According to various reports, It was 2017 when Concord was planned. At the time, Overwatch was the game of the moment, with millions of sales and players worldwide (it also won multiple game of the year awards, including The Game Awards). Blizzard had built an esports arena because they saw unlimited potential growth in the industry, and names like D.iva or Mercy resonated with the hearts of players, who praised their characterization and background, and went overboard with fan art to celebrate them.
Clearly given the importance assumed by the game, publishers have done what they have always done: they started planning potential competitors.
A single shot in the barrel
The same goes for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League: When Rocksteady Planned the Game, Destiny Was Making Millions of Dollars (it was released in 2017), live services were rampant and everyone was talking about it as a game that was dictating new rules to the industry. Many publishers simply took note and began planning their “Destiny” to compete in a new and still largely free market segment.
Now, let Concord and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League be two titles released at the wrong time is clear to everyone. We took them as a model because they were the most resounding failures of recent years, but there are many other feasible names, such as the never-released Hyenas by Creative Assembly or The Last of Us Online by Naughty Dog. Generally speaking, they are all projects that have suffered the same situation, that is, they were born in years in which the market was very different from the one in which they were or would have been launched. Of course, each has specific stories to tell, but generally speaking, development times are one of the main problems they have suffered.
Thinking that these games fail for qualitative reasons is naive: they are often condemned before they even reach the market because, simply, they attract an antipathy due to the inevitable changes in fashions and tastes occurred during the endless development cycles. Let’s also add that often the games that fail are those that come from studios linked to completely different works, a factor that is not secondary and that increases the antipathy mentioned above and that puts players at a bad disposal from the start.
In such cases it’s quite useless to start looking for the guiltyassuming that the developers have done their best to make the best possible work and that players simply have the right to not want to play something that is not up their alley at that moment.
There remains the problem of a market that forces us to plan titles so far in advance, making changes on the fly dramatic and many failures inevitable, where often “getting it right” with a game seems to have become a round of Russian roulette.
This is an editorial written by a member of the editorial staff and is not necessarily representative of the editorial line of Multiplayer.it.
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