Sony’s Concord is arguably the biggest commercial disaster in video gaming history. After eight years of development and burning through $200m, the game was shut down about two weeks after its release. As a gesture of goodwill, Sony refunded purchases of Concord on digital storefronts. Reviews were good, but we are long past the time where corporate review outlets could meaningfully influence buying decisions.
A big reason for the failure of this game was that the characters were ultra-woke. There is the damage-control narrative that Concord launched into a crowded market and therefore could not have succeeded. Well, the dishonest shills wanting to make this claim should perhaps read up on Valve’s Deadlock, which is currently being soft-launched, with daily playercounts of 100k and more. The main reason why Concord failed was its absolutely repulsive cast. Nobody wants to play as an ugly character, not even the pink-haired walking pronouns.
Concord could have been fixed. Here is the work of one random guy online who used an AI to transform the horrible cast of this game into much more appealing versions of themselves. You could almost say that the AI transitioned the cast from ugly to non-ugly:
Not all characters are great. A few could have been removed quite easily, but a game with the remaining cast would have had immediate commercial appeal. Allegedly, Concord had pretty decent gameplay. If that is true, then it seems safe to say that politics caused this commercial disaster. Sony California HQ did not want you ogling hot chicks so they rather took a $200m loss.
It almost feels like companies these days are going way too far in trying to make characters “relatable”.
Sure, relatability is a big part of making an interesting meaningful character and story, but who on earth goes on Netflix to watch the life story of joe average NPC? I mean, isn’t escapism one of the biggest reasons we consume fiction in the first place? to take us to a world beyond the boring and the mundane?
I think Spider-man is the perfect example of making a character relatable while still making for an awesome character. Hell, in many cases, if the character is awesome (and well-written to not come off as a Mary Sue) enough, you don’t even need relatability. Batman is hardly relatable, yet he’s the most popular superhero.
Idk if it’s to make them relatable, or if it’s an attempt of big investors to socially engineer the public (schizo hat on). Either way, even fat ugly chicks want to play as characters they could imagine their ideal selves cosplaying. It’s an important part of all media that just isn’t going to change so easily. They may as well just design amorphous blobs as characters. It would probably land better, I think.
The blobs (“slimes”) in Dragon Quest are among the most favorite characters of that series. They are cute and you can project anything onto them. With the gender-fluid characters of Concord this will not be so easy.