Musings: Concord, Audiences and the present state of Play(station)

I don't think Sony's made good box art in over a console generation

Given how contemporary it is to writing this post, you already know this story if you've been following the wreck that is Concord, but it's worth recording for posterity.

Released for Playstation 5 and PC on August 23rd 2024, Concord was a team-based competitive multiplayer hero shooter developed by new studio Firewalk Studios, its staff comprised of a host of ex-Bungie staff with glittering resumes of exactly this type of game. On September 4th, 12 days after its release, publisher Sony Interactive, owner-operator of the Playstation 5 console platform and longstanding industry institution whose expensive, photo-realistic high-fidelity games routinely sell millions, announced Concord would be taken offline in light of its abysmal failure to sell and thus generate a workable playerbase. At the day of its release on Steam and in the days thereafter, Concord struggled to breach a player count of 700, a dismal number even by the standards of failed multiplayer games. The rough estimate is that across physical and digital sales, on both platforms, Concord couldn't have mustered more than 25,000 sales in total and globally, a number routinely outstripped by small indie games and the most niche of niche titles.

This was a game with around US$200 million in its budget (you've likely heard $400 mil being thrown around; put a pin in that, we'll get there) and 8 years of development (pre-production and planning plus actual dev time) that Sony bought from prior owner, studio-creation and accurately named firm ProbablyMonsters in 2023 for "an undisclosed amount". Concord, once its release window was due, got the red carpet treatment; it headlined and dominated this summer's State of Play (11 of the 35 minutes are given wholly to it), Sony's marketing stream and their equivalent to Nintendo's Directs, it had a whole series of luxuriously animated extremely high-fidelity cutscenes prepared to be released week after week to dripfeed a story to players, and it was revealed to be getting a separate luxuriously animated episode in Secret Level, a CG animation anthology series featuring episodes for top-shelf and highly popular brands like Warhammer 40K, Capcom's Mega Man and Sony's own God of War, which was one of the prime announcements of Geoff Keighley's Gamescom Opening Night Live, a major livestreamed press conference in the vein of the old E3 games reveal conferences and a show that routinely gathers hundreds of thousands if not low millions of viewers globally.

It got its own branded controller, it got a closed and then immediately open beta that would run the month before release, it got the entire vehicle of Sony's marketing grunt behind it. Emboldened by the earlier massive success of Helldivers 2, which released at a price point of £35/$40 instead of the typical £50-£60 (or for Sony, £70, these days)/$60-70 range, Concord got the same price point rather pointedly.

And no-one bought it. It's easy to say that because it's explicitly the case: Sony wouldn't chance the optics of killing one of their own major games in under two weeks and choose to up-front refund the desperate few who bought it no questions asked if it had even a small but workably tangible audience. The fact that they immediately went for refunding people is telling: it means they have no legal obligations or constraints if they choose (and it's more "when" than "if") to bury it and never bring it back.

This whole scenario gives plenty of meat to chew and stew if you like to muse about videogames as an art form and medium and/or as an industry, which is the point of this messy screed. Live-service games and multiplayer games failing and dying is a common story these days - the first half of this year saw the releases and functionally immediate deaths of Skull & Bones, Suicide Squad Kills The Justice League, Foamstars and Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's Xdefiant alone, and this has been a pattern going back many, many years now. But basically none are as massive and cataclysmic a failure as Concord, which, regardless of the accuracy of scuttlebutt about how it was internally regarded, was very obviously a flagship title Sony was banking tons on. Its size and its owner's status makes it a significant event.

 So, where do we start?

 Concord & Audiences

 

Look at this guy. He's just a regular dude from any given office, dressed for laser tag. It's John Concord. Johncord.
Image source is the tragic "Playstation Studios Fandom Wiki", and will be for other character portraits and the like as the sources are few and far between outside of ripping from videos.


Let's start with this one: why did Concord fail?

There's been a lot of debate and talk about the "why" of Concord's failure but let's be frank, even if you don't follow the industry at all you can probably deduce the core reasons pretty easily from what's been said so far. The first one is the one my rattled-off list of deaths shortly ago hits at: that there are too many of these things.

This is the commonly held wisdom about the ongoing mass extinction event of multiplayer and service games: there are too many, the audience for any given genre of them is already taken, and you aren't toppling the ones who have locked in their grips on them. And despite how my phrasing at the start of this paragraph sounds I actually agree entirely with this, I just think there's more nuance to it that's worth digging into to really understand what that means and why Concord ate shit so hard.

The way games are talked about normally, it is usually understood as there being a set 'online shooter' market or audience or 'MMORPG' market/audience or even a set 'gacha' market/audience. I think that's true, but these generic audiences/markets are actually much smaller than anyone thinks. This is best described by the guy who I got this thinking from, as it just makes sense to me and fits with what we can observe much more readily: all the way back in 2015, just shy of a decade now, creator of SteamSpy and later Epic Games Head of Publishing (he's since quit as he did not like the direction they were going) Sergiy Galyonkin wrote a post on Medium titled "Your target audience doesn't exist". It's a pretty quick post and it's extremely fascinating; as a guy very interested in market and audience data, as you can glean from him creating and running SteamSpy, one of the prominent Steam data-miners for collecting sales data for games, he's extremely tuned in to what an audience even is.

