Chris “CJ” Johnston’s Top Game of 2024

chris Is a product manager improve and host Ready Player One Podcast.

The game players will forget about in 2024 but I can’t stop thinking about is Sony and fire studio‘ First-person team arena shooter harmony. In a year that saw so many great games released, this is the best stealth game of the year. Like it or not, Concord will quietly become one of the most influential games in the industry over the next few years.

It covers everything that anyone in video game development and publishing is so afraid of repeating or being compared to. A nightmare that wakes you up in a cold sweat. Its absolute failure will be studied and theorized in the industry. It will impact how games are announced, marketed and released – all in an effort to avoid the same pitfalls.

On the face of it, it’s easy to overlook Concord for a variety of reasons, both problematic and non-problematic. It’s hard to argue that any of these reasons are completely unfounded. After all, perception is reality and this game proved it.

The YouTube video will tell you all the factors that accelerated Concord’s failure: blatant bandwagon chasing, multiplayer sucks/not what we want from Sony, live-service gaming, diversity and inclusion, AAA budget, and more. Before anyone outside of Sony/Firewalk had played it, the game became the poster child and focal point for anything gamers considered anti-consumer.

The confluence of these things is death by a million paper cuts. Never mind that it’s a fully featured premium game with free scheduled updates, tons of lore and weekly story shorts, some great deck-building game mechanics, and a great soundtrack – I mean, yeah For me, the list goes on and on. I loved Concord and our two weeks together. It takes me back to the days of addiction faint Play multiplayer games with friends and colleagues. In the two weeks we were at the tournament, I played 136 games (*cough* didn’t win a lot, but that’s okay) and had an unforgettable amount of fun.

Before you dismiss the positive aspects of what I just said about the game, consider how the storm surrounding Concord’s failure also affected us as players and people. What many of the YouTube videos, negative comments and hate tweets say is not about the games they are targeting, but the ease, speed and sheer joy we as people have with the games, most of which come from having never played Its a minute. As humans, I hope and hope that we will be better in 2025 and beyond. Can we stop driving crashes? Well, probably not – yes, that’s too much of a wish for humans on the internet. It’s hard to find the joy that playing video games can inspire when we’re consuming or participating in a bunch of hateful shit like this.

As someone who loves underdog stories, watching the car crash unfold in slow motion was heart-wrenching. I still feel for the Concord developers, who put in years of hard work on this game to get to this result. Once the game is considered (rightly/wrongly) trash, it becomes damaged goods. Then, as players, we don’t want others to see us playing or talking about it. Our friends don’t try. We want to discredit anyone who dares to enjoy it or suggest that it might be good. There’s no time for a “but it’s actually fun” cycle like Guardians of the Galaxy did a few years ago because it was shut down in an unheard of two weeks.

So, Concord is a game that no one wanted and few played, but it’s a game that will be on the minds of anyone making or launching a first-person multiplayer shooter or a live-service game for years to come.

…

also, mini shooting adventure——Why is no one talking about GOTY’s mini shooting adventure? The fucking rules of the game.