What was the biggest financial blunder in videogame history?
What was the biggest financial blunder in videogame history?
$599 USD
My favorite is Atari making 12 million 2600 Pac-Man cartridges for an install base of 10 million.
Ackshually E.T. sold ridiculously well, the actual issue is that Atari flooded stores with copies because they thought it would sell a LOT more.
watch dogs legion lost around $90 million
Got to be Concord no?
Concord, no contest.
probably still concord
Cyberpunk getting removed from the PS store caused their stock to drop for 1 billion and CDPR was sued by investors.
APB (all points bulletin) took 100m to develop and 5 years, the game was closed in 3 months and the studio filed for bankruptcy.
Anthem cost 100m to develop and failed to meet sales expectations, anthem 2.0 was cancelled and the game went maintence mode after 2 years.
Commodore was it until concord probably.
Ackshually E.T. sold ridiculously well
...and tons of those sales were returned because the game was shit.
APB (all points bulletin)
I have literally never heard of this one before.
I remember a lot of hype about it. It was supposed to be like GTA Online but 10 years early.
it wasn't even 10 years early it was like... 3?
but yeah before concord set a new standard APB was one of the biggest flops. up there with brink (which I'm sure is also long forgotten), battleborn and lawbreakers
Creator of GTA David Jones tried to make a GTA MMO and it flopped horribly because the technology and normalfags werent there.
Concord
Right now, it's looking like the purchase of Bungie by Sony and the entire Gaas initiative. It's been such an utter disaster all throughout. The only thing that seemed to have worked was Helldivers 2.
Concord.
Entire studio was created to make the game.
Hired many employees, spent over 100 million dollars, between $100 - $400 million dollars based on the estimates I've heard online were spent on the game.
The leaders of the project told Sony it would be a Star Wars level franchise, they actually believed they would make a profit on the game.
They planned to produce lore videos like this one frequently and add new characters often.
youtube.com
They spent 8 years making the game, back when Overwatch was still relevant they started making it.
The game sold poorly because it was just an inferior clone of Overwatch which is already a dead game anyways, by the time Concord released. In addition, nobody likes forced diversity, and the game costed money in a genre that is usually free. Plus it is a dying genre to begin with. Lol.
The game sold about 25,000 copies at $40 per copy so it made about $1 million dollars. Which is considerably low because the game costed $100 to $400 million to make.
Sony wasn't sure how to respond and they considered making the game F2P at one point but then cancelled that idea and shut down the game entirely and refunded the $1 million so they ended up making $0 on the game and spending between $100 to $400 million and the studio went out of business. The studio had hired people from Halo and Jimmy Neutron to make the game and it was run by diversity hires telling them what to do lol.
Also don't forget it has, not "would have", has a secret level episode, a series that was supposed to represent famous video games.
it's kind of funny how 'Tortanic' ended up not being a flop at all even though it went ftp. it still gets updates to this day.
It's weird that concord failed the way E.T. did dozens of tenfolds over but somehow the game industry hasn't crashed again.
all of those game streaming services that launched and flopped back around the time the PS4 and Xbox One was launching.
You have to understand 1970s-Early 80s Atari was literally a frat house masquerading as a tech company.
E.T failed because the console industry specifically crashed, not the other way around.
It was a giant flood of low quality games so it was impossible to know which were good or not.
The creation of game magazines and the seal of quality and all that was an attempt at making the developers put more effort into it.
a part of me wants to believe gametap coulda been gamepass before gamepass if it wasn't so early to the scene but that's probably just me waxing nostalgic.
also what the fuck was up with onlive, wasn't that basically just stadia with its streaming concept?
Ah, I understand now. Thank you for clearing that up.
Cheers, anon.
ET was just a symptom of the videogames crash, it was an industry wide failure. Concord despite being a giant shitheap is largely just a Sony management problem.
It's whatever the current thing we don't like! I can't remember if we're supposed to hate Assassin's Creed or Doom right now but IT'S ONE OF THEM.
They all were such a bad deal. The key issue was you still had to buy the fucking game at full price after paying for everything.
Why would you like a game made by someone that hates games and wish they were in hollywood instead?
Lots more people seem to be bringing up Concord than AC Shadows or nuDoom 3 though. Hmmm...
There was an earlier AC game that was a buggy shitheap on launch, so was one of the Batman Arkham games, and Cyberpunk too.
Interestingly those were just stupid buggy and that was it. Was Concord buggy as well at launch too? Or was it just, not as popular as it should've been? I didn't follow it at all, but if it was on the market for 1 week and made 25k sales, that's not that bad, keep it online and add new content and it could make back its money in a few years.
Individual games are one thing but
Didn't Sony buy bungie for like 3.6 billion?
I'd be shocked if that makes them even half of that back.
