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While this is true, it's a very different situation. Overwatch is an old game, it's been running for eight years now. When Overwatch launched, there wasn't anywhere near the kind of well-established competition that there is today. When Overwatch launched, there was no Apex Legends, Paladins, Deadlock, Quake Champions, or Valorant. Further, Overwatch's launch cast was designed with incredible visual clarity - nearly every character had a silhouette and visual design that both made them distinct and conveyed their style of gameplay. There's a pair of business terms for this kind of thing - Blue Ocean vs Red Ocean.

A Blue Ocean is mostly unexplored and pristine - you're entering a market that's mostly untouched and there isn't much competition. This favors the first-mover advantage - the first ones there have more time to experiment, set things up, and learn from their mistakes. The customers/players in that market don't have anywhere else to go if they want their gameplay, so you can afford to make mistakes, iterate, and improve. Since there aren't many other games to switch to, the players will likely stick with what they are already familiar with.

A Red Ocean is a saturated market, where the waters have been dyed red with the blood of all of the dead or dying competition. There's already a lot of competition, meaning that any new product must stand out significantly from its peers or it will soon die from lack of audience. In a Red Ocean, the initial launch is much more important because you never get a second chance at that first impression. Further, audience retention is also super important because of how much competition there is - a new product might be able to draw some attention just from the novelty, but novelty wears off quick and most of the players already know the genre and the other games available. If the new game doesn't serve their needs immediately, the players won't give it the time to improve - they'll just go to one of the competitors that already does serve their needs.

We can't really compare the two games in a vacuum, we must compare the full environment that the games launched in. Overwatch had the added benefit of significantly less competition in its Blue Ocean, meaning that the playerbase really didn't have anywhere else to go while they waited for Overwatch to improve things. Concord was unable to grab attention immediately in a Red Ocean, meaning any potential audience quickly dispersed themselves among the large number of competitors already out there.

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I think that the core issue with Concord was just that it doesn't do enough to stand out from its competitors like Overwatch, Valorant, R6 Siege, or Apex Legends. I can briefly comment on the purported eight year dev cycle - no game really has a real dev cycle that long, that's longer than an entire console generation. Most games with long dev times spend the last 2-3 years in actual development and the first block spinning their wheels or restarting from scratch. The main issue also wasn't the diversity of its cast - every hero shooter has a diverse cast of characters.

The core issue I see is just that they don't do any one thing super differently. Without a major defining element to stand out from the rest of the pack - a gameplay mechanic, a license, a visual style - there isn't anything to draw an audience for your game. This is usually the result of choices made by the upper team leadership. Perhaps the director's vision just wasn't what players are interested in today. Perhaps the game was designed by committee. Perhaps there were other major issues that cropped up during development. Perhaps some core team members left during development and they were unable to recover. Regardless of what it is, the game itself is perfectly serviceable in all of the ways I saw, and that just isn't enough to grab an audience. Being ok at everything doesn't grab attention.

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If we're developing a cross-platform game, we aim for the best performance we can squeeze out of our lead platform. If we're targeting PS5 as our lead SKU, that's 16 gigs of RAM, 8 cores at 3.5 GHz, and so on. We aim the majority of our dev time for that first and then we adjust up/down for the other platforms we're building for to stay within reasonable performance specs.

If the game is targeting PC exclusively or as the lead platform, I've seen two different general approaches. The first of these is the "enthusiast" approach where the team is purposely aiming for high visual fidelity and high spec machines as a selling point. Crysis is probably the ur-example of this approach, though it has somewhat fallen out of favor recently. This approach usually aims for near the top of the line when we're finishing up pre-production, which usually means it'll be targeting hardware specs about a year older than the latest by the time we launch. We can't really keep moving those goalposts because top of the line is always a moving target. Instead, we need a target set during production where we're doing the majority of asset creation, so we generally lock in our goal around the time pre-production ends and stick to it.

