Ding ding ding!

Winner winner, idiot dog barfing up your chicken dinner.

So uh, skipping a bunch of excess lore:

“Dogs are one of the most beloved pets in the world. They are loyal, friendly and make great companions. Despite their differences, all dogs share a few key traits – they are affectionate, protective of their owners, and eager to please. Dogs require proper care, including regular exercise, grooming, and veterinary checkups. In return, they provide unconditional love and can even improve their owner’s physical and mental health. Whether as a family pet or a working animal, dogs have been an integral part of human society for thousands of years.”

The chat bot is named after a dog because a dog-named chatbot is more likely to make users treat it with patience, kindness, and understand that it does silly things sometimes, but it means well.

Its marketing. PR.

Hey, I appreciate your honesty and integrity!

I suppose it is still possible that the Concord themed Secret Level episode will still air…

I still doubt it.

I’m still willing to bet 2¢ it won’t air, haha.

But yeah… the marketing (the video presentations of staff and developers, their public statements etc) seemed to me to very much indicate that the whole plan was to create an entire Concord Expanded Universe.

The game was supposed to have weekly story/character progression updates like some older MMOs, they talked about being in many different media formats, they literally used the phrase Concord Universe or Universe of Concord.

When you go all in on a new IP and … its the biggest failure in the history of gaming… all your plans are done, kaput. You have to wait for people to forget about it and then ‘reimagine’ it a decade later if you even want to try to resurrect it.

From a game design standpoint… it wasn’t designed to work as a heavily MTX dependent game.

That’s actually a whole lot more development, more content, more UIs, more testing… and thus money you have to throw at it to get it to be that… and it already has failed, and been stupendously expensive to develop, has a horrific general reputation/perception.

But as to at least the Secret Level episode airing?

You do have good arguments that basically boil down to it already being completed or mostly complete, and the … who gets paid by what contract with who for what… that kind of set up … may lead to it making more business sense to just air it anyway.

But I would still counter that Sony wants to memory hole this IP from collective knowledge, and that they value that, as a means of improving their public perception, more than whatever they’d lose from breaking their contracts with Amazon.

Unironically, this is why I no longer work in tech.

Another user pointed out ‘Found the business major’ and while that may or may not be 100% accurate… this person’s mindset is absolutely, hilariously, stereotypically common amongst MBAs.

They know almost nothing about the actual business sector they end up in, they know almost nothing about the nature of any given employee’s actual work, they just view everything through the lense of ‘maximize next quarter profits’…

… It’s all just 100% cocksure narcissistic bravado + 'the way i was taught how to things work is correct, stop arguing with me.’

And these people are almost always your boss, or your boss’s boss.

… and they’ve now deleted all their posts.

I do have to say this has been amusing… haven’t seen this caliber of very obviously wrong but actually no you’re wrong in a while.

EDIT: Wow, no, holy shit, their entire account is gone now.

… What?

It… it goes into the company.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

They run an absurdly profitable business.

They make approximately $15 million in profit per each of the roughly 360 employees.

That’s after wages.

Nobody knows exactly what an average Valve salary is (they’re a private company, they have no obligation to disclose that), but they almost certainly just continue to accumulate a stupendous amount of money, which they can then throw at any ideas that require all kinds of potential material or licensing or technical costs.

The employees are not making $15 million dollars a year. Probably more like 1/10 to 1/100 of that.

Do you really, truly believe that everything that’s never been done before is a 100% sure bet to invest time and money into?

Do you really have no idea of how complex, untested, but potentially viable ideas come to fruition, come to be found out as coherent and workable vs incoherent and non workable?

… You are aware that matchsticks were essentially invented by the scattershot approach of a man who just had the time, funding, and materials to just basically randomly test a whole bunch of chemical compounds, and he just happened to accidentally drag a stick covered in concoction #38 or whatever against a hearth, whereupon it burst into flame?

… Do you think the Wright Brothers, or any other early experiments of developing flying machines… or all those involved in early rocketry… do you think all of those people were 100% sure that each of their designs would work?

