Concord is Sony's biggest failure in gaming history.

[chakkra]

LurkerJ said:

curl-6 said:

If you're going to try selling a multimillion dollar video game, it turns out it's inadvisable to be deliberately contemptuous and exclusionary towards a large portion of your potential audience.
The devs were so focused on trying to fight a culture war that they forgot to actually create an appealing video game.

How many games out there without black or Asian or Latino characters?! Why is it important to have a white male as a character? 

What did the designers say exactly that robbed people off the wrong way? Would be nice to know

The game mechanics and gameplay seem solid, it’s not broken from a technical point of view, a highly polished product with no bugs. There are no scummy micro-transactions despite the genre’s predatory behaviours being normalised by gamers and even desired, this sort of trend bucking is refreshing to see and I hope devs, at Firewalk and elsewhere, don’t learn the wrong lessons from this failure. 

Non of this excuses the game for not clicking with its intended audience, but it’s also not an excuse for us to push our baseless narratives about why it failed either just because it flopped massively. 

We live in a world where a lack of white male characters is somehow more troubling than a bullying campaign that targeted the studio and devs relentlessly for months just because a group of entitled people feel like every game has to appeal to them? Talentless hackery. 

Funny that you use that wording because that is exactly how many people are feeling about the DEI movement.

The sad part is that this movement is actually making more harm than good to minorities and representation, as we are now seeing a push back stronger than ever before against "diversity", and I'm telling you this as a non-white, non-straight guy.

If you look back a little, there has always been female characters in video games (Tomb Raider, Metroid, Resident Evil franchise, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Killer Instict, heck, every single fighting game in existence has had female characters in it) and there has always been non-white guys in videogames (about a third of all video games are made in Asia, for God's sake) and please do not tell me that you ever heard anyone complaining about Chun-Li, Kitana or Jax.

Like I said before, Internet has made it difficult for decision makers to discern who exactly the "loud minority" really is, but I think they are starting to figure it out. I just hope that we don't see a pendulum effect now, with everybody going into the other extreme, when they conclude that this DEI insanity has been making them lose money.