“Certain aspects of Concord were exceptional,” Hulst continued, “but others did not land with enough players, and as a result we took the game offline. We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options [and] after much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio.”
But why? Did they actually think it was going to cost more money to keep the servers running than it would bring in? What’s the opposite of the sunk cost fallacy?
Matchmaking took upwards of 10 minutes. Maybe they could capture a core audience but all that waiting would alienate even more people. Increasing the wait time even more. They could have invested more money and re-release it, but how much money would it take to overhaul the game. And there is no guarantee, that a 2.0 would be played more. So giving it up is probably the best solution, not burning even more money. Keep in mind, it costed about 400 million $ to make.
An opportunity cost is the opposite of a sunk cost apparently: https://money.stackexchange.com/questions/46042/what-is-the-opposite-of-a-sunk-cost-a-sunk-gain
lmao, to think this game costed four times as much as APB is crazy. That game was the definition of “publisher throwing money at a single project until something fun comes out” and it was fun. How do you not accomplish that at four times APB’s budget?
I wonder if there is still going to be a Concord episode in the upcoming animated videogame-themed TV show “Secret Level”. A month ago, this was confirmed, but at that point, it wasn’t decided yet whether Firewalk Studios would be closed.
If the work was already done to make the episode I think it should still be included. The artists and animators for it shouldn’t suffer because the thing their story was based on flopped.
hopefully they don’t get clowned on Social Media because of a Concord episode if ever released, Blur Studio are amazing
That’s an idealistic point of view and certainly an admirable one, but it might not be realistic. Perhaps Sony execs simply don’t want people to be reminded of this flop they signed off on.