In that post, he reasons that the generic markets for any given genre aren't as big as everyone at the time believed - and frankly, most still operate with that same understanding. Instead, Sergiy argues that, for example, World of Warcraft did not build a gigantic tens-of-millions-strong audience for all MMORPGs to get a slice of, it just built a gigantic tens-of-millions-strong audience...for World of Warcraft. And that is plainly observable, as the 2000s and even early 2010s are littered with a litany of MMO corpses of wannabe "WoW-killers" that died almost immediately. The 'generic' audience for a genre still exists, but it's not the entire available userbase for WoW or these days Final Fantasy XIV or Phantasy Star Online 2; it's the scant bits of overlap between their userbases, the people who are drawn to the genre specifically and thus play multiple titles of it.

This, I think, is how things actually work and it broadly explains the ongoing mass-death of service games that we've been seeing for years now. There isn't one big gigantic blob of 300mil+ multiplayer or service game players, there's just many disparate audiences for each specific one drawn from all over the place, brought in by how much any given game appeals to them in terms of aesthetic, gameplay mechanics, story or so on. There are overlaps between many of them, and while you can find generic markets in the overlaps between games with shared elements, even then there's no guarantee that any given person in those overlaps is actually a member of that 'generic market' - for example, someone who plays both FFXIV and PSO2 maybe just really likes the aesthetics and 'dress-up' element of those games, and will not give a single shit about, say, New World just because it's an MMO.

This, incidentally, should be fucking obvious because the platform holders spell it out for us. Sony's financial reports put PS+ active subscriptions at 47.4 million, but the monthly active users of all Playstation consoles in December 2023, subscribed or not, is 123 million. In other words, only about a third of Playstation owners across PS4 and PS5 pay for the subscription required to play online multiplayer...so, two-thirds or 80 million active players don't play online. Incidentally, there's been suggestions of downturns in PS+ sub counts; it's hard to gauge as Sony completely innocently decided to stop reporting their exact counts in 2023, a move Microsoft pulled years earlier to obfuscate the obvious decline of Xbox as a platform. The take-away from this is that of course the audience is much more limited than it seems, two-thirds of the active player-base don't play online games!

Hell, the article citing the Sony report of 123 million MAUs (monthly active users) also has Sony declare 40% of those are PS5 owners...so just over a third of their playerbase are PS5 owners, and the rest are PS4 users or lapsed PS4 users using their PSN accounts for Sony's PC releases. Concord didn't release on PS4, so its console audience is...40% of the Playstation playerbase.

I want to know who approved this armour suit. It almost looks like some AI generated thing that mixed up a Warhammer 40K Space Marine with a golf course, somehow; why else does she have the exact colour scheme of one and that fuckin little red flag?

What this means is that having really strong core elements, "killer edges" that really distinguish your game from all of the others about the place, is more important than ever. It's worth reading the other posts on Galyonkin's blog, especially around the time of 2015-2016, as he gets into quite a lot of the specific adjacent topics and nuances of the 'target audience' discussion - this isn't the first time where AAA Western games have seen massive drop-offs in sales, for example, and his discussion of that happening back in 2016 to Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Watch Dogs 2 also hits upon the other key point here: there is so much more choice now that people aren't just stuck with "the game of the month" and the audiences are not just white young adult men from North America and Western Europe. The successful service and multiplayer games will persist for years upon years, people have an entire bank of older things they can go back to, and the choices for single player experiences are even more numerous and stockpile even more. There are so many games coming out that people can afford to be picky, and can hunt down things that are very specifically for them and their tastes in the moment rather than having to make do.

People aren't automatically or by default members of any given audience, their "membership" for any given audience is always fluid. And even then, the big Western AAA things like Concord are not meeting the specific tastes of any audience.

And as storefronts like Steam and GOG and itch.io continue to do business, and as the home consoles start to maintain compatibility across generations to avoid the legal repercussions of breaking the consistency of digital game availability, this just keeps getting more and more true. What need have I of Concord if I desperately need entertainment in the form of a shooter this month? The list of readily available and easily playable boomer shooters that are more to my specific tastes grows a little more each year, to the point that I can easily winnow off some of them to get very specifically exactly what I want.

To that end, it's dual-pronged; the audience for team-based online multiplayer hero shooters is not as big as CEOs dream of it being, the online multiplayer audience on Playstation is the minority, and more specifically, there is no audience for Concord. There provably, demonstrably isn't because it did not materialise. In this moment of time, in these conditions with the spreads of games and the desires and tastes of all the possible people an audience can be formed out of, there are so very few as to be functionally zero audience members for Concord.

