Concord, PlayStation’s online hero shooter from first-party studio Firewalk, launched this week to a Steam concurrent player count high of 697, according to SteamDB. To describe the launch as dismal is an understatement.
But while this three-figure player count has captured headlines and provoked ridicule across the internet, the detail that caught my eye was that Concord reportedly spent eight years in development. That means Concord began its journey sometime around 2016 – the same year Blizzard released Overwatch.
Firewalk Studios is made up of veterans from Bungie and Activision, two of the foremost makers of online PvP shooters, so it’s no surprise it attempted to go toe-to-toe with Overwatch to win over fans in the genre given its staff pedigree. But as the saying goes, if you aim for the king, you better not show up eight years late.
With so many games now taking close to a decade from the beginning of development to release, we’re starting to see the financial and creative consequences of an overlong development cycle. Spend too much time in development and ideas that were once novel are no longer in vogue. Furthermore, the time and money spent over those years has to be recouped somehow, which leads to decisions like the $40 cost of entry for Concord when many of its peers are free to play.
The cost of coming late to the party means you must bring something new to the table. Unfortunately, Concord is neither particularly innovative nor content-heavy. That said, it does have a level of polish at launch that was often absent from its hero shooter peers when they were first released. Indeed, Concord’s weekly animation story drops are fully motion-capture, and Firewalk’s time spent on crafting its lore has helped secure Concord an episode of this winter’s video game animation anthology series, Secret Level.
But well-established hero shooters like EA’s Apex Legends launched almost bare bones and still managed to make a splash thanks to its intriguing central concept which combined hero loadouts with a battle royale match format. Valve’s Deadlock doesn’t even have finalized assets or art but has still caused a huge burst of excitement among the PC community, thanks to the way itchanges up the classic 6v6 hero formula with its heavy lane-and-minions MOBA mechanics. By contrast Concord appeared with an all-too-familiar offering and, frankly, the time spent on finessing its presentation – the graphics, motion capture, performance, and so on – likely lead to a later release date which in turn meant it lost valuable time establishing itself among its peers. If it had been released four or five years ago, when the PS5 first came out, maybe its launch would have been an entirely different story.
So that begs the question: was the lengthy time spent in development worth it?
We know it now takes longer than ever to make a AAA game. And while technological improvements have brought about previously unimaginable levels of detail, customers have now spent decades expecting bigger open-worlds, better graphics, and more hair follicles on a character than ever before. This has created a vicious cycle where, if studios want to meet those particular player expectations, games must take longer to make so that they can meet the bar set by the technological advancements achieved by prior games.
This creates a very risky dilemma, particularly for those aiming to dominate the live-service space. Knowing the cost and development time required for a AAA online game, studios have to assess, predict and/or simply guess as to what will be the next big hit. What game will succeed in four, five, six years time if we begin developing it right now? Will the audience still care for that kind of game when we’re finally ready to release it? It practically requires the services of a fortune-teller to get the answer right.
Some get it right. Blizzard correctly judged the appetite for a Team Fortress 2-like shooter that adopted the hero kits of MOBAs. Others get it wrong – Epic’s original tower-defense version of Fortnite, in development for around six years, completely misread the market. Luckily Epic had the resources to pivot Fortnite to an online battle royale after witnessing the skyrocketing success of PUBG. It soon learned that the rewards for quickly jumping onto a trend can be limitless. But quick is the optimal word here.
Concord isn’t the only game that this year that’s the product of a poorly judged, time-consuming gamble in the ever-changing landscape of live-service games.
Like Concord, Rocksteady’s Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League was released with a level of polish and detail unseen by other online multiplayer shooters. And, also like Concord, it suffered from a lack of content and innovation. These flaws meant Suicide Squad was unable to attract players from rival PvE games, while also alienating Rocksteady’s fans who adored the studio’s single-player Batman games. Suicide Squad Kills the Justice League spent nine years in development. Soon after release, publisher Warner Bros. called the game a disappointment that cost the company $200 million.
Live-service games, by their nature, are at the mercy of time more than any other format, but even single-player games can be victims of the overlong development cycle . Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, Ubisoft’s long-awaited samurai ninja game set in feudal Japan, is finally coming out this fall. The only problem is Sucker Punch released a very good, open-world, samurai assassin game almost four years ago in 2020, beating Ubisoft to the punch. It remains to be seen if this will affect Shadows’ sales, but there’s certainly a vocal section of the Assassin’s Creed community that feels like Ghosts of Tsushima has already provided the experience they wanted.
So what’s the solution? It’s certainly not developers crunching themselves to death to make games faster. But, unfortunately there are just no easy answers to this situation that is, as far as I can tell, unique to the medium.
One solution that’s been bandied about is to make shorter games. I’ve personally advocated for the need of more half-sequels like Uncharted: Lost Legacy that offers fans a chance at enjoying a new game in a beloved franchise, both at a lower price and sooner than a full sequel game. But while I’m personally a fan of shorter games, I know I’m in the minority. When games are $70 each, it’s understandable that many players want something that offers significant bang for their buck. Plus, shorter lengths is only a potential solution for big AAA franchises where it’s now become accepted that if we want a new Fallout, GTA, or The Last of Us, we’re going to be waiting a decade for it.
For online games like Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, though, it might just be that the longer you spend losing ground to rival games, the worse the outlook is at launch. You either need a completely novel gameplay mechanic a la Apex Legends or Deadlock, or hope your game has the juice, as the kids say. All I know for sure is releasing an Overwatch competitor two years after Overwatch 2 was released feels like a mighty disadvantage.
Matt T.M. Kim is IGN’s Senior Features Editor. You can reach him @lawoftd.