hero shooter Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Hey Folks. There has been a lot of discussion over the last week about the release of Concord and how poorly it is doing. Right now it has a 24-hour peak user count on Steam Charts of around 260 players with an all-time peak since the launch of 660. Granted this only represents numbers on Steam, but can be used as a way of extrapolating how well a game is doing in general. If it is performing poorly on PC, it is likely performing poorly on Playstation 5 where it is a console exclusive. Across the board, this seemed like a game that no one really wanted that was released into an already packed hero shooter genre, put up against games that were free to play as opposed to its $40 buy-in price. I remember briefly getting excited about the trailer only to lose all interest when I found out it was “yet another live service game” and more than that… focused on PVP combat. The trailer was this really cool science fiction heist thing and I felt like it could have been a really interesting game along the lines of the Guardians of the Galaxy game that came out a few years ago. Unfortunately, it was not and was part of the larger forced march that Sony seems to be on towards trying to mint a live service goldmine.

Why do we find ourselves on this path? The answer is simple… FIFA Ultimate Team exists and it was enough to make the financial types stand up and take notice and believe that live service games were an infinite money glitch. This feature went into FIFA soccer in 2009 and has been the prime revenue earner for Electronic Arts almost since that point. Just like World of Warcraft levels of success poisoned the waters for future MMORPGs, every game now is seemingly expected to produce “FUT” numbers. Just so you understand what this means… in 2020 during peak pandemic spending FIFA Ultimate Team brought Electronic Arts 1.62 Billion Dollars. That is from selling what are effectively digital trading cards that come along with a stat package for your game.

It was not until yesterday that I realized just how much money Sony has seemingly poured into trying to make Concord a thing. Secret Level is an Amazon Prime Streaming project from Blur Studios… aka the people who created pretty much every big-budget game trailer you have ever loved as well as the popular “Love, Death & Robots” anthology series. In the teaser trailer the text flashes by “15 Stories Inspired By Your Favorite Games”. So let’s take a look at the list of games that are going to be included.

● Armored Core
● Concord
● Crossfire
● Dungeons & Dragons
● Exodus
● Honor of Kings
● Mega Man
● New World: Aeternum
● PAC-MAN
● PlayStation (Highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities)
● Sifu
● Spelunky
● The Outer Worlds
● Unreal Tournament
● Warhammer 40,000

There are a few of these that don’t really fit, that “your favorite games” bit. Firstly you have New World: Aeternum which I am guessing was included because Amazon is at least in part bankrolling the project and that they really want their console rebrand to work. Honor of Kings was new to me, but apparently, it is a really popular MOBA in mainland China from Tencent. Similarly, Crossfire is wildly popular in the South Korean market. Then you have Concord, which I am assuming was included in the list as part of the Sony marketing push behind this project or potentially part of a larger deal to allow for other properties to be included. This feels like an awful lot of money to put behind a product that had not been released and that is an IP that is unproven.

There has been a spate of large-budget flops lately. Suicide Squad for example looks like a massive winner compared to Redfall and Concord and reportedly it was an over 200 Million Dollar loss for Warner Brothers. Redfall cratered hard enough to effectively destroy the studio because Arkane Austin is no more. Concord will likely destroy Firewalk Studios as that seems to be the stakes that are on the line currently when a large game fails to find its market. 2023 was a brutal year for Video Game Studio layoffs and closures, and this year has reportedly already surpassed it. I don’t exactly revel in the death of these studios, but I do think that we have been on an untenable trajectory for a while. Video Games have been financed through the cult of green candles, and the belief that the line will always go up.

Even games that were large successes are beginning to flounder. Helldivers 2 was a massive success, but then as Sony pushed some unpopular practices like required use of the PlayStation Network…. it began to shed players. Recently they have been shedding players due to balance decisions, proving once again that a live service game is only one bad patch away from failure. Similarly, the title that Sony bought to herald its new Live Service push was Destiny 2, and it has been bleeding players for years. I know I used to be a massive supporter of the game but left more or less permanently after they removed the Forsaken content from the game. Now that the game has entered what is effectively maintenance mode after the release of the Final Shape and what is reportedly the last major expansion for the game, it is similarly shedding players.