Thus, the question of "why did Concord fail?" is more accurately, and perhaps hilariously cruelly, better put as "why did no-one want Concord?". After all, a game can fail because it failed to reach an audience, but Sony blasted Concord all across the airwaves, to millions of people through their own streams, Gamescom ONL, sponsored Twitch streamers, through emails and the PSN storefront and app notifs and online trailer ads and more. Helldivers 2 got nowhere near that push and spawned an audience 12 million strong - it is not that Concord failed, per se, it's explicitly that no-one wants it.

"Bafflingly ugly and weird outfits" is the trend across all of Concord's character designs. Does this look like a spacefaring mercenary/space pirate field medic to you? Looks more like an SSX character found a weird chimera of various rifles and decided killing people is more fun.
 

The answer to "Why did no-one want Concord?" (besides "its character designs are all fucking ugly and unappealing") that I think sits right is a bit of a peculiar one, one I think is more 'theoretical' at the moment and is steeped in something that came long after Galyonkin's 2015-2016 posts: the pandemic fucked up a lot of our understanding of the world. In general, yeah, but also within the sphere of games as an industry, a market and a medium.

Spending on games skyrocketed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, to record levels never before seen even at the height of the mobile game craze, across the board. A big part of the ongoing cratering of corporations and studios around us now is a ton of them hired up and expanded rapidly under the braindead assumption that this massive spike was permanent and games would eternally float at these heights forever more. Surprise surprise, when things opened up and people could go outside again and things began settling down, the status quo began reasserting itself and spending on games went back down to more normal levels.

However, I think it had an unforeseen effect that I've only heard some consider: in making the wider public get more invested in games with their new heaps of time and saved money, it exposed more of that public to more games. And when you get deeper into an art medium and explore more works from it, you start to develop your own specific tastes as you move from thing to thing. To put it simply, yes, I think the pandemic resulted in the wider public...growing taste.

It's funny to put it that way but outside of slandering people I think it's legitimately true: people who only buy games some of the time now have a better idea of what they actually like and their tastes, their notions of what they like and don't like has changed. We see the knock-on effects of this all over the place: people decide they like things that the typical AAA game does not provide, and so, we see the likes of Elden Ring do numbers normally reserved for those Western AAA mega-franchises, or Helldivers 2 be the break-out hit of the year when it was obviously deemed to be a footnote by its own publisher. Black Myth Wukong, which released at basically the same time as Concord, has now sold 18 million copies worldwide - the bulk of that is in its native China, delighted at receiving a home-grown game that meets their tastes, but it's been no slouch globally either.

The quirkier games, the games that shy away from the things that Western AAA studios decided were the norm and the "correct" way to make games and interfaces and more, these things are selling better and better and the typical, standard AAA stuff is selling worse and worse. I think the pandemic exposed a ton of people to a wider range of things, and revealed to them possibilites they hadn't considered, and changed the tastes of the wider market beyond the online discourse sphere. I think that combines with the natural progression of interest and tastes that sees phenomenons and fads and trends shift naturally over time to result in a probably accelerated shift away from what people considered the eternal norm.

Combine that with the blindspots that the pundits and journalists have for audiences outside the sorts that mainly occupy the online discourse sphere (older men, middle-aged and older women, children, and nationalities beyond the Western hemisphere) and you get way more of the "surprises" happening more often, to the point that it shouldn't be surprising any more.

Concord was dreamed up for and designed for a specific audience at a specific time that stopped existing in the numbers Sony imagined some years ago. You might nominally call it the "Overwatch audience"; while still trucking along, the days of Overwatch's cultural and multiplayer dominance passed years and years ago. I have to get more ancedotal here and draw on the opinions of those who actually played it and its betas, but it's remarked that Concord felt a lot like a Bungie game, their specific style of shooter, which makes sense as the key staff are ex-Bungie.

We can thus intuit that the great seas of potential audience members no longer have a taste, at large, for Bungie-style shooters. The ever-diminishing player counts and cultural reach of Destiny 2, alongside the long-ago death of Halo as an IP anyone cares about, have seen Bungie's star wane. This isn't to slight them, this sort of thing happens often and sometimes is simply unavoidable; tastes change. You have to notice the changes and adapt or die. That's fucking hard.

And with the studio continuously shedding long-time key staff, their ability to land that "style" that people may want is fading ever more, too.

It's not just Concord, either; reporting goes that Bungie proper are hitting against these issues. Take the sources on this with a grain of salt as several of them have been wiped in the intervening time, the one I could find was here: Marathon was allegedly some time ago presented to big Escape From Tarkov streamers, it being the champion of the "extraction shooter" genre a number of studios and executives have become obsessed with lately, of which Marathon sought to dominate. None of them were impressed, they did not want to play Marathon, much less stream it for a wider audience. These people were sought as advertisement vectors because they are thought leaders and prominent community members in the audiences Bungie is hunting for, but what they represent is exactly what I spoke of: there is not a gigantic millions-strong audience for extraction shooters. There's just a big Escape From Tarkov audience. They don't want a Bungie-styled game either.

