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Every crease and fold of the Concord saga is so confusing to me. After the response to the trailer, you’d think there might be a pause to reflect. After the performance of that beta, you’d think that would have pulled a comically large lever of some kind to take a breath. To hear Sony tell it, their process didn’t involve “Gates” early enough, rounds of user testing or evaluation. The whole thing seems like it was greenlit by Vibes.
When I saw that it was still receiving patches even after having been exiled, I held out some kind of hope. It wasn’t for me, it seems like it wasn’t for very many people, but my allegiance is always going to be with those who dive fully into their madness and bring some measure of it back out. Maybe it’s a model shift, maybe it’s… I mean, I don’t know what it is. I mean, Sony pulled Cyberpunk 2077 completely off their store. Remember when Fortnite was a failure? They hacked in a new mode to ride the Battle Royale meme, and now Travis Scott does concerts in there. Pretending that we can understand or project every outcome is a joke. Much, much weirder things have happened.
Wesley Yin-Poole has an article at Iggin that pulls together a lot of the disparate threads. The story of this game’s development involves people throwing around various budgets – anywhere from two to four hundred million dollars. They obviously have an incredible amount of talent, but if you don’t receive material guidance from the mothership and instead you just get a gout of resources it’s bad actually. My friends who make games have to contort themselves mightily to get a hundredth of this budget, but I’m weirdly pro-Firewalk at this point. They didn’t really have a partner on the publishing side. These relationships are often contentious, for obvious reasons. But you can’t provide funding without structure. What happens in a situation like that is… well, this.
(CW)TB out.