It's def not a great look but it's also only 1 former dev. I'm not going to judge the whole team on the words of 1 person who isn't working there anymore

This is the problem with spending millions of dollars on games and focusing on profitability over actual quality or expression. Video games are fundamentally an art medium. You can choose to make some uninspired cash grabbing trash, and can even make a whole company built around that and make profit. But are you going to make a great game that way? Probably not.

You'd be better off with half a dozen people with passion and a comparatively minuscule budget. You might have to scale back from ultra realistic graphics and massive explorable areas with dozens of voice actors, but I don't really think that makes games any better anyway. A little 2d rpg with really basic pixel graphics can put a big project to shame if it's made with passion and emotion.

Just read the article, id hardly call that a "meltdown" lol. Sure, it was unprofessional, but it wasn't a rant. This article feels like it's trying to spin a narrative that doesn't exist.

The post in question.

eh, i don't really care. it was a huge labour of love from a lot of insanely talented people making an awesome game. why would i care about a bunch of talentless freaks hating on it? i'm sure having fun playing it, and i wouldn't trade it for anything.

Note that this is the only post they're talking about. It wasn't like a drawn out thread with name calling.

Again, not saying it's professional, but calling this a meltdown? Come on now... Y'all are being ridiculous. This is like the tamest fucking tweet.

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 heard the project had been in production for 10 years and in development for 8

Tbh the fact you even know a character's name makes you an expert in my book. You know more than anyone I've ever talked to! 😅

I actually liked that game. Sure, it was unpolished and unoptimized. But there were still some fun to be had. It feels like they gave up on that game within a week or two.

"Nobody" probably isn't literal here, but I imagine some manager scheduling a meeting where they want a report on the game's performance and feedback during the beta. Some higher up is going to sit in for the first few minutes for the KPI summary.

The sweating analyst jokes about the heat in the room, the higher up dryly remarks that the AC seems to be working just fine. The presentation starts, the analyst grasping for some more weasel words and void sentences to stall with before finally switching to the second slide, captioned "Player count". It's a big, fat 0.

They stammer their way through half a sentence of trying to describe this zero, then fall silent, staring at their shoes. The game dev lead has a thousand yard stare. The product owner is trying to maintain composure.

The uncomfortable silence is finally broken by the manager, getting up to leave: "I think we're done here." There is an odd sense of foreboding, that "here" might not just mean the meeting. The analyst silently proceeds to the next slide, showing the current player count over time in a line chart.

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 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.

I seriously doubt that episode will ever be finished.

oof. Yeah, they did the right thing pulling the plug on this for now. You'd probably spend more time waiting for a match to queue up than actually playing the game.

I loved the first Division game. It had a great community, great gunplay, and prior to the crafting nerf(s) a really good loot/crafting feedback loop. But it could have just as easily been made as a local co-op or self-hosted game. I have yet to encounter a game that can only exist as a live service game, unlike e.g. Eve Online which can only exist as an MMO.