Of course, we don't have any concrete word for that event occurring, but I think something of its nature must have happened somewhere because Marathon has basically been radio silent going on a year and a half (revealed May 2023; it's the last week of September 2024 now, and it's unlikely to just "shadowdrop" in the rest of 2024, so we can be sure it won't show again til 2025). You don't just vanish for so long after a dramatic reveal trailer without there being something wrong - and evidently there is, as now some report it's being retooled as a hero shooter.

You know, a hero shooter. Like Concord.

Before we move on, one last thing: there is a growing apathy for the concept of live service games, of games that will simply cease to exist if they don't get enough players to sustain them. This is having the increasingly noticeable effect of people just pre-emptively refusing to give a game a go under the assumption it will simply die within half a year or less. The thing about "service" games is that the bulk of them by design demand massive amounts of player time to get their content, to keep them playing long enough for new content to arrive to get more money out of them - players have to "invest" in them to get the most out of them. As more fail to make it, more people get burned and never want to do that again, or just go to the established names with such massive audiences that they won't be dying any time soon, if ever (many the victors of the old 2000s MMO wars are still around to this day, operating small servers in "maintenance modes" for the people who keep paying to play them - it's a profitable model, apparently). This makes the task of manifesting an audience ever more difficult for all future live service games, compounding the other mountains of problems these things are suffering from.

Concord's immediate and viciously fast failure will compound this significantly - why on earth would anyone sensible consider Sony's as-yet-not-cancelled Fairgame$, a team-based online multiplayer competitive shooter very much like Concord, when Sony has demonstrated the willingness to kill such projects before the launch month has passed? To be frank you'd have to be fucking stupid - and thus Fairgame$ is now an infinitely tougher sell than it already was. And as this happens frequently across the entire industry (often prominently so, with the failures reported, discussed and danced over widely), it becomes ever harder to convince players of bothering to try to begin with. Why bother when it'll be gone in three months if you're lucky?

Concord: A Conspiracy Theory, and the state of play(station)

Former Sony Interactive Entertainment president Jim Ryan, here photographed in the act of yearning to close more studios for not producing more Horizon games or winning the Bungie Seal of Approval.

 Hear me out on this one.

If we go back to that beginning summary, about Concord, Firewalk Studios and the history that got us here, there's a little thread to pull out: ProbablyMonsters, the firm that put together Firewalk Studios, was formed in 2016 by former Bungie chairman Harold Ryan. The staff of Firewalk Studios consists of a lot of former Bungie staff per this post:

  • Studio head Tony Hsu, formly Activision manager of Destiny
  • CEO Harold Ryan, former Bungie chariman as mentioned
  • Executive producer Elena Siegman, producer for multiple Destiny expansions

    Separate from the article, elsewhere we can find:

  • Lead character designer Jon Wesinewski, lead character designer for Destiny
  • Lead gameplay designer Claude Jerome, designer on Destiny
  • Director Ryan Ellis (now stepped down), director on Destiny 2

Etc, etc.

Per this tweet from one of them, Concord had been in development for 8 years - since 2016, when ProbablyMonsters formed, and by the wording of that Playstation Blog post the pre-production work was done with some number of the staff in place before Firewalk Studios was then built and the staff shuffled into it in 2018. That post itself is from 2021 when Sony publicly announced the 'partnership' with Firewalk, likely committing fully to its infamous live service plans where they intended to have 12 or so active live service multiplayer games on the market simultaneously by 2025-2026.

You know what else was going on at that time of the commitment and ramp-up? Sony acquiring Bungie proper in February 2022 (article from when the purchase cleared and was locked in in June 2022), the negotiations for which naturally must have been carried out in 2021 when they formally locked in to this other studio comprised of more Bungie staff. Indeed, the announcement of the plan to have 12 live service games by 2026 was made that same month, February 2022.

In November 2023, Sony president Hiroki Totoki stated that they were "reviewing" their slate of live service games, this public statement coming after it was announced that former Playstation head Jim Ryan was to be cast out in Spring 2024. This was followed in December 2023 with the surprisingly open declaration by Naughty Dog that the planned The Last Of Us service game was being cancelled because making it was requiring all hands on deck, preventing them from developing anything else, particularly the sorts of games they were actually used to making. This was foreseen as there were a number of layoffs from the studio relating to monetisation of a service game before this.

There's no strict source for this next bit as it's rumours, murmurs, industry scuttlebutt: the word goes that Jim Ryan, perpetual idiot and a blight who has left a lasting black mark on the industry, desired Bungie so bad that he bought them for a massively inflated price because he wanted their "expertise" in making live service games. In essence, it was his belief that with Bungie's knowledge, Sony could successfully launch, maintain and wire up 12 live service games to the believed-to-be endless Playstation playerbase and just live off the infinite money machine forever - not how any of that would be phrased by him or Sony, but that's the intent and belief. The word goes that sometime in 2023, particular staff from Bungie were sent round the Sony studios to review and pass judgment on the lineup, to determine which games would make it and which would need to be reworked, tweaked, or outright cancelled because they believed they would never work. Let's look at the lineup that we know of:

That's 9 of the 12 planned live service games, and of those 9, 4 were killed in or after this review, 2 have gone completely MIA and are presumably in development hell, 1 is obviously in development hell, and 2 released. Of the two who made it, one succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations, and the other failed beyond anyone's wildest expectations and brought the kill count to 5. There are potentially 3 more blocking up Sony's surviving studios.

