Concord is Another High-Profile Victim of AAA’s Painfully Long Development Time

ign.com:

Concord, PlayStation’s online hero shooter from first-party studio Firewalk, launched this week to a Steam concurrent player count high of 697, according to SteamDB. To describe the launch as dismal is an understatement.

But while this three-figure player count has captured headlines and provoked ridicule across the internet, the detail that caught my eye was that Concord reportedly spent eight years in development. That means Concord began its journey sometime around 2016 – the same year Blizzard released Overwatch.

Firewalk Studios is made up of veterans from Bungie and Activision, two of the foremost makers of online PvP shooters, so it’s no surprise it attempted to go toe-to-toe with Overwatch to win over fans in the genre given its staff pedigree. But as the saying goes, if you aim for the king, you better not show up eight years late.

With so many games now taking close to a decade from the beginning of development to release, we’re starting to see the financial and creative consequences of an overlong development cycle. Spend too much time in development and ideas that were once novel are no longer in vogue. Furthermore, the time and money spent over those years has to be recouped somehow, which leads to decisions like the $40 cost of entry for Concord when many of its peers are free to play.

The cost of coming late to the party means you must bring something new to the table. Unfortunately, Concord is neither particularly innovative nor content-heavy. That said, it does have a level of polish at launch that was often absent from its hero shooter peers when they were first released. Indeed, Concord’s weekly animation story drops are fully motion-capture, and Firewalk’s time spent on crafting its lore has helped secure Concord an episode of this winter’s video game animation anthology series, Secret Level.

But well-established hero shooters like EA’s Apex Legends launched almost bare bones and still managed to make a splash thanks to its intriguing central