The videogames industry is completely paralyzed by fear of conflict. It's in a transition between the old guard who never had any training and revel in conflict (sometimes, but rarely, too toxic levels) and the new starters some of whom seem to have no idea that criticism is an intrinsic part of the creative act.

It's very sad and products are failing all over the place while the industry works it's way through this. It might not make it as the current solution is to homogonize all staff and remove their intrinsic value.

Oh well, I enjoyed the first 20 years in the industry, not so much the last 10 years.

This is a great reference, thank you. To me it was clear that Concord suffered from a deeply dysfunctional creative processes.

The character designs alone are so laughably bad that they border on caricature. They don't only violate the most basic of design fundamentals, they show a shocking amount of incompetence on all levels.

Lots of money, but not vision. It's not a coincident that Concord was a hero shooter. Of course big money doesn't understand what they invested in and everybody was just chasing trends without understanding a single dime of what made Overwatch a success.

> Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate

What do you do when you don't fear the "conflict" (passionate argumentation in search of better approaches) but having it leads nowhere, because people have different opinions?

For example, I responded to a comment where a person had a difficult situation with a coworker, though I didn't really have any solutions myself either: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41601023

There's a lot of abstract stuff out there, without always having a clear cut "best" answer, but which will have different drawbacks long term, which will impact people differently (e.g. in regards to webdev, that could be using an ORM vs not using it from a type of workload where either could suffice, composition vs inheritance, DB views vs dynamically built queries in the app, using the DTO pattern vs not, using projections for returning DTO data directly from the DB to avoid needing arguably unnecessary mapping in the app code between an Entity and DTO object).

Probably there's dozens of things like that, that apply to game development as well, with people whose opinions have been shaped by differing experiences.

I think that you will probably need to compromise a lot and with outcomes that might feel sub-optimal, hopefully without souring the team dynamics in the process.

I've realized something funny. It should be the company's interest to encourage employees to have productive debates and spend effort figuring out the best course on action, while in reality, from the perspective of an employee, it's an uphill battle to have your voice heard, with no reward at the end. Therefore, what a smart employee does, is shutting the fuck up.

Case in point: in my current team there's one very vocal senior who needs to have things done his way, but other than that, the willingness to participate in discussions is inversely correlated with experience, and the most experienced devs simply ran out of fucks to give because they're not getting paid extra for the time they spent in fruitless discussions. The end result is that the knowledge ends up being unused and we implement stupid ideas.

I did not find that book compelling or realistic.

> I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business

Valve is currently working on Deadlock and seems to have no issues getting players despite its still unfinished state.

If nobody listens to well-founded criticism like yours and just says "nah, people will love it" -- yes that would be a good example of toxic positivity.

> I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it.

Funnily enough Overwatch 1 came out just over 8 years ago, so Concord was probably pitched as a "me too" clone of that from its inception.

I'm not sure it's a play test failure. If it were, you would think there would have been a burst of users and then nothing. It seems to me more like a market appeal failure. I didn't get the sense that anyone was intrigued by the story or characters, and the hero shooter as a genre has Overwatch, TF2, Deadlock and the bodies of Battleborne and others. They didn't showcase any stunning new mechanics in their intro, nor did they manage to make a funny or compelling story.

The marketing seemed to basically rely on "if they see 30s of gameplay, that will be compelling enough".

If we remember TF2, they launched with a bunch of really well conceptualized "Meet the character" videos which built humor and personality into the characters as well as taught some of the mechanics.

Overwatch launched a whole pile of interesting and very fresh player mechanics, as well as about triple the characters available with TF2.

Again, I can easily imagine they had players testing it. I'm not sure they had many people market testing.

> Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?

Well they certainly weren't dogfooding it after launch. The Concord credits list 1,972 professional roles [1] while a week after release the game had fewer than 150 players on Steam. [2] The game was so bad that not even the people who spent 8 years working on it had any interest in it.

--

[1] https://www.mobygames.com/game/229488/concord/credits/playst...

[2] https://steamdb.info/app/2443720/charts/#max

It already happened many times:

Fallout 76, No Man's Sky (at least they managed to improved after release).

The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Redfall, Babylon's Fall (Dead after release?).

And many games just force player to do meaningless things (for example, cast one magic 100 times for an achievement or unlock an unique item). Do they actually think this is funny during QA or design stage?

its the same thing with Gemini. if speaking up can get you fired, socially ostracized and black listed there is ample reason to just shut up.

I mean... the game was in development for 8 years and paid the bills for (apparently) 150 people working on the game for nearly a full decade. That's pretty good for a complete failure ;)

I guess they just couldn't find the magic formula to keep the game even longer in development like Star Citizen managed to do.

Lol exaggeration much? Comparing an office with little criticism to the Portuguese political police.

Bad leadership.

Leaders should ocasionally take time to listen to bad feedback.

No experience in games, but I’ve seen first hand how a thick layer of ladder climbing middle management can create a culture where all important signaling mechanisms become internal, isolated from the outside world. In such a culture, what faceless hypothetical users[1] think slowly fades away, and what other “important people” within the org thinks is all that matters. Basically high school popularity contests – quite banal. However, the emerging behavior of such an organism can be very perplexing.

[1]: Dehumanizing the customer comes in different forms, I suspect. I’ve seen a lot of “we can’t care about individuals because we are web scale so we need to look at user metrics instead”. Perhaps in the gaming world there is more of “gamers are trolls and toxic boyroom loud minority, so their criticism isn’t worthy of attention”.

I don't know about that. The slide the engineers sent to management for Columbia warning that the problem had never been simulated was, shall we say, not brimming with positivity. It just was incredibly unclear[0].

[0] https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...

Agreed in general. Though the points on character design may be a bit too reductionist. Concord didn't really need characters with clear sex appeal. Or even characters people immediately want to be like. The original characters aren't that bad! At least judging from the concept art. They just suffer from extremely poor and downright unprofessional execution.

Take this redesign for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1fdz1m.... The results are pretty close to originals and do not pander to any specific demographic. But there are just enough interesting and unusual details in the new designs that make you want to learn more about those characters. That's what the released game is missing entirely.

My pet theory is this had to be nepotism in hiring. I struggle to find another explanation for how they botched the execution so badly that the characters can be legitimately seen as "designed to make people squirm". Which I don't believe could be any executive's intention.