Back to bagging on Concord designs to break up the text. What the fuck were they doing with her outfit? What is with the display case helmet? What's the tube with a pink spot on her back even for? The fuck is with that gun handle?

My conspiracy theory is this: Sony contracted ProbablyMonsters, ran by a former Bungie executive, to get the wheels turning on a new game. Under Jim Ryan, this became a new live service game; the studio put together to make it consists .rimarily of ex-Bungie staff the former Bungie executive likely has contact and credit with - some even seemed to be poached from Bungie during development. Jim Ryan, separately, negotiates an acquisition of Bungie for an insane amount far beyond any reasonable measure of their value. Jim Ryan then has Bungie start up another live service game for Playstation, and is now funding two studios of Bungie staff making live service titles, to the tune of tens of millions per year - if we go by the average budget for Sony first party titles (Spiderman 2's leaked $300 million, and Concord's reported $160 million), probably like $20-30 million a year for Firewalk Studios.

Not only is Firewalk Studios put together partially on Sony's dime, but Sony eventually buys them entirely for "an undisclosed amount" from ProbablyMonsters, in addition to continuing to fund Concord's expensive development, another Jim Ryan move. Issues begin to develop in the planned portfolio of infinite money machines as few of Sony's studios have the infrastructure or expertise to develop and maintain these things, and so a review is called. Jim Ryan, having bought Bungie for basically this, puts it to a cadre of Bungie staff to decide what lives and dies.

The Bungie staff basically write off every single other title except the one closest to release, Helldivers 2, and...the one made by other Bungie staff, Concord. All the rest are given the choice of die or be reworked, prolonging their already long, expensive development times. Sony ends up with basically no games to release in 2024, and obviously the advice for Helldivers 2 wasn't kind, as they received little promotion by Sony and weren't allotted much in the way of server resources.

Yes, I am proposing that Jim Ryan, fucking public idiot that he is, and Hermen Hulst as well were scammed completely back-to-front for near a decade by Bungie executives in and outside the company, who used their positions of influence to functionally remove or delay all of the competition their own titles would have faced in Sony's lineup, excepting one they figured would fail (which then defied all odds to succeed massively), for whatever reasons.Their own idiocy and incompetence led them to waste untold billions of dollars and unfathomable amounts of opportunity cost chasing an obvious pipe dream, completely devastating Playstation's first party title output for years to come while actively gutting many of its studios, all to free up more money to pay into this scam.

And at the end of it all, after supposedly expecting a cap of around 50,000 players for Helldivers 2, Sony was faced with Concord probably selling half of that at best.

More than anything her face perturbs and annoys me. And as said, every time the outfit is fucking ugly and ill-fitting.

It's here that I go back to that pin from earlier about Concord's budget. Mark the difficulty of finding sources with how fucked search engines are these days, I need to start locking in bookmarks/screenshots of shit; around the time of Concord's closure, the scuttlebutt went that Concord's budget was about $160 million, which was the number I've been going with when writing this so far. Since I wrote that part, games journalist Colin Moriarty came out with an alleged Concord developer as source that the game's budget by the end was $400 million - specifically, it took $200 million initially and then was "in such a state" that Sony speedily bankrolled another $200 million to get it into the shape it launched in, in the last year or so of development. He also talks about how there was a culture of "toxic positivity" in Firewalk, a refusal to take criticism or acknowledge the difficulties and problems of the game that resulted in this scenario.

To be clear, Moriarty's track record is spotty to the point that I wouldn't blame anyone for dismissing his claims outright, but there's been corroboration about parts of it from other journalists - specifically the bits about the "toxic positivity culture" - with their own alleged sources. The budget claim is also asserted as not including the money Sony spent acquiring Firewalk from ProbablyMonsters, and it's here that I don't think it holds.

Yeah, Concord had two years of pre-pro and around six years of active development, but I just don't see how it could outstrip the budget of Spiderman 2 with what it has. Yes, it was expensive - $160-200 million sounds right for it and is stupid expensive. You can cite the credits list, but that's a tricky thing; yes, there's great swathes of people from Playstation Creative Arts support studios for motion capture and animation and so on, which is extremely expensive stuff, but also great chunks of that list are finance, business, communications and executive staff who don't specifically do much for any given game they're credited on, just a few hours of time here or there at most for some roles (and executives of the parent company don't do anything at all!).

By that same measure, the Playstation Creative Arts studios do such work for all of the Playstation first party stuff, they exist as support studios dedicated to that work for that reason, which further dilutes the project-specific cost of their work.

