Sunday, December 22, 2024

The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit

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Sony hero shooter Concord launched late last week, and its Steam concurrents haven’t yet topped a thousand. The dramatically low turnout has already earned it the title of biggest flop of the year on social media, and if you caught any of the discussion on Reddit, TikTok, and other platforms over the weekend, you mostly saw people gloating, posting screenshots of SteamDB concurrency charts and tacking on a generic dunk, or claiming “it rules” that we can all see a big game fail.

My guess at the real reason for all this grave dancing is that it feels like a victory over FOMO.

That jubilation over Concord’s low turnout—it apparently cracked the top 50 best sellers on the PS Store over the weekend—derives to some degree from an I-told-you-so sense of justice: the idea that out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt executives are cynically chasing trends, and that the rest of us would’ve had the common sense to avoid releasing a Concord, a Marvel’s Avengers, a Suicide Squad, a Gotham Knights, or that perplexing Gollum game. But it’s not actually that easy to know why one game succeeds and another doesn’t.

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