The weird thing about “Live Service” games is that while the big budget money grabs are failing to gain purchase… a lot of the existing games are trucking along and doing just fine. If you search for “best live service games” you will find a ton of listicles and the vast majority of the games listed are all around ten years old. Warframe for example is potentially the best looter shooter on the market, and it has pioneered a business model that seems to have worked for them. Sure they do not generate FIFA Ultimate Team money, but they have reached a place where it is sustainable for the studio. Similarly, Path of Exile is doing amazingly well hitting brand new peak concurrency numbers for the Settlers of Kalguur league. Similarly, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, and hell even the often-panned Fallout 76 seem to be hitting their strides. This leads me to believe that “big business” has been bad for games as a whole because they do not care about the sustainability of platforms… only about extracting the maximum amount of value out of the players.

I am sure this is terribly naive of me, but I would love to see more “Indie Darlings” like Last Epoch which is financed in large part through supporter packs similar to the model that Path of Exile pioneered. They are not massive successes necessarily, at least not in the billions in the sales department… but they are functional and enough to keep the studio churning out new content. Games have been a bubble and I am sure it will continue to burst, but my hope is that what is left in its place is something that makes more sense. The zero-sum game that we have been playing over the last few decades clearly is not working as intended.

Unfortunately, we are probably going to lose a few more studios before this tale is finished. Bungie recently laid off a massive number of employees due to “underperformance”. In this, they canned several projects leaving themselves with only Destiny 2 which is on life support, and placing all of their eggs in the Marathon basket which is an IP reboot turned extraction shooter. The thing is… it doesn’t seem like there is a lot of hype surrounding Marathon, in part because just like Concord it is attempting to launch itself into an already packed genre. The only people who really remember Marathon were Macintosh gamers from the 90s who subsisted on playing it when everyone was playing Doom. You know what a bunch of 40 and 50-somethings are probably not big on… extraction shooters. Those who are into that genre are already probably Tarkov stans. I feel like this is maybe not the right play for the already stratified ecosystem that the game is launching into.

Maybe I am being overly hyperbolic, but I feel like a lot of these games would have made really fun single-player and co-op PVE experiences. Suicide Squad, for example, seemed like it was itching to be the next game in the Arkham series, with similar gameplay. Concord, the game that started this post… at least based on the trailer felt like it really wanted to be a PVE game where you built up a team and planned and pulled off successively larger heists until you uncovered some plot where you had to save the world. Redfall similarly felt like given a bit more time baking and a story-driven focus… it could have leaned on the best parts of that Arkane DNA to create a memorable experience similar to Dishonored. It feels like these games are failing because they are being pushed into a mold that relies on massive player engagement to succeed.

Anyways… I am done rambling and yelling at the clouds. Maybe I am off my base, but Concord feels like a gauge of customer sentiment more than some of these other games. We went from “low interest” to what feels like “no interest”. All of this said… what the hell do I know? I will very likely be over here in my corner playing the same damned games that have been out for the last decade or longer, and enjoying myself doing that.

This morning I want to take a little bit to talk about a game that I used to have a lot of faith in… that just announced they were closing down the servers this coming July. This game was originally announced at Pax Prime 2014 and I first got my hands on it during my very first Pax… the inaugural Pax South 2015. To say they were the belle of the ball was an understatement… they had the biggest booth and also had really awesome media and tournament suites upstairs. On the floor of the convention they had computers set up to have constant running multiplayer battles and in order to make this all work… had called in this legion of devoted fans to help ease the new players into the experience. I managed to get in to the press suite on the first day and was completely blown away with the game that I had seen.

You have to understand this was pre-Overwatch even being announced, let alone releasing and taking the world by the storm. This was also pre-Paladins being a thing… so the only experience similar was Smite which was a fairly faithful port of the MOBA genre to a more player point of view experience rather than the traditional top down isometric. The biggest challenge out of the gate was what to call the game… we largely referred to it as a MOBA but even then… it didn’t quite conform to that concept. The characters were really the part that stood out because they were vibrant and animated extremely well… you had some that played like a traditional shooter and others like The Margrave pictured above that felt very much like an MMO tank.

It felt extremely fresh and when I left Pax I was super excited to the game launch. They had their press game on point giving out these really cool thumb drives that were super detailed vinyl/plastic versions of the games logo… that then had an executable you could run that would connect out to their ftp server and grab whatever were the freshest media assets available.

On Day two I managed to sneak everyone that was attending from AggroChat into the press suite again to do battle against other folks attending the media demo. The above image wound up on the Motiga twitter account and I am super grateful someone took a picture of us playing. Side note… we completely trounced Angry Joe and his entourage, in part because we had devs and community folks constantly trying to help us ease into playing the characters. Basically I went away from Pax South 2015 singing the praises of this game and was super pumped when I got my email a few weeks later getting into the alpha/beta program.

