Comment by techjamie
I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing. Perhaps not necessarily as hard as it did, but there were a number of red flags before it released. The character designs were bland and bad, which is worse than just being bad. They drummed up a whole bunch of controversy, and the marketing outside of that controversy was basically non-existent. Almost nobody had heard of the product until it already had failed. Even when it was in beta for free, they only garnered about a couple of thousand players at any given time.
Then you add on that they already missed the train for hero shooters by about eight years and their modern competition is all free to play and has already sucked up the entire market for the most part. I saw an analysis by a former game producer that thought that perhaps they had a work environment that stifled criticism and commentary from developers and I think that that might have been an accurate assessment; The entire product was released in a way that myself and a number of other people that I've seen online simply can't believe that nobody was throwing their hands up and saying that this was a bad idea before release.
> I would say that a reasonable person could have foreseen Concord failing.
> Then you add on that they already missed the train for hero shooters by about eight years
There's an analysis video I saw on Youtube which touches upon this fact: data-driven production suffer from two major problems: when they register a signal (i.e. people like hero shooters), it's already too late. It is impossible to catch a growing trend, just one that has already reached its peak.
The second problem is that the data is misleading in the first place. Using social media sentiment, for example, is pure nonsense because social media personas are not real people. They don't buy toilet paper, they don't talk (or Google) about 99% of their boring existence, and the signal is manipulated by bots and malicious agents. It is absolutely crazy that companies still haven't learned that you cannot hire a bunch of data scientists and predict the next major hit. They have tried for the past 20 years, but human ingenuity (and the chaotic human psychology) is totally elusive to their silly models.