I could see it if it included the studio buyout. Long development with extremely high fidelity assets and lots of motion-capture for the special animated cutscenes, a big marketing campaign, buying a spot in Secret Level and also buying Firewalk Studio outright, that could go to $400 million especially because prior owner ProbablyMonsters is a firm based around making studios and selling them like that. Given the evidence of a significant push behind Concord specifically, and the allegations from Moriarty and others that Concord was the special darling project of Hermen Hulst, CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, it's likely all sorts of merchandising shit was also paid for and now has to be scrapped or cancelled, which doubtlessly incurs fees. 

Factor in whatever Harold Ryan, founder of PM and CEO of Firewalk, got for presumably detaching from one or the other for the sale and absolutely $400 million makes sense. If the story of having to hastily redo the game in the final year is real - probably it involved getting the Creative Arts studios to focus in on Concord and drill out a lot of work on a strict timetable, that'd drive costs up - then that would also secure it.

At the same time it feels like an attempt to specially damn Concord by making it the most expensive Sony first party title of this generation, above Spiderman 2's $300 mil and the earmarked $350 mil for Spiderman 3, when it doesn't really need the extra boot to the corpse.

Any which way: is it any wonder Jim Ryan was ejected this year? And yes, he was kicked out - you get to gracefully "leave" at that level instead of being openly booted to the curb, but no respected executive suddenly ups and leaves in the midst of a review process of the company's product portfolio that discovers that shit's fucked and results in near half of it being cancelled. With Concord's galling failure, some wonder if Hermen Hulst is soon to follow.

That's why we're staring down the barrel of a Tokyo Game Show State of Play from Sony that reportedly has remasters of late PS4 titles Horizon Zero Dawn and Days Gone, to go along with the ones for The Last of Us and Until Dawn, the latter of which has already seen its studio gutted before launch. They have no games because their entire pipeline has been corkscrewed by Jim Ryan's total incompetence, and the level of graphical fidelity they have tied their brands to means that any projects out of the studios now freed up are going to intrinsically take in the region of 4-5+ years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Again, Spiderman 2 spent $300 mil pointlessly redoing existing work and Sony has earmarked $350 mil so presumably expect them to do it again - that shit won't exist until near the end of the decade.

Yes, this is all purely speculation drawn from what we do know, but hey, I called it a conspiracy theory. It makes about as much sense as any other explanation for the absolute clown shoes period the PS5's lifespan has been, especially of late with the total embarrassment that the PS5 Pro is.

The funniest thing is you just know Concord was going to be a centrepiece, the flagship, the showboat for that fucking mess, too. And then they had to hastily redo it when it died horribly.

Unlike everyone else tripping over themselves to mock this easily and justly mockable thing, I pick a screenshot of an actually fucking silly part. Yeah man, making really distant crowds...sharper! £825 well spent!

This brings us to the current state of Playstation and Sony Interactive, or whatever the division's name is these days (Sony Computer Entertainment just sounded better).

What more needs to be said? It's fucked. The PS5 is tracking below the PS4's lifetime sales at the same point in their lifespans, this year has been a litany of PR disasters for Sony as they kill studios and gut the headcounts of others to try and stop the bleeding of all these hyper-expensive live service failures, they only have Until Dawn Remaster with a release date left on their upcoming slate, and outside of Marathon the only officially announced game they have in the hopper is Insomniac's Wolverine, which could very well still be over a year out. Is it any wonder they're trying to "remaster" PS4 games that already run at 4K60 on PS5? The same PS4 games they already gave out through the PS+ Collection for the first few years of the PS5's life to fill the gap in releases, and whose disc copies can be bought for £15 or less new?

I mean for fuck's sake, Bloodborne is right there and they refuse to touch it! If ever you needed confirmation that the executive suite really dislikes Japanese games (besides killing off the Japan Studio and having their censorship policies target Japanese games more than others), there it is!

The PS5 Pro, in all truth, solves a pretty serious problem for PS5 games; as developers won't fucking lower their resolutions or reduce their fidelity, good temporal anti-aliasing is key to smooth over jagged edges and keep things clean because of how Unreal Engine and most other modern engines work. The PS5 doesn't have that; it has AMD's FSR2 and any homebrew solution by individual studios, most of which suck, as does FSR2, making games extremely blurry and often causing trailing ghost images of components on screen, which combines horribly with things like motion blur features that try to smooth things over more. The PS5 Pro's special all-purpose solution, PSSR (pisser), is high quality and legitimately good.

It's nowhere near fucking £825 (including the disc drive and stand costs, as it comes with neither!) good, not in any universe and never will be. The PS5 Pro announcement and presentation was a massive unforced error that completely undermined what few values this shitbox has to offer, and the thing is so prohibitively expensive and clearly built to bilk more money out of people that everyone hates the fucking thing, and rightfully so! It should be hated! There's a world where the PS5 Pro launches at the regular PS5's price and only has the Pisser tech in it, none of the gaudy raytracing or other completely pointless boosts, and in that world I'm putting on my clown makeup to get it! But Sony's current management can't do a single fucking thing right (other than "kill Concord ASAP") so here we are!

