The Concordverse - Highguard, Marathon, Horizon Hunter's Gathering and other Flopbusters - How Many Times Do We Have To Teach You This Lesson, Old Man?

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Unpopular opinion maybe but I really like Marathon's art direction. I'd buy it if it wasn't 40 bucks when there are better cheaper games on the market.
I don't mind the shaders and the way the environments look, but A: it's pretty conspicuous to give the original IP that kind of facelift, and B: the characters are pretty unappealing to look at in terms of their designs.

The older I get, the more I realize that appealing characters might actually be the #1 factor in whether a game sells, even beyond gameplay.
 
>lawbreakers mentioned
it is obligatory to post cliff bleszinski memes whenever this game is brought up
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Cliff bathrooms.JPG
This'll save the business!
 
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arguably the last 2 werent as massive flop series as the top 3 but its a close call from how mishandled they were
No, because you could still play and access those titles. Concord shuttered itself WITH its studio in two weeks' time.
 
The older I get, the more I realize that appealing characters might actually be the #1 factor in whether a game sells, even beyond gameplay.
I think it would be oversimplifying things to say that Concord's problem was with the character design. There are so many examples you can think of in support of or against that theory (Sonic, arguably, was a great character, until the franchise got a reputation for consistently bad games).

Marathon being this big Mac classic is one of those things that feels like history got rewritten at some point.
Marathon was worshipped in those circles when it came out but a lot of the Mac was known for was what would be considered quirky indie games today, with Escape Velocity (and its sequels) one of the bigger examples. One of the books I have that focuses on Mac games talks up Marathon as one of the best games on the platform but was also inconsistent on a lot of others. Marathon was tied with an obscure Accolade puzzle game Ishidō: The Way of Stones for their top-rated game, but they talked up how great The Daedalus Encounter was, which was an old FMV game that probably would've been completely forgotten if it didn't have Tia Carrere in the starring role.

Video game history does get rewritten, I first found out about the video game crash in 2004 from a video game history book written by Rusel DeMaria and it both seems to promote the idea that the NES saved the video game market but also points out that during that same time, the games people actually liked continued to sell. It was a bit complicated because there was a bit of a downturn in the industry and the market was facing a surplus of merchandise that wasn't able to be sold, but Activision in particular was able to weather the storm because they had some of what was the best games for the Atari system. (Their problem was that heavy discounts for the surplus games meant that their titles had difficulty competing in the market). Bobby Kotick's later takeover of Activision wasn't even related to the crash, that was in the late 1980s when CEO Bruce Davis ran the company into the ground.
 
I think it would be oversimplifying things to say that Concord's problem was with the character design. There are so many examples you can think of in support of or against that theory (Sonic, arguably, was a great character, until the franchise got a reputation for consistently bad games).
Well, I guess it does demand some qualification - I guess what I mean to say is that I think character design (and indeed, characters in general) constitutes the meat of someone's first impression of a game, especially within the context of the trailers and thin looks we get of them these days. As much as I hate to say it, there does seem to be a correlation between the games I see people talking about after directs/state of plays/etc and how striking their character designs are, even to a greater degree than the merits of the gameplay (at least, from what can be inferred).

But yes, I suppose I need to retarget that sentiment a little, as I suppose I meant it less about the raw amount of sales a game gets, and more about, I suppose, how much discussion/buzz surrounds a game after it's unveiled, which is a factor in a game's success, but not the only one.

To your point though, I can only speak for myself, but anecdotally, whether or not Concord's problem was the character design, the characters are overwhelmingly the first and loudest point I see mentioned.
 
…and I’ve never even heard of Steel Hunters. Battleborn and Brink probably should get spots, but Steel Hunters is new to me.
Premiered in TGA 2024, it was a mecha themed hero-extraction shooter that debuted alongside Mecha Break. It had limited tests until the last beta test where the game had a sudden change, and said test was near its' release around April 2025. It shut down at October 2025 and was rumored to have been developed for around 6 years.

From what limited information I can gather, the dev team are not seasoned developers (i.e the guys who made World of Tanks/Warships) but a splinter WG group who split off from Lesta. They developed the game as proof that they can survive without the Lesta group, that being WG EU/West, who are known around for being incompetent among the entire Wargaming development team. I don't remember how much the game was made but some have said that it was around 30-60 million lost.
 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ujOtI5Qnt7QPremiered in TGA 2024, it was a mecha themed hero-extraction shooter that debuted alongside Mecha Break. It had limited tests until the last beta test where the game had a sudden change, and said test was near its' release around April 2025. It shut down at October 2025 and was rumored to have been developed for around 6 years.

From what limited information I can gather, the dev team are not seasoned developers (i.e the guys who made World of Tanks/Warships) but a splinter WG group who split off from Lesta. They developed the game as proof that they can survive without the Lesta group, that being WG EU/West, who are known around for being incompetent among the entire Wargaming development team. I don't remember how much the game was made but some have said that it was around 30-60 million lost.
How do I not remember this game? I liked Mecha Break before it fizzled out, and I remember trying to look for alternatives.
Maybe I don't remember because that dogshit snot game Astro Bot won.
 
How do I not remember this game? I liked Mecha Break before it fizzled out, and I remember trying to look for alternatives.
If Steel Hunters took the easy way out, Mecha Break is going full on humiliation ritual. One of the creative developers mentioned something around the lines of "we're going to stick to our creative vision" when addressing MB's balancing issue, that has persisted in multiple seasons, on a game that has only 1k players, and backtracked around the 3rd Season.
 
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