'Marvel Rivals' Game Director Trashes 'Concord' Saying "It Didn't Bring Any Unique Value"
Thaddeus Sasser, the Game Director for Marvel Rivals, trashed Firewalk Studios’ Concord saying “it didn’t bring any unique value.”
During an appearance on the Videogamer podcast ahead of Marvel Rivals’ release, one of the show’s host brought up the fact that the game was releasing in a crowded market and noted that Concord recently released and was quickly shut down.
The host stated, “You’re entering a market that is very full of different games. I think one of the cool benefits of Marvel Rivals is that it is offering something that not only no one else can because no one else has the Marvel license for a hero shooter, but you’re also offering something that is entirely unique within its market. And we’re seeing a lot of games come out that are like very similar to other games. Like Concord came out and died very quickly. There’s a lot of reasons behind that, probably. It didn’t have much marketing. People didn’t gel with the art style of it. But at the end of the day it was another standard hero shooter.”
Sasser then chimed in saying, “Yeah, it didn’t bring any unique value.”
The host continued, “When people already have Overwatch. And you’re not going to drag people away from Overwatch.”
Sasser concurred and explained, “There’s a switching cost. I’ve already invested in Overwatch, I’ve got 15 skins for Pharah, I’m not going anywhere.”
The host then asked, “When you’re pitching or working on a new free-to-play game in the current market, are there worries that you’re not going to grab that crowd? It’s quite evident that Marvel Rivals will at least kick off very well especially considering the massive Discord following and how big those play tests were. Is there a slight worry there?”
Sasser replied, “As a game developer you’re always worried until the audience has already responded. And the truth is that I don’t think anybody can accurately predict this or the game industry would be radically different today. There’s a lot of games that come out where people are like ‘it’s going to do well’ then it flops or people come out and go ‘It’s going to flop’ and it succeeds amazingly. So, I think it’s really hard to tell ahead of time and you’re always worried about that.”
“But I think the trick is that you need to have that reason that people want to come play your game and I think Marvel Rivals does that exactly with the superhero. I don’t know about you, but when I heard the concept of the game I was like ‘Oh my God I want to go be Storm in a game’, ‘I want to go be Doctor Strange in a game’. 'I want to be those heroes in the game, that sounds awesome. And of course my mind immediately leapt to all the cool possibilities you could have with that. That’s what I think will pull people in as well too. If we’ve done our jobs well, they’ll love what they play and they’ll want to play some more.”
Marvel Rivals had an extremely successful launch hitting a peak all-time concurrent player count on Steam of 480,900. Furthermore, the game is still going strong with the most recent 24-hour peak hitting 449,895 players.
Furthermore, the game’s developer and publisher Net Ease announced that the game had been played by more than 10 million people in its first 72 hours.
What do you make of Sasser’s comments regarding Concord?
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