They have no games coming. There is no knock-out PS5 title for Christmas 2024. The PS5 Pro is startlingly near twice the price of the regular PS5 if you want it to have all the same capabilities as that and the regular PS5 is already overpriced. Their development schedules are completely fucked. Games aren't selling enough on the PS5. They don't have anything for 2025 - Marathon might not even make it. 

We have passed the point of diminshing returns on high fidelity graphics and the technology associated with it; making them look better is a waste of money because no-one notices or cares and it's hyper-expensive and difficult to get to the current level never mind surpass it, resolution basically can't go higher because the TVs don't exist yet and no-one cares as Sony officially admitted people prefer frame-rate boosting modes, most PS5 owners don't have TVs capable of VRR or higher than 60Hz refresh rates or probably even HDR and no-one can fucking tell raytraced lighting apart from regular lighting solutions because they were solved ages ago and are so good they compete casually. People do notice the issues with bad temporal AA but they could be avoided by devs not making super realistic hyper-fidelity games and just calming the fuck down, instead of buying an £825 box.

And the tech in that £825 box, such as all the pointless dedicated hardware for fucking raytacing, also "steals from the future" - how on earth are Sony going to justify a PS6 in a few years' time? Advancements in CPU and GPU processing power have slowed straight down, they're hitting the theoretical limits of what the technology can do with what we presently have, and the possible focus features of a built-in superior anti-aliasing solution and dedicated hardware for raytracing are now spent. A PS6 has to compete with this; if the price can't be brought down to at least the normal PS5's price tag, they're fucked. They're trapped.

Sure you can spend hundreds of millions of dollars chasing realistic simulations of real American cities to serve as a backdrop for your extremely expensively animated Spiderman game, but then your sales figures are matched by Luigi's Mansion 3 and its sub-1080p resolution. It's sold at full retail price and cost a sliver of your budget to make and isn't paying licensing fees to Disney. The public are still buying Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to the tune of thousands of copies a week - based on the figures of the Insomniac leak, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe has outsold all of the PS5's first party library combined and can only be toppled by dipping back a few years into late PS4 games - and it's a repackaged Wii U game whose litany of popular paid DLC is just porting of mobile game assets with a bit of touch-up at most.

Their hardware costs too much and they're still increasing its prices. They have no new games, only the same three old ones re-released ad nauseum. Their mid-life refresh is so much of a leap that they have left themselves no room to grow with their next console, and is too expensive for the vast majority of people, and is dependent on people having TVs capable of displaying its features adequately. If the PS6 is just the PS5 Pro but cheaper, that directly shits on PS5 Pro customers.

The Switch 2 is coming.

Also, I want to roll back to focus on a point that really needs to be screamed from the rooftops more: Sony's last reported figures for active PS+ subscribers is 47.4 million as of early last year. As of the end of 2023, there are 123 million active Playstation users, not PS+ subscribers. You need PS+ to play online multiplayer, so only about a third of Playstation users are able to play online multiplayer games (that aren't free-to-play like Fortnite or have their own subscription, like Final Fantasy XIV). Concord isn't free-to-play and hasn't its own sub, so it's aiming for that 47.4 million set.

In other words, Concord's potential userbase is hard-capped to about one third of the overall Playstation userbase. Conceptually a significant PC userbase would make up the difference, drawing the vast seas of hundreds of millions of Steam users or whatever it's up to now, but, well, they got like 700.

Sony wanted 12 active separate live service multiplayer games all going at the same time, all targeting that same 47.4 million PS+ subscriber set, completely gumming up their world-renowned household name brands known for making cinematic single player titles regarded as some of the industry's best work. You know, the titles played by both that 47.4 million PS+ subscriber set and the other near 80 million people on their platforms. They set themselves up to completely stop serving the vast majority of their userbase in service of finding 12 different angles from which to milk the minority.

This has been the defining trait of Sony under the tenures of Jim Ryan and Hermen Hulst; completely ignoring the actual reality of things and attempting to just force reality to fit their desired ways to make money. It's not about what an audience wants or what the actual best way to make money is, it's about what they want the best way to be, and if no-one else wants it then fuck them, it's all they're getting so they better just show up. No-one wants to play old ugly games, only Modern Games with Great Graphics. You'll get the same three fucking open world games about dirty miserable people crawling about the woods whispering their own actions to themselves over and over again and you'll pay ever higher price tags for it.

Take a trip through the documents of the Insomniac leak sometime. One of them, about the sales figures of all of Sony's published games dating right back through the PS4's whole run, also contains data about the ratio of the physical-digital sales split. Just go find that one yourself, look over that specific dataset, and consider what it means that even with that information, Sony continue to twist numbers to say digital is vastly outperforming physical to justify removing disc drives from their consoles and selling them back to you.

Consider the PS5 Pro reveal, where Mark Cerny openly states that, in his words, three-quarters (75%!) of users actively seek out and set games to frame-rate boosting modes and not graphical fidelity modes, a setting that is not set by default. And then having said that, goes on to talk about increasing fidelity and providing more room to boost fidelity and ways to convey fidelity to players, and how the bulk of the PS5 Pro's tech (PSSR aside) is about increasing fidelity and resolution. You know, the things the vast majority of players have deemed lower-priority, if one at all, and the pursuit of which is actively killing vast swathes of the industry by inflating budgets massively for no tangible gains.