The excitement sorta died off however once we started actually playing the Beta client due to the lack of reasonable matchmaking. What seemed so damned polished at the show… was a carefully cultivated image. The actual experience was anything but, and largely focused on logging into the beta voice server and convincing people to group up with you… then dropping to a private channel and trying to join on each other and queue as a complete group. That said I did this a few times and Lonrem helped ease me into this community a bit, but it felt like too much hassle for me at this point when I am not really even a big player of this sort of genre. My stance had been that I would come back when things were a bit more polished and I could queue on my own without need of the very manual matchmaking.

In November of 2014 the oxygen started being drained out of the room… when Blizzard announced Overwatch. While these were not exactly the same… they were definitely similar enough feeling to be serious competition. I told myself that all Motiga needed to do was get to the market first… and develop an initial foothold. The experience was interesting enough to keep people engaged if they could just launch. In February of 2016… Motiga went through a massive round of layoffs and this is really the first signs that maybe the future wasn’t nearly as bright as we might have hoped. They did a deal with the devil at this point… securing additional funding from Microsoft in a trade for console and windows 10 exclusivity… forcing them down a path of the Windows Store instead of something more mainstream and actually used by gamers… Steam. This also cut them off from being able to do some sort of Steam early release program that has been effective for a lot of games as they worked out the kinks getting them to market.

I kept expecting to hear an announcement that Gigantic was going to be releasing… especially with the support from Microsoft to help them get across the finish line. I went through the hoops to convert my original Gigantic beta account to a Windows Store beta account and downloaded the game to give it a go. The only problem is… the game didn’t feel anywhere near as fresh and unique as I remembered it. I was now standing in a world where Paladins had also released in a pretty widespread beta program and Overwatch was constantly looming over its shoulder. Additionally while match making was a thing… the player base had dwindled to a point where I had to sit there waiting for fifteen to thirty minutes to get a match. When I did… you had one of two options… the map that was awesome and tuned… and the map that was way the hell too big and had some memory leak issues. Once again I put the game away and thought “I will try it again at launch” because honestly I thought surely there had to be a launch window just around the corner.

Things got more complicated in May of 2016… when Motiga announced that it would be inking a deal with Perfect World to become the official publisher of Gigantic. We all knew the writing on the wall with this one… it meant they needed more money and this was a way of obtaining it. This erased that Windows store exclusivity… but also probably watered down any support Microsoft was willing to give. Additionally it set up a scenario where the player base was forever going to be fractured. One version of the game would be working with Xbox One and Windows Store users… and another version of the game would be running through the Perfect World Arc client. Overwatch released in May 2016 and Paladins in September 2016… triggering an arms race of companies trying to create their own version of this new genre that was being branded the “Hero Shooter”… all without even a potential date on the horizon for the launch of Gigantic.

When it finally launched in July of 2017… it was the textbook definition of too little too late. It released on Windows Store/Xbox One and a version that ran on the Arc Client available through the Perfect World store or Steam. At this point unfortunately… nobody really cared. I’ve never actually played the released version of this game because while I filled up a hype balloon at Pax South 2015… over the course of the next few years a bunch of tiny punctures drained every bit of it away to where I was left with a flaccid balloon that could never be inflated again.

Amazing little gem of a game whose light is dying along with its playerbase.

The above quote is from a review on steam… and I feel like it sums up Gigantic as a game nicely. It was in fact an amazing idea and it was doing a lot of things that were revolutionary for its time… but the constant failure to launch caused everyone who was once interested to eventually fade away and start playing something more viable. Multiplayer games live and die by the player base… and once you lose the trust of a large core of gamers… there is absolutely nothing you can do ever to get it back. I have to admit I sort of mourn what might have been when it comes to Gigantic. I still feel like it was a great game concept with extremely interesting characters… the problem is… Overwatch did everything better except for the core concept of having two gigantic monsters duking it out for control of the map.

Motiga was a really cool company, and I hope that each of the folks that managed to hang on through the end… find a good home in another company where they can bring their interesting ideas to a game that actually has a chance. I feel like both Microsoft and Perfect World kept the balloon afloat for way longer than it would have were they not in this story… but in the end we wound up with a really complicated sequence of event and a fractured player base which is a critical fault for any game. This is by no means the complete tale of this game or some gripping piece of journalism, but instead just my personal experience as I watched and hoped that they would get their shit together and make it work.

Live Service Gold Farm Over?

Fall of Gigantic