I don’t know what the market at large wants, but I suspect its failure is based at least in part on the fact that the purchase has zero value if other people don’t also value it, so the customer is now more reserved with their time and money unless a game seems like it’s going to take off, which would theoretically make nearly every a game a huge success or total failure. What I want is for a scalable multiplayer shooter that gracefully handles 1-X players, and I hardly care what X is as long as it’s more than 3. Let me host it on a LAN and play split-screen, and give me a deathmatch mode, among other things. We used to get this kind of shooter all the time, and now I’m starving for one, to the point that I’d happily have picked up Concord if it was that game, even with its wonky-ass character designs.

When a game cost that much to make and didn’t launch with big numbers, there was no prayer of it ever making money.

It was early morning at jury selection, and I did not bring headphones with me.

Well, yeah. If it’s clearly never going to recover, why keep spending money on it? They already took it as a total loss by refunding everyone, so that was probably cheaper than holding out for a recovery that wasn’t going to happen.

Keeping it running has ongoing costs involved. It would just be setting money on fire.

Concord likely wasn’t shit but also was just thoroughly not something that anyone was asking for.

Keeping engaging content on an ongoing basis seems to be such an unreachable target for most devs and game designs that it’s undoing large swaths of the industry.

It had worth to me, as someone who was stuck in a place where it was unacceptable to watch a video but was acceptable instead to read a summary quietly.

The old games were beaten by a Twitch chat sending little more than random inputs to the game. Maybe the newer ones are worse, but let’s be real.

There’s a disclaimer that says not every Switch 1 game will work, but I think it will play on the new Switch with the same lousy performance it has now unless you buy the Switch 2 version.

Are you prepared to have to buy the game again to do that? I don’t know it for sure, but it’s how I expect Nintendo to operate.

UFO 50 (Steam)

It’s a collection of 50 games, not mini games, from a fictional game developer called UFO Soft in the 1980s. Not every game is a winner, but a ton of them are. You see the advancement in technology and design techniques over the course of the 1980s, and there’s a bit of back story for each game that you can start to put together a throughline for the company and its fictional developers. About half of the games also have local multiplayer. I’d prefer that they also had manuals for each game, especially the more complicated ones, but that means that my favorites in this collection are the simpler games that speak for themselves more quickly.