The second approach is the "broadest possible audience" approach where the target spec is good performance on the common spec at PC cafes in Asia, because that is the largest number of potential players. Blizzard was pretty famous for adopting this approach to their PC game development. By making the game able to run well on potato settings, we remove barriers to entry for as many players as we can. This generally means we can't put in as many pretty effects and visuals, but it also means we have a broader target audience.

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Most game dev teams have a strong idea of who our game's target audience is, and that includes the kind of context they should already have. If we're building a big budget AAA first person shooter, we can expect that our representative player recognizes and likes first person shooters and is likely already familiar with the basics of how to play them. It is unlikely we will need to teach them the very basics like how to move about the map and aim or what strafing is. If we're building a casual mobile game where we expect our representative player is new to games and lacks the context needed to play, we'll need to spend more effort to teach them that context.

The need for tutorialization is especially high in two major cases:

In these situations, it is a good idea to spend significantly more resources on tutorials than games with more traditional gameplay. We, unfortunately, don't always get the resources to do that. In those cases, it ends up hurting the game's reception because players will often miss the features entirely and then complain they aren't there.

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It's similar to how different players like different kinds of gameplay in games, different buyers have different things they're looking for and different spending habits. A lot of the considerations among players for in-game purchases also apply to whole game purchases.

Consider - many players are all about getting a hot new game on release day. These types will preorder, preload, and may even stay up till midnight to start playing right away. In like manner, many in-game spenders also like getting the hot new thing that appeals to them right away.

Some players are willing to wait for the sales on new games. These more value-minded players love to buy discounted products and bundles where the items included might not be on the top of the desired list, but they like getting value. These players won't buy the brand new $20 cosmetics, but they can often be tempted by the bundles of all of last season's cosmetics at a discount.

This is just a few examples of different buying habits. We also often make products (both microtransaction and full game) for new players to help them ramp up in the game. The players who make the most products for are the biggest spenders, but we try to provide different things for everybody who wants to spend.

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The "made for kids" label is a very real thing, but most laymen misunderstand its purpose and often treat it as a pejorative. When used in an argument, is yet another equivalent of saying "I don't like this" while trying to make their opinions feel or sound more valid. Making products like games for children is actually quite specific, because children are not small adults, they are completely different beasts from a cognitive and self-awareness perspective.

Young children (e.g. ages 1 to 13) actually go through tremendous changes year over year in terms of cognitive development because they are growing and learning so quickly. A baby, for example, does not have the concept of object persistence yet - if an object leaves their sight, it ceases to exist for them. This is why peek-a-boo is so delightful for them - when you cover your face to play peek-a-boo, you stop existing to the child. Children can't really understand that other people exist and have their own separate thoughts and feelings before age six. The attention span of a four-year-old is much much shorter than a six-year-old.

This means that products aimed at children have a very specific targeted age window because of how differently each age group generally sees the world. The cognitive difference between a four-year-old and an eight-year-old is enormous, meaning that a game targeting four-year-olds are necessarily enormously different than games targeting eight-year-olds. This is what the "for kids" label generally means - these products are targeted at people with different levels of cognitive function.

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There's a significant difference between "somebody needs to show the moderates the truth" and "you should confront the angry gamers". I do agree that we need to reach out to the moderate audience but I don't do that by shouting at the angry gamers and hoping I get the moderates in the exchange. I specifically target the moderates and curious with my posts. I try to treat questions as being asked in good faith. I specifically try to avoid confronting angry gamers because it's very hard to persuade someone who is deeply emotionally involved.

Experience has taught me that confronting angry gamers generally results in them demanding more and more "proof" that they're wrong while providing none themselves, moving their goalposts until they're still technically correct (even to the point of absurdity), questioning my career experience (despite having little to none themselves), and generally pulling the arguments into the weeds. Angry gamers generally aren't arguing in good faith; they're arguing because they're deeply emotionally engaged and venting those negative emotions onto whoever will listen. Those in that echo chamber are also similarly emotionally compromised. No amount of truth telling will change that because they don't want to learn the truth - they want to be angry and misery loves company.

