I don't think I've seen something like this happen before. The closed beta was a disaster, I think the Steam version didn't even reach 3k players?
For those unfamiliar with Concord (and I don't blame you), it's a team hero arena shooter made by Firewalk Studios. This game has been in development for several years, and Sony was so impressed with what they saw that Sony purchased the studio back in 2021. Concorn has been revealed and....it looks hideous. The playable characters almost look like a parody of a woke game: fatties, aunties, shitty looking aliens, and everyone dressed up like they're wearing costumes for Doug Walker's next movie.
The gameplay, from what I've heard, is okay, but in this oversaturated market with players having several other options (not to mention FREE options when Concord needs $40 and a PSN account to play) there is no reason to play it.
Back in June there was some Playstation Showcase and Concord got nearly a third of the air time dedicated to its trailers, and nobody liked it. Basically a shittier Guardians of the Galaxy with even worse cringe MCU humor.
The closed beta was so bad that players were struggling to find players to match with.
So Sony has switched to having an open beta....and the player count has dropped even MORE. This thing is crashing and burning before everyone's eyes, and the game hasn't even officially released yet! Firewalk Studio employees had better be firing up their resumes. Concord's release date is officially August 23rd 2024, there is no way they can course correct this.
I would have expected for there to still be plenty of idiots eating up the free beta slop at least, but with such low numbers are gamers finally fed up?
I think what's happened is we've finally hit normie apathy when it comes to this stupid free to play hero shooter/battle royale trend and people don't care anymore so they're just dropping off the charts completely. Everything looks the same, it's worse than Concord, even Call of Duty is getting slaughtered in the reviews and it's over really basic things like the installation sizes, interfaces how shit. Even if you hate Call of Duty that's always been a pretty permanent fixture within the games industry much like GTA.
Yes the character design is fucking awful but it's getting more and more generic with each release or each new season any time they try to introduce something. They are completely hamstrung in their character design by DEI targets which is hilarious, they could probably instantly fix their numbers with some sexy clickbait but that's not going to happen because the owners want that DEI money so badly.
From an art perspective I think what I hate most about this new character design style they're going with is how heavily reliant on photogrammetry that are. It seems a main tactic of AAA studios these days is to do photogrammetry for characters usually inserting employees into the game and then grab whatever internal assets they can piece together and poorly edit for their next shitty title.
CoD Black Ops 6 fills 310GB of disk space. I can't fit that on my computer.
N64 Resident Evil 2 fits on a 64MB cartridge, so 0.064GB
It seems some devs don't give a single fuck about optimisation.
That's actually insane