Sony, a pillar of the video game industry, recently released a big new multiplayer tentpole game, but you wouldn’t know it based on buzz. Concord, which iterates on the team shooter styles of games like Overwatch and the attitude of Guardians of the Galaxy, is struggling to attract even just a couple hundred players at any given moment on Steam, and sales estimates on PC and PS5 aren’t great. What happened? And why can a by most measures solid game with a big marketing budget flop during a year that has produced several surprise hits from much smaller studios? On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we discuss that.
We begin by talking about the first big game of the “fall” video game season: Star Wars Outlaws. Despite an enormous budget and a four-year development cycle, reviewers were given just a week to play the gargantuan game before embargo. Not ideal! We discuss how that impacts the way reviewers play and perceive games.
Then we move on to Concord, Sony’s new team-based hero shooter that generated more buzz by flopping than by existing in the first place. Why are people so gleeful about tallying up its commercial failings, though? What about the modern internet has broken our brains in this specific way?
Lastly, on a happier note, we discuss Tactical Breach Wizards, the brilliant not-quite-XCOM-alike that recently rocketed to the top of our game of the year lists. We also pitch several compelling get-rich-quick schemes, including my personal favorite: Replace all executives with babies.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can create our own middle-of-the-road triple-A game that chases trends from several years ago. Ours will succeed, though, because we’re built different.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Luke: These [kinds of games] are usually somebody’s game. People who play Overwatch play a lot of – if not exclusively – Overwatch. It’s the same with League. It’s the same with Valorant. People play that game. People aren’t gonna leave those other, better games for Concord. It’s not a 20-hour single player game that people can stack up at sale time or put on their pile of shame and come back to later. If you’re not playing this game, this game’s fucked.
Nathan: This is also why, if you look at Sony’s stable, its other live service multiplayer game this year was Helldivers. There wasn’t really an analogous experience for that, so people were more willing to hop in and give it a try. Whereas with Concord, you can point to several other, pretty similar games, so people are like “Well yeah, I’m just gonna keep playing those” or move onto playing another of those because they already have player bases, they already have a lot of content, they’re better known, or their friends might already be playing them. In other words, the reasons people check out games.
Gita: Yeah, my favorite team shooter to play is Apex Legends, because I cannot get enough of that Respawn gunplay. But I play Overwatch because my friends play Overwatch. We have a group call every Thursday night where we play games together, and we usually end with Overwatch. That’s why I’m an Overwatch player. In the darkest time of my life, I played so much Overwatch that it’s now deeply embedded in my brain. I don’t think I could play another team shooter – at least, not seriously.
I tried Helldivers, and I had fun, but as the bloom came off the rose and people stopped playing it, I eventually uninstalled it from my PC. That’s just what happens: These games are seasonal. If you want the money faucet to turn on and stay on forever, you have to be something that’s a little different from what’s out there. Overwatch couldn’t sustain itself being Blizzard’s flagship moneymaker product because it couldn’t keep up with the novelty of new games that were coming out. I also have really intense opinions about how they do character balance; I don’t think they do a very good job. But that’s a story for a different time.
Nathan: You were talking about having a game night with friends, and I think recent multiplayer hits – like last year’s big example, Lethal Company – show that the meta for how multiplayer games blow up now is word of mouth. And I think it’s sort of been that way since covid [lockdowns in 2020]. Among Us was the canary in the coal mine. It came out before 2020 but had this big surge because of word of mouth and became one of the most popular games out there at that time. Lethal Company was the beneficiary of a similar phenomenon.
Now it’s just sort of how multiplayer games get big. Friend groups move from one game to another, and they’ll say “Hey, everybody else, come join me on this!” Then that game gets really big for a minute. That happened to Helldivers earlier this year. The problem for companies is, it’s really hard to manufacture that, especially when a game is just not demonstrating anything super new or interesting. Concord, again, isn’t. So it didn’t generate that groundswell of interest. It didn’t have people being like “Me and my friends have to check this out. We’ve gotta switch over to this one for a little bit.”
Without that, I think the floor for how a big-budget multiplayer game can perform – as opposed to the ceiling – is really low now. Even for a game with the marketing power of Sony behind it. You can still wind up with less than a thousand concurrent players on Steam during your launch week, which I think in another era of games would be unheard of. But the way people find out about games and move between them now is so rooted in their friend groups and Steam and Discord that a tiny game can become huge, and a huge game can be tiny, depending on the circumstance.
Gita: That’s such an interesting way to put it, but it’s really true. What I’ve heard from people who work in game development – from all levels of game development, but especially the indies, where you’re responsible for so much more – is that measuring the success of a game or predicting the success of a game is just… nobody knows! Nobody knows what makes a game a hit or not a hit or makes people grab onto an idea or not. Marketing budget certainly has something to do with it. I don’t think Cyberpunk would have gotten to the place where even my husband was like “I think I might check out Cyberpunk” [without it]. And then I had to be like “Homie, I heard some bad stuff about Cyberpunk. I’m so sorry.” I had to sit him down.
Luke: With his fist on his knees, he’s so excited. “I’m sorry, baby. It sucks.”
Gita: “No, it can’t suck!” But there were billboards everywhere, on the side of every bus and every subway station we went to. We were flying back and forth from LA a lot at the time, and we were seeing Cyberpunk everywhere. Advertising works! But it’s not everything. Word of mouth counts for so much.