When you have a stable business with a guaranteed source of huge amounts of revenue, that all you have to do is basically maintain at a very low cost…

Most other revenue can be thrown at whatever, in a how ever long it takes to do well and properly timeframe.

Actual innovation requires a series of creative ideas that are explored thoroughly, without overwhelming pressure or influence on decision making, or timetables.

Valve’s position allows them to do this.

Lots of those things go no where, but a good number of them work out, and basically revolutionize the industry, more than making up for the projects that do not work out.

As a certain wise old man once said:

“These things, they take time.”

Seems highly unlikely Valve was dedicating valuable dev/engineer time and money to make a toy they had no intention of ever producing…

This actually is basically how Valve works.

They have a pretty small team, and Steam is a fucking money printer.

They are a private company, not public.

That means no shareholders. No need to jam out a product to keep stock prices up, no boards of directors that also sit on 12 other boards that are all scheming to figure out how to push the whole industry toward stupid bullshit like NFT game items or ‘replace all our employees with AI’ or ‘every game is actually just a marketing tool for MTX or battlepasses.’

(The entire idea of loot boxes and in game microtransactions was basically just another ‘i wonder what would happen if, or if it would even be possible to…’ and then the steam marketplace of ingame items was born, and then basically every one else copied them, poorly.)

(Fuck, its basically the same with modern in game achievements as well.)

…

They could do nothing other than maintain their existing products and basically just coast on that forever, remaining profitable.

Because they have essentially no hard deadlines to put out some new product… this enables them to have a very loose, very voluntary, workplace culture which emphasizes quality over quantity, creativity over ‘its the same game in a new setting’, as well as not rushing anything.

A whole lot of their projects in the last decade are just people saying ‘I’m gonna do this’ and then if anyone else thinks its cool or neat, they work on it too.

People are allowed and encouraged to contribute to any project, at any time, as opposed to basically all other corporate software studios that have very rigid and defined roles.

And the delivery truck in the background has legible, sane text on its door.

This is just a pic of some cars at a local car mechanic shop.

… Its’s Big Whale Day!

Amazing.

So, the goal here is to prevent ghosting by making ghosting minutely costly to the ghoster.

They pick from an array of multiple reasons why, and the app formulates an exceptionally kindly worded explanation to send to the ghosted person.

I don’t see this as dangerous to people who are ghosting potentially dangerous people.

Instead of getting nothing, and formulating whatever cockamamie explanation in their own minds (or maybe just going ‘sigh, oh well’), they at least get a facsimile of closure from a canned response.

Obviously this does not magically solve the many problems of dating apps, but I fail to see how this is more dangerous than just ghosting on its own.

The problem is that its minutely time consuming to provide a ghosting explanation.

This ghost explanation requirement requires people to actually explain themselves, and that’s gonna be very cumbersome to people who are not really looking for a serious, long term relationship.

It makes it very annoying to use the app in a scattershot approach for rapid fire hookups, with tons of potentials on deck, as you’ll be forced to consistently ‘tend’ to all of your simultaneous matches, or drop them…

…and for people who think they’re looking for a serious, monogamous relationship, but consistently ghost people, it will basically cause uncomfortable cognitive dissonance when they realize they don’t like having to do a modicum if effort to explain why no one seems to meet their standards or is due their attention, even though they previously thought they were interested.

Basically, the problem I see with this app is that it forces users toward being honest with themselves.

Well shucks, I could have used another 2¢.

No, no no, that is the current practice and origin of the entire problem.

If you legally class a game as an ongoing service that is temporary and subject to termination, without recompense, soley by the decision of and according to the terms of the licensor, then they can legally sell you a game for $80 bucks and then shut down the next day.

If you legally class the game as a good, well you can’t sell someone a chair which then has 3 of its legs disappear or collapse (due to no fault of the owner) the next day without that being a scam of a defective product.

…

If you’re saying the emphasis should be on raising consumer awareness that they’re buying a temporary, revocable and non refundable service…

Who, other than children, do not know this yet?

That would not force the industry to actually change their practices.