Destiny is dogshit and people blamed it on Activision. Once Activision was gone... it became worse. So I think a lot of good will is gone.
eric still can't let it go
not even close, GTA6 is lining up to be shot in the head
Was Concord buggy as well at launch too? Or was it just, not as popular as it should've been? I didn't follow it at all, but if it was on the market for 1 week and made 25k sales, that's not that bad, keep it online and add new content and it could make back its money in a few years.
Ohhhhhh boy, you've been away :)
Concord had some bugs on launch, but there was so much bad blood between the devs and their potential audience, along with astonishingly boring gameplay, hideously ugly art, obnoxious character designs (complete with pronouns, including on the fucking two-buckets-stacked-together robot character). They apparently didn't listen to any feedback from players during the closed beta either. It was just a total shitshow. They took it offline and refunded everybody -- it was that terrible.
APB had some of the best customization in any online game I've played.
It was a game that had so much potential but felt flat.
The hype for it was insane as it was basically GTA Online before GTA online was a thing.
Anon, Concord was a multiple hundreds of millions of dollars super project funded by Sony headquarters itself. They had a fuckton of animated shorts scheduled, and bought out a slot in that weird vidya TV anthology thing that was a while ago. And they failed to break 700 concurrent players on Steam.
Concord was Sony meddling at every turn and the result was a game that looked like it was designed by middle-managers (because it was), bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the game's concept art. Mind you it was an Overwatch clone that released nearly a decade after Overwatch did specifically because it "needed to be" AAA.
I don't think it's the worst failure in the world or anything, it just had a huge budget that it didn't need and made no sense in the game's case, ultimately serving just to bloat it and make its development take ages. In the time it took for Concord to be developed, release, and then be rescinded after Sony saw Overwatch's reveal, Overwatch 2 had already pretty much died and lost relevance.
cdi phillips
At minimum the game cost at least 250-300m. Sony bought the studio after the studio had already put in 50-100m. Then they themselves on top of buying the studio put in another 50-100m minimum.
The concept art was just as terrible, what are you smoking?
I don't have a compulsive Anon Babble need to dump on every part of the game because it le failed is what I'm smoking.
Probably this.
GTA6 will selling 20+ million copies on brand alone. Whether it completely poisons the well for GTA7 in 20 years is a different question and I doubt Rockstar cares.
you are still more mentally ill than this eric person you hallucinate about daily.
it won't stand a pig's chance in a barbecue pit if it sells at $80-$100 like they keep mumbling about it doing
it'll make up the difference with GTAO (same as 5 did) but it'll very certainly take way longer to do that between the astronomically higher budget and entry price
You underestimate normalfags. There are people that bought PS5 Pros purely just for that game because they thought it would be out for sure mid 2025.
no i don't underestimate normalfags, people that buy PS5 pros after seeing final fantasy 7 rebirth looked exactly the same on it aren't normalfags
Concord might be way more recent, but it truly is a fucking massive blackhole of money lost for a game that lasted less than two weeks. Plenty of consoles have been real dumpsterfires, yet this is just a single piece of software costing so much more than it should that would never see any kind of return, and even other games that took years to dig themselves out of a hole just to be milquetoast haven't fucked up THAT badly.
That said, Sony is sure taking another big L with buying Bungie. That doesn't seem to be a good financial investment at all.
I understand the parts about it being a boring game and the PC infestation it had (you can tell that by looking at the characters). But my point was, why not just leave it on the marketplace? The servers cost potatoes to run and it could've made a couple more millions even with poor sales.
normalfags will by PS5 pro simply because they want the latest and greatest playstation just for the fuzzy feeling of having bought the best. It's the same reason why I want to buy a high end metal front plate Marantz amplifier even though I have nothing more than an average 5 speaker setup and I drive it from my PC, so technically even a first gen HDMI connected piece of shit Onkyo or Yamaha would serve my needs perfectly.
Potatoes was more than Concord had any realistic hope of making back, and Sony was quite probably looking for a reason to fire Jim Ryan at that point. Next is firing Hermen Hulst, Ryan's greatest disciple.
Concord makes ET look like a success
So were most games of that era. If anything, it was too ambitious compared to more popular short and simplified arcade ports.
This sold just as much as the Steam deck... and VaIvedrones claim steam deck is a major success?
Sega Saturn's US release took Sega from kings of the US market to going third party.
i remember brink as that one game absolutely flooding every rummage sale and bargain bin for like 5 or so years
never much got what it was about but i knew to stay away
I don’t even know where to begin
E.T. crashed the industry and yet E.T. cartridges are still considered collector's items. Maybe in 40 years Concord will also be considered to be a collector's item.
concord itself worked fine. the price to content ratio was fine, no mtx, no major bugs.
it was just THAT ugly and uninteresting and trying to enter a super saturated market where you need a big, big, BIG gun to enter.
they didnt make it ftp because even patching it to be f2p would cost more than what it could make and sony has been paying journo to bury it and underplay its failure where possible. we are talking about an 8 years in the making half a billion game that couldn't even come close to clear 1k players on launch day