As is now traditional, right after I’d filed last week’s Pushing Buttons, huge gaming news broke: Sony was pulling its hero shooter Concord from sale just two weeks after launch – because nobody was playing it. Everyone who bought it on PlayStation 5 and PC was refunded, and the future of the game is now unclear.
This is a brutal sequence of events. Sony bought the makers of Concord, Firewalk Studios, in 2023. Concord had been in development for eight years, and it was an expensive game, with bespoke cinematics and a long-term plan that would have cost $100m or more to develop. In its two weeks on the market, it sold fewer than 25,000 copies, according to estimates. This is a shocker, even compared with the year’s other bad news for developers and studios.
Much has been written about why Concord flopped so spectacularly. As Keith Stuart pointed out in his review of the game, it launched into a crowded genre, the hero shooter, in which many players already have their preferred game (Overwatch, Valorant or Apex Legends, to name three). Sony’s marketing of the game also seemed to fail, in that almost nobody knew about Concord before it arrived. (I barely knew about it, and it’s my job to know these things.) Criticisms, too, were levelled at its characters and design: it was generic and didn’t have any particularly interesting gameplay ideas.
The failure of Concord is also symbolic of the existential-level problems in modern game development: they are so expensive to create, and they take so long that a game can miss its moment years before it is released. All this makes publishers risk-averse, but if you’re simply trying to recreate what’s popular, it’ll be out of date by the time it’s finished.
Concord is not the first high-profile multiplayer flop of the year. Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League also disappointed its publisher by not selling well, and its players by shoehorning an otherwise potentially interesting game into a live-service multiplayer model. Sega’s Foamstars went completely under the radar. And let’s not forget Hyenas, Sega’s live-service shooter, which was cancelled only a few months before it was due to be released.
My feeling is that people simply don’t have time for another forever game. Destiny, one of the first of the current generation of eternal live-service games that aim to keep players playing for years, turned 10 this week: it has become part of the lives and routines of millions. Overwatch, Fortnite and, heck, even the decades-old World of Warcraft are dominant in their genres. What would it take to get those players to abandon it for a new game, or add a new game into their spare time? And with these sorts of titles, people aren’t just abandoning the game – they’re also abandoning their friends.
The live-service game rush reminds me of the time in the 2000s where almost every publisher was trying to create a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft. Every day I’d get a press release saying that so-in-so has secured millions in funding for a new Warcraft-killer. Some of the resulting games were good – Guild Wars, to pick one example – but most of them enjoyed mild to moderate success at best. Online games are not easy to succeed at. They never have been.
It is striking that this comes right on the heels of the enormous sales of Black Myth: Wukong, a resolutely single-player game. Many factors contributed to Wukong’s success, as I wrote about last week, but nonetheless there is huge demand for that game, and by extension, huge demand for single-player games in general. Speaking personally, I do not want a game that takes years to play. I want one with something to say, an experience to impart, and one that eventually ends. A game whose artistry comes before its business model.
This is partly a matter of taste. Self-evidently, there is an enormous market for live-service multiplayer games; it’s just that most of those people are already playing one. I highly doubt that there are untapped millions of players desperate for a hero shooter or battle royale game who just haven’t found the right one yet. It’s time that publishers try something new instead.
What to play
My family remains enthralled with Astro Bot, particularly my youngest, who now wakes me up every morning talking about his preferred power-ups (the “frog punchies” are his fave). But I needed a break from it, so on a long train journey recently I gave Bakeru a go. It is a distinctly Japanese-flavoured action platformer in the vein of long-forgotten 1990s series Ganbare Goemon. For the benefit of the 98% of people to whom that means absolutely nothing, that means whacking gorgeously animated yokai with drumsticks as you whirl through a comic-book version of Japanese towns and scenery.
The difficulty is definitely geared towards children, so I found the first few levels almost completely frictionless, but it’s been a welcome platformer time-warp nonetheless, reminding me of the screenshots of similar Japanese games that I’d pore over in the pages of my Nintendo magazines in the 90s.
Available on: PC, Nintendo Switch
Estimated playtime: 10 hours
What to read
In more positive news for Sony, details of the long-awaited PS5 Pro have finally been unveiled. An extra £200 outlay on its current system price tag buys enhanced technical specs, a 2TB solid state drive and more.
As mentioned, Bungie’s space-opera shooter Destiny turns 10 this week – and as Christian Donlan writes in this anniversary essay, it’s a game that people always have something to say about: not just one of the first forever games, but a forever conversation.
The Rubber-Keyed Wonder, a new film about the development of the ZX Spectrum, is out early next month.
What to click
Does the Minecraft movie really look that bad? Only a 10-year-old can tell us | Rich Pelley
Astro Bot review – glittering ideas make Team Asobi’s 3D platformer a gem
What the Car? A racing game with a ‘complete disregard for actual vehicles’
Question Block
Reader Maisie asks this week’s question:
After years of happily gaming on the Switch I decided to expand my horizons and invested in a PS4 and gaming laptop. The PS4 is great but I’m struggling to get into Steam games – sitting at my desk is just not the same as lounging on the sofa next to my husband. Do you have any tips for making PC gaming feel less like work and more like fun?
I have exactly the same feelings around PC gaming: I hate playing games at a desk. It was a bit different when I was a teenager playing endless Rollercoaster Tycoon, The Sims and Age of Empires II after school, but nowadays I sit at a desk all day, and apart from being the last thing I want to do after hours, it isn’t good for your body. But I do play a decent amount of PC games these days, because you can run an HDMI cable to your TV and play almost all of them on any Bluetooth-enabled controller. Your PS4 controller will work, as will any Xbox controller – I use an Xbox One pad for PC games now, but for many years I used an old wired Xbox 360 one, which are cheap secondhand. The Steam Deck is also a gamechanger – I unreservedly recommend saving up for one.
As for a PC-only game that might make all of this seem worth it: these days almost everything is cross-platform. But Baldur’s Gate 3 really does play best on PC, and if that doesn’t make you willing to put up with a keyboard and mouse, nothing will.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.
