This article was not meant to be. It shouldn’t be. I was sitting down to plan to write how the complete and utter disaster that was Concord could be salvaged and turned around. It still can be, but then the PlayStation 5 Pro announcement dropped, and everything changed.
Depending on what sources you read, Concord took between 6 to 8 years to develop (more on this later) and cost somewhere between $100 to $200 million to do so. After just two weeks and an estimated 25,000 sales, the plug was pulled on this multiplayer game in swift fashion. How on Earth can this be positive, I hear you ask?
I’m not going to knock Sony for trying new things. I actually appreciate that they have, for a while now, been trying something new in the hope something does stick. It started with Destruction AllStars, then moved to Foam Stars, and now we have Concord (or did, anyway). PlayStation wants to show they can make in-house exclusive multiplayer games and not rely on third-party ones like Call of Duty or Fortnite.
Each game in its own right was actually pretty good. I personally really loved Destruction AllStars and wanted to get into Foam Stars, if only I didn’t have to wait just as long to find a match than to play one. Then Concord arrived, and you already know the rest.
The hope and the positive is that it’s now at least three times where Sony has gotten this massively wrong. At some point, someone must say, “Hang on a minute,” and evaluate why this is continually happening. If they do, they might then just realize the answer is staring them in the face: Make multiplayer games from franchises you already have a fan base for.
Quite simply, they have made games that catered to no one. They were new IPs. Nothing wrong with that, but you have to get people interested in the IP in the first place to want to buy it. As proven most recently with Concord, they quite clearly didn’t. I’m also afraid their other upcoming heist game, Fairgame$, is also going to be dead on arrival. To juxtapose this, I refer to the huge success of Helldivers II for an immediate “There you go” as an example.
So, what could Sony do? You don’t have to look back that far to find beloved and successful PlayStation-exclusive shooter multiplayer games: Killzone, SOCOM, Resistance. If you really want to, I’d take MAG again right now over Concord! Sony already has established franchises that I, and I know a lot of others, would dearly like back.
With that in mind, why not revisit them BEFORE starting new IPs? Manage the risk? Killzone, for example. I would almost guarantee you could do as little as make a Killzone 2 HD remaster, complete with all the multiplayer maps and modes, and PlayStation would have them sell like hotcakes. The fan base is there and waiting!
SOCOM still has a fan base who even now play SOCOM multiplayer games on PC. There is a niche in the shooter multiplayer market that could be filled with the tactical third-person hardcore game that is SOCOM.
Heck, why not make a brand-new, free hero-shooter-type game in the same vein as Overwatch/Concord/Paladins but use characters from the Ratchet & Clank universe?
Where I’m going with this is, if you test the waters with games in the genre you want to expand into but start with games that already have a fan base, if successful, THEN expand into new IPs, not before.
It’s hugely ironic that in the week that Concord was shut down, there was the launch of Astro Bot. Astro Bot is a game that celebrates the rich history of games that PlayStation has garnered over the last 30 years. It feels painful to see these great icons pop up in the game while, at the same time, Sony seems blind to the fact they even existed in the first place!
I’m not paid a 6 or 7-figure salary, but even I can figure out what might sell well for PlayStation and what won’t. This leads me nicely to the PlayStation 5 Pro reveal this week. Here is the full presentation:
Surely, before any manufacturing process and development is started, there needs to be recognition of a need to fill in the first place. Seeing how this console generation has gotten off to an awfully slow start with games, even now, still being developed for both this gen and the last gen 4 years in means we haven’t even really taken off with what this generation can do yet.
With that in place, why do we even need a more powerful console right now? There have only been a few major current-gen only releases from the big development software companies. It’s far too early to say there was a need.
Add to this, as mentioned before, the big-hitting developers like Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, Sucker Punch, etc., need around 5 to 7 years to make games to the standards expected these days. We still haven’t seen many brand-new standard PlayStation 5-only developed games from these companies on the current hardware, let alone on a more powerful console version.
Then, we had the presentation itself (am I the only one who thinks Mark Cerny reminds me of the androids from the Alien franchise, like Bishop and Ash?). I digress. Mark is there on his hard sell of why we need this new piece of kit. During the presentation, there were shots of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (a three-year-old game, I’d like to add) where Mark is highlighting that if you look closely at the crowd in the background, you can see more detail.
I sat there looking and looking, and then I was thinking, “Are you serious? I can barely see any difference, and even if I could, so what?”. It then struck me. That’s it. That is his selling point. Details you can barely notice will be a bit better, and the games will be a bit smoother. I’m okay with the smoothness bit, but cut to the chase, Mark. What is this going to cost? How much money do you want me to part with so that I can get a console to play the occasional big title game that comes out every 7 years and know that the background details I hardly noticed before will be that bit sharper?
£700/$700
If anyone was watching it live, I guarantee there was more people swearing at exactly the same time around the world than at any other moment yesterday. £700/$700. Oh, and that’s just the digital version, so you still have to pay for the disc drive and vertical stand on top, if you want them!
I’ll be honest. I like the PlayStation brand. I have a day-one PS5, DualSense Edge Controller and even a PlayStation Portal. I’m lucky enough to have some disposable income that I could save to buy the PS5 Pro. But even I, a fan, have my limits, and this is way over it. The reaction on the internet in the last 24 hours suggests I am not alone. A PS5 Pro, with a stand, 2TB hard drive, and the disc drive at £500 to maybe £550, I could swallow.
This obliviousness to the real-world pricing, alongside the whole blinkered to what multiplayer games the PlayStation fan base would really like to play, shows us one thing we should have all figured out now. Sony is so out of touch with its customers that it’s now actually insulting them.
In my best Jeremy Clarkson impression of something Richard Hammon has just done, “Sony, you are blithering idiots!”