I feel I am much better off aiming at the moderates and intellectually curious to begin with and bypassing the angry shouting matches altogether. At least this way the audience is generally looking for education and is willing to listen. It just isn't worth it to pick a fight if I don't have to, it takes far too much effort for far too little reward.

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There is absolutely a ceiling on the size of a game and franchise. The natural ceiling for any tentpole blockbuster franchise is the relative size of the audience who is willing to buy into the game at that point in time. At some point, we'll run out of people who want to pay for the game no matter how much additional marketing and game we build. When we reach that point, we pull back because spending more to make and build more won't make financial sense.

We have already hit that ceiling for some games. Square-Enix just recently decided to sell off the Tomb Raider franchise (along with several other studios and IPs) after not being able to grow it to the size they wanted. They were unable to hit the numbers they hoped for with the Marvel's Avengers and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy games they produced. This naturally results in them (and others) pulling back on the titles that cannot support this kind of expenditure. We've also seen it with the workhorse franchises that have a strong niche carved out, but aren't actively growing - Lego games, non-FIFA non-Madden sports titles, MOBA games, hero shooters, digital card games, MMOGs, and so on.

This isn't to say that the overall audience can't grow or shrink over time. Cultivating the franchise/game audience over time is also necessary. One of the biggest examples of failure to cultivate the audience is with Activision's Guitar Hero blunder. They put out far too many Guitar Hero games too quickly and killed the entire franchise (along with most of the rhythm and beat game genre). Audiences can also grow organically over time if the game/franchise is carefully cultivated - Final Fantasy 14's growing user base is probably the best example of this.

The overall point here is that these changes have already been happening, you just need to know where to look. Most of it isn't accompanied by a lot of fanfare by intention, just a quiet pull-back or cap-off in terms of budget for new games in established franchises and genres. A big news hullabaloo about it is basically the nightmare scenario. This kind of directional business change isn't likely to be made public in large part due to the opacity of project budgeting and team sizes, as well as the overall length of time it takes for these changes to reach the public.

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What most game publishers and developers want is steady and reliable earnings over time. It is much more expensive to build and market a brand new game and sell it than it is to continue development and marketing for an existing game with an existing regular player base. This is why most large game launches are expected to get continued monetization and development support for at least a year after launch, with many hoping to continue updating and monetizing for years beyond that. We want to continue developing and adding content to the games people want to keep playing. 

This means that one-time single customers are not our primary target audience. What we want are repeat customers - players who enjoy the the things they buy enough to keep buying additional things as we release them. We generally hope to do this by providing them enough value in the things they buy that they feel like they got their money’s worth. This encourages them to buy more in the future - the things they get for the money are worth it to them. It forms a virtuous cycle - players give us money because they feel they are getting value for it, we spend the money to develop new and engaging content for them to play with.

When it comes to marketing and selling to children, what we want is still the same thing - steady and reliable customers. This means that we actually don’t want kids stealing their parents’ credit cards and running up huge bills only to get them reversed later - that’s not a reliable or steady income stream for us. In those situations, our customer service reps typically give the customers (parents) a grace period of like 1-3 months to ask for refunds because unhappy customers are not repeat customers. This generally means we want both parents and kids have a good time with our game - parental controls, spending limits, an easy refund process, and so on. 

Remember, the goal is steady and reliable customers, and that means customers who choose to keep coming back day in, day out, week in, week out like my former boss. His kids loved a certain studio’s F2P children-aimed games. He would give his kids their weekly allowance in in-game currency since it’s what they wanted. Angry and upset customers don’t do that. There will always be some outliers (like parents who didn’t look at their own credit card bills for over six months before complaining), but we generally try to err on the side of forgiving customer mistakes because it means they stay happy and reliable customers.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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