did, because being sick of microtransactions is something everyone agrees on. (even if they do end up buying a lot of them)
To me, this just seems like it was a monumental failure across all fronts. By all accounts the reviews of the game said “This is a solid core and decent game” which doesn’t help it stand out from its peers. The choice to run an extremely long CGI cutscene as the summer games trailer, rather than showcasing gameplay, was a big mistake. All it did was further convince the gaming audience that the game was a weird Temu version of GOTG, while confusing the hell out of me, as I was like… does this have a single player?
I wonder what world we would be in if the game had been marketed differently, as the ‘antidote’ to free to play etc.
I suspect this is probably Sony deciding that the game wasn’t worth spending the marketing on, and not pushing it harder than they did. There was so little marketing for Concord (at least that I saw). The fact that they pulled the plug less than 2 weeks from the debut only cements that feeling.
I really do feel for the developers here though, they put a lot of effort into the character designs, art, level designs an all sorts of other bits of gameplay we might not be able to see.
They were also fucked on timing, as releasing alongside the stealth beta launch of Deadlock didn’t help. Battleborn fans will remember how Overwatch did the exact same thing (Overwatch open beta was the day after Battleborn’s launch). Ruthless. Overwatch’s release was purposeful, I think Deadlock’s “beta” was more just unlucky timing, with Valve acknowledging the existence of Deadlock the same day Concord launched.
It’s a hard question, because Steam sales have been responsible for several hits and people making lots of money, so, it’s good for the industry.
If it’s good for everyone in the industry, probably not though…
The early preorder numbers were probably so dire that they cancelled any ad buys they were planning. I do think the CGI short was a mistake, but mostly because it was just badly written. No one would care that you’re a GotG knock off if you are also funny and exciting.
The passionate Concord fanbase discovers novel emergent gameplay!
Concord’s 5v5 Rivalry mode is now full of players racing to throw themselves off the side of the map as soon as matches begin. Why? Well, that’s apparently the fastest way to earn XP, so it’s the most efficient way to go for a last-ditch effort to reach level 100.
You want an indication of how broken the progression system is in this game? Here is one.
It might even make Daggerfall’s sit in a room and cast fireballs at the wall method of leveling look good!
Ha, you just reminded me of playing Dungeon Master decades ago, having my characters fling daggers at the wall to level up their ninja abilities.
There is always a loot cave.
That and Bethesda’s ES games. How many times I ran around the world in Morrowind doing random actions so I could level up a skill is insane. Jump much?
That’s a little different than some of the stuff mentioned earlier, though. At least this skill progression is designed that way, even if it’s not ideal. Concord’s is just broken.
Peak Ultima Online gameplay!
Tru dat. Though as others have noted, in earlier cases often enough the system worked that way for a reason. Maybe not A+ game design, but not bad design.
Have you ever thought “What was it like being the marketing manager for a game in 1998?”. If so, it’s your lucky day!
At one time, I was in a meeting with some well-known game developers who had signed a long-term, multi-game development deal with Microsoft and the subject of Valve’s new deal, using the id engine came up. The leads of that company, not having any idea about my ties to Valve said something like, “what a joke — a couple of Microsoft developers license the id engine and think they can build a game.”
Hahahaha
LOL. Although, it was a normal reaction at that time. It was that, a few ex-Microsoft employees who wanted to get into game development, and just got a id license to do it. The first guess any game veteran would do is that it was a bunch of clueless people who were over their heads.