Voice of Customer | Return on CX Investment | Insights & Research | Accredited Customer Experience Master (ACXM) | Content Strategy | Budding AI Enthusiast
Video gaming is having a tough time, and it's starting to show how prioritising profits over CX can be a burden on the bottom line. Sony is shutting down and offering full refunds on its latest game, Concrod, just 2 weeks after it launched. Reports suggest the game only sold 25,000 units and peaked at just 700 players on Steam WORLDWIDE. Concord took 8 years to develop and most likely had a budget of millions of dollars. It was meant to be the "next big franchise" in gaming. But there's been a fair amount of controversy surrounding the launch of Concrod, most notably from supposedly forcing a "woke" agenda, to the general look and feel of the game characters being "too ugly". But at the core, the problems with Concord seem to boil down to 2 main points: 1 - Genre saturation Concrod is a late-entrant into the first-person hero shooter genre, where games like Overwatch, Apex Legends, Fortnite and Destiny already own most of the market. The problem is nobody was asking for a new hero shooter and Concrod didn't present anything new, unique or exciting to lure players from the games that are already enjoying mass adoption. 2 - Live Service fatigue Live services can be hugely profitable over time as players engage in micro-transactions for cosmetics and perks with real money. Players are encouraged to keep coming back to see what's new and are tempted to spend money on skins, loot packs or battle passes that ensure an annuity income for the game studio. Live services have, unfortunately, not lived up to the expectations of players and often left players disappointed, especially when you've paid R1,000+ for the base game. To date, very few live service games have proven to be successful, and players are getting fed up with broken promises. Ubisoft recently also took a hit, with its share price dropping to its lowest level since 2015, based on low sales of its new property, Star Wars Outlaws. While a relatively fun game to play, it's dogged with technical and quality issues that don't justify the asking price. That, and the fact that Ubisoft chose to hide standard gameplay features and early access behind a paywall by releasing multiple versions of the game ranging up to over R2,000 at the top-end, which left a terrible taste in gamers' mouths. This is in stark contrast to news that Black Myth: Wukong, a narrative-driven single-player game with no Live Service, became the top-selling game of 2024, garnering a peak player count of 3 million players on all platforms and selling over 18 million copies. The difference? Black Myth focussed on quality and what gamers have been asking for, while Concrod and Star Wars Outlaws looked and felt like another cash-grab. Nobody said making a profit was bad. This is business after all and we have shareholders to satisfy. But there's something to be said about taking time to understand the market needs and building a quality product rather than chasing money-making trends that might already be on the way out.