It just slaps a big bold 'haha the fuck you isn’t even in the fine print anymore’ label on a product and makes our cyberpunk dystopia a little bit more obvious, but doesn’t achieve any useful goal in terms of altering actual game design/support or consumer rights.

Normally it works exactly backwards to this in larger studios/publishers.

Game devs do backbreaking, insanity inducing levels of work, and all but 10% are laid off when the game launches, regardless of success or failure, and for this time they are making probably about area median wage, maybe 10 or 20% more.

Its the middle managers and higher up executives who make multiples to orders of magnitude that amount of money, and almost all of them are rewarded by either failing upward or bailing out with golden parachutes, even though its often their decisions and directions, often going against lower level devs, which lead to the ultimate commercial failure.

Perhaps this loss will be so serious that some higher ups will actually get axxed, but even then it hardly matters: They can easily retire on what they’ve earned so far, whereas the actual people writing code, making maps, making art assets, they’ll basically all be homeless if they don’t find another decent job in 3 to 6 months.

I am fairly, but not 100% certain, that Ross Scott’s proposal currently making the rounds in the EU would say that you either have to refund a game (and all in game purchases) when it becomes totally unplayable, or you have to release some kind of way for dedicated fans to be able to least run custom servers and bypass no longer maintained, proprietary, always online verification/anti cheat schtuff.

I disagree.

Amazon still owns and operates New World.

All of the other games/franchises slated to be featured still exist as purchasable products.

They do not own or operate Concord, which probably no longer exists as a product.

The servers will be shut down in a few days.

There are no announced plans to take it F2P, as that would require dumping even more money into a gasoline fire to rework it into F2P.

Why would you promote a product that does not exist?

Its no longer a headline IP… its a total flop of an IP.

I don’t know, maybe if the whole episode is basically already done, maybe it still airs, but all that does is remind everyone about what is potentially the most expensive disaster in the history of video gaming (barring possibly Google Stadia).

It’s an anthology style show, meaning a bunch of basically self contained plots and stories, you could easily just drop one.

It’s possible they air it, but again, I’ll bet two cents the entire Concord IP just vanishes as brand management trumps over anything else.

I will bet you $0.02 that they will absolutely pull the plug on that episode, that they will indeed fully kill it here and now, and that it will not be reworked into a F2P game with the same characters or art style ever.

Maybe they will take some of the core gameplay mechanics and work them into projects totally unrelated to the ‘Concord IP’ they spent so much time hyping, but I see 0 chance that Concord just relaunches as Concord F2P in 6 months.

Yeah it hit that point a few days ago.

If I had to guess, they started the process of pulling the plug when sales/players didn’t pick up on Labor Day, a holiday that normally sees increased player numbers.

I do not think this will go F2P at some point in the near future.

If you spend 8 years and 200 million + dollars on something that you expect to … you know, at the very least, recoup that cost… and it doesn’t even make a fraction of a percent of that?

At that point, someone with some modicum of business sense is likely to realize they’ve been chasing the sunk cost fallacy for almost a decade and that throwing even more time and money at this to develop it even more probably is completely insane, as its already shown that nobody wants this product.

I think its more likely this will be totally scrapped barring a few assets and code snippets that might be cannibalized into other projects.

This whole thing is an utter disaster from a branding perspective, if the core gameplay systems later emerge in some other game, its going to have nothing to do with the whole grand expanded universe they’ve envisioned and promoted as being a huge draw to this game.

As for the devs, sure I feel bad for them in theory, but it doesn’t help that you’ve got at least one that calls everyone criticising the game a ‘talentless freak’ and then having a twitter meltdown in response to a person saying basically: wow I’m sorry this game didn’t do so well on launch, it looks like a lot of time and effort was put into it.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2024/08/23/concord-dev-writes-off-critics-why-would-i-care-about-a-bunch-of-talentless-freaks-hating-on-it/

The whole ‘feel bad for the devs, they did a good job, it was management that fucked everything’ is seriously undercut when you basically express that opinion to a dev and they act like a 14 year old responding to people that don’t like their Deviant Art OC.