The eagerness to grave dance on unpopular games has become a bad habit

Sony hero shooter Concord launched late last week, and its Steam concurrents haven't yet topped a thousand. The dramatically low turnout has already earned it the title of biggest flop of the year on social media, and if you caught any of the discussion on Reddit, TikTok, and other platforms over the weekend, you mostly saw people gloating, posting screenshots of SteamDB concurrency charts and tacking on a generic dunk, or claiming "it rules" that we can all see a big game fail.

That jubilation over Concord's low turnout—it apparently cracked the top 50 best sellers on the PS Store over the weekend—derives to some degree from an I-told-you-so sense of justice: the idea that out-of-touch, creatively bankrupt executives are cynically chasing trends, and that the rest of us would've had the common sense to avoid releasing a Concord, a Marvel's Avengers, a Suicide Squad, a Gotham Knights, or that perplexing Gollum game. But it's not actually that easy to know why one game succeeds and another doesn't.

The devs at Firewalk Studios, many of whom are ex-Bungie, have made a game in the genre they have experience in and released it without the free-to-play monetization we so often complain about, which isn't a cynical or underhanded thing to do. But concurrency numbers have, in some situations, acquired a moral quality: If you release an unpopular game, everyone is suddenly morally justified to shame and embarrass you, whether it's because all big budget games are bad, or live service games are bad, or you did too much woke—pick one.

My guess at the real reason for all this grave dancing is that it feels like a victory over FOMO. If the new $40 game sucks and no one is playing it, I can safely go back to whatever I was playing before without worrying that anyone's having fun without me. Beating up on unpopular games is also a way to passively farm a satisfying sense of vindication: If I never paid attention to a game that fails at launch, it affirms the correctness of my judgment and the immaculacy of my taste without any effort on my part. 

When a struggling game has a high enough profile, as Concord does, the reasonable impulse to crack a joke about its Steam concurrents gives way to that sort of thinking, which then gives way to a shit-talking free-for-all that turns the developers into cartoonish corporate stooges and totally warps the reality of the game.

Battlefield 2042 became one of these dogpiles back when it launched, and to make their point its detractors started copying and pasting a giant list of features from previous Battlefield games that DICE was accused of "removing," including features I don't remember anyone liking in the first place. (I never saw anyone use Battlefield 1's fortification building system, but it became a must-have feature as soon as it could be used as a bludgeon.) I don't think the mistake DICE made with Battlefield 2042 was not making a list of every discrete feature that's ever been in a Battlefield game and then putting them all into one game, but through the warped lens of Reddit and other platforms, that's what the conversation became.

They never asked what I wanted. from r/memes

Above: It's not clear where this "$300 millions" figure has come from.

Concord's Steam launch numbers are astonishingly low for a blockbuster competitive game, but the piranha-like gnashing of social media hasn't delivered any real insight into why it's fared so poorly. Some onlookers have said with conviction that Concord's $40 price tag was obviously one of the problems, forgetting that Helldivers 2, the biggest breakout game of the year and a game also published by Sony, is $40. In a saturated market where 39 games release on Steam each day on average, I'm not convinced that price was a problem: Concord couldn't even get a large audience to give it a shot during its free beta.

I don't have the one true answer, but my take for now is that Concord isn't selling a fantasy or a narrative that's getting FPS players excited to play it in the first place—before they've even decided whether they like its guns, characters, and modes—and one reason I can imagine it's struggling in that respect is that it doesn't have an easily-disseminated identity rooted in competitive shooter pedigree, as its competitors do. Valorant is nouveau Counter-Strike—it's easy to tell your Discord friend it's "CS:GO by the League of Legends studio." Apex Legends came from Infinity Ward lineage, Deadlock is Dota plus TF2. Concord comes from ex-Bungie devs, but I don't get the impression that Destiny 2 fans perceive it as an offering with any deep spiritual connection to their beloved space fashion game, of which the PvP Crucible is a small part.

Dramatic post-launch turnarounds do happen, and maybe updates and a sale can get Concord some momentum. Or maybe there just isn't enough oxygen available to a game with Concord's particular characteristics in late August 2024, a period that's included one of the fastest-selling games ever on Steam, a World of Warcraft expansion, great new games like Tactical Breach Wizards, and now Valve's own hero-based MOBA-shooter hybrid. DICE went on a years-long Battlefield 2042 overhaul campaign after its rough launch; it's possible Firewalk will stick with it.

Either way, the reflex to cheer for Concord's failure as if it's deserved only produces resentment and misunderstandings, creating an environment where everything is deemed obvious and real analysis is drowned out in favor of sharable quips, surface-level observations, and hyperbole. (These are not the ugliest character designs you've ever seen, Reddit—get a grip!)

You can understand why this is a more comfortable rhetorical lane than reckoning with the more complex reality of a volatile gaming landscape where quality is not the sole predictor of success, where multi-billion-dollar institutions like Sony now often struggle to be heard, where it's difficult to make predictions, and where it often feels like years of work can be swept away by small miscalculations and rapid changes in taste.