Sony's upper management has, for years, actively collected and acknowledged data about their users and their habits and preferences, and then worked to do the exact opposite of what they want, seek the opposite of what they seek and push things they do not care about or actively do not want. Because the executives want it the other way because they've convinced themselves they're right, all evidence to the contrary be damned, and so they attempt to force reality into the shape they want rather than fit their work to reality.

The Switch 2 is coming.

The sun is going down, and Hermen Hulst is getting cold.

Who does understand audiences?

Hermen Hulst, who I really should've slagged off more in this post, but the bulk of Sony's current woes are to be laid at Jim Ryan's feet, being initiatives and directions explicitly started by him.


The market research and knowledge of audiences at big publishers in particular seems years, probably even decades out of date. Marketing in general for videogames is just fucked; "I didn't know that was out/coming out soon" is being said basically everywhere more and more, the critical information for games isn't reaching people as much and the processes for doing that fail regularly.

The one notable exception, of course, is the one trucking along profitting off of every little thing they release, always having a full salvo for an annual release schedule and not choking under impossible budgets: Nintendo, for all the shit I can and do give them (they run their shit like a mafia and basically always have), are the only ones who seem to know what they're doing all of the time, instead of only half the time (the likes of Capcom go here) or none of the time (Sony, Microsoft). 

Their hardware is the cheapest and sells accordingly; their software lineup has an answer for damn near everyone, and their regular Direct marketing streams cleanly and concisely deliver a show of gameplay, the release date/window and availability for their titles and many significant third parties. Their focus on variety and diversity in tastes and styles gets them more announcements for these shows, which gets them more eyeballs who in turn are pleased by at least some of its offerings, which gives their marketing streams a prestige and reputation for being the place that announces the things you want so a wide variety of people show up just in case the game of their dreams does. It's a remarkably managed loop that they've maintained flawlessly for years now.

If there's anyone who has anything approaching actually accurate audience and market data and the knowledge of how to apply it, it's obviously Nintendo, and what I wouldn't give to see the demographic shakeout and how that affects their decision making. It's been many, many years since there's been a Nintendo Direct that has absolutely nothing for me, not even a single title; it hasn't been that long since the last State of Play that had nothing for me, or the last Geoff Keighley show or E3 stand-in stream, for that matter. I don't think it's a stretch to say that that is probably much more widely true than you or I realise.

The current videogame audience has changed quite a lot in recent times, with a wider spread of demographics becoming more involved and active but also a sweeping change in tastes, preferences and desires that all but completely throw out everything that pundits, journalists and devs and publishers believe to be the way of things. The people, I think, long for the PS2, even if they don't know to articulate it that way, but the marketers are firmly stuck in the mire of 7th gen and the poisonous out-of-touch ways of thinking it engendered. Taste-makers are out of step, publishers don't know what audiences want or probably even who the audiences are, and the people writing about games are too limited in their range of perspectives and tastes to be relevant most of the time.

And hell, the people running the publishers just actively and openly ignore what data and facts they do have because it upsets them when things don't work the way they've arbitrarily decided they should. In researching and reading and digging up source articles for this post, and having collated a lot of Sony's recent stupidity as a result, it's clear as day to me that more than anything, it's unfathomable industry-wide incompetence at the management and executive levels driven by personal preferences and the irrational drives to make reality fit them that's killing the Western games industry specifically.

I mean, for god's sake; Overwatch had a special strength in its being extremely optimised, so it could run okay on absolute toasters (like the Nintendo Switch!) and thus be played by as wide a range of people as possible. This also has the knock-on effect of its models having to use art style and art design to compensate for lower graphical fidelity, and also thus makes it easier to make costumes and skins to sell because the fidelity level is lower! And that also provides room to scale up and make fancier skins as time goes on and optimisation and performance improves! And people with superior hardware can more easily get insane levels of performance for less work on their computers' part, and we know from data like Sony's that people fucking love higher frame-rates over anything else.

Concord specifically aimed to have extremely high fidelity, photorealistic character models and flashy effects, meaning new skins are more expensive and time-consuming to produce, there's less overhead to grow into and also it locks it off from the significantly bigger and still-extant PS4 userbase. The article that I sourced for the 123 million MAUs; the same report, Sony says only 40% of those are PS5 owners. So Concord was limited to the smallest set of Playstation console users Sony could get it to, and the developers made their own lives difficult in the pursuit of fancier graphics over actual art style, art design and appealing work.

That, I think, is the actual legacy of Concord: a perfect crystallisation of complete mismanagement and a wild disregard for material reality, fuelled by a total lack of understanding about the current audiences for the medium and what they want or value. Ill-considered in every possible way, from every possible angle, on all possible fronts.

Looking forward to seeing Fairgame$ at the State of Play stream tomorrow.

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Musings: Concord, Audiences and the present state of Play(station)

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