I had a coworker introduce me to The Five Dysfunctions of a Team[0] as a useful tool for framing problems with team dynamics.<p>It's easy to draw parallels between what's described and those dysfunctions. In case you're not familiar, this framework by Patrick Lencioni outlines five obstacles that can mess up a team’s flow: absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results.<p>Particularly relevant to this situation:
> Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate<p>Just to warn you though, there is a tradeoff. You can also just act like an asshole and cite a culture of toxic positivity if people take issue with your behavior. The key is collaborate, productive focus on the outcomes with the other human beings involved in the endeavor.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Team" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Five_Dysfunctions_of_a_Tea...</a>
It still amazes me that a project can fail this hard without anyone speaking up. Based on what was said in the clip, there wasn't a great overarching direction to define the game. I haven't even heard anyone discussing the Concord story, what were they cooking to make them think they would be able to create something comparable to StarWars? Nearly everything I've heard about this game has been that it's a fairly generic hero shooter.<p>Did they ever do player testing or get outsiders to try it out before release? Were the people working on this game dogfooding it themselves?
a super-cynical take would be:<p>investment banker: for the low low annualized price of $50m/year I’ll sell you this company. it’ll never make money, but it’ll attract lots of your negative marginal product workers from across your company, thus improving the success of your other games. it can run for about 10 years. at the end, you shut it down and it’s a big tax write off.<p>massive game company: where do I sign?
I don’t think developing a new PvP shooter is a viable business, particularly if you take 8 years to do it. And if you expect people to shell out a lot of cash up front when the successful competitors are mostly free.<p>A single player game can succeed if you do something remarkable in terms of graphics, story, gameplay, etc. Not necessarily all of them but some of them. A PvP game has fewer factors you control (less story) but requires absolutely that you create a two-sided market of players —- it’s like saying you’re going to make Facebook in 2024. Even if the base game was better than <i>Overwatch 2</i> or <i>Fortnite</i> it would a struggle, but the fact that they wanted to make <i>another</i> hero shooter proves they don’t have the vision or creativity to make something better. Is that toxic positivity?
Toxic positivity is just a new way of saying it was a "Emperor's new clothes" situation. Everybody could or should have been able to see that the emperor had no clothes but was too scared to speak out. Only somebody not constrained by the system, a naive child in the story or in this case consumers who weren't in the corporate structure, was able to point out the obvious truth.<p>I still think people are tip-toeing around this a bit though. Suggestions that Concorde failed because the genre isn't popular anymore seem like they're trying to avoid some hard truths in particular. I am uninhibited though so I'll say it. Overwatch has characters people want to fuck or see themselves as, and gamers like that. Concorde has characters designed to make people squirm uncomfortably, daring people to criticize their design so they can be called toxic gamers. The character design is deliberately offensive to gamers, defying them instead of pandering to them.
Personally I don't see any difference between toxic positivity and the environment my parents grew up, where any possible remark could land on PIDE/DGS office, followed by a state policy security offices visit to clarify one's ideas.
It’s not so different from mid 2000s BioWare culture (where many hits were created). Games looked like a shitshow right till the end and the general answer to these conceran was faith in “BioWare magic”.<p>Sure, different track record but still, this kind of mindset is the norm more often than not because of an industry where failure of the project also means loss on job - so there’s no incentive whatsoever for studio level people to flag in progress failure that may lead to a studio closing.
I see this story is on Forbes now, but apparently without any additional details:<p><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report-says-sonys-concord-cost-400-million-to-make/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/09/21/new-report...</a>
for me, toxic positivity is basically everyone pretending that everything is running smoothly even though it's not.<p>could happen because of either of these two reasons:<p>- they really don't know the ideal state<p>- they are afraid of the backlash if they speak up
even <i>reddit</i> was laughing so hard at that game that moderators had to purge and lock threads about it all the time. this was the first one I recall seeing: <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_might_have_the_ugliest_characters_designs/" rel="nofollow">https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1d4ylfi/concord_mig...</a><p>it is blatantly obvious <i>why</i> that game has failed as hard as it did, just from that screenshot alone - tumblr-tier design, twitter-tier writing, targeting the virtually non-existent "modern audience". the talk about market saturation and such is just a cope - this game could come out before Overwatch was even announced <i>and</i> be F2P and it still would've failed just as spectacularly.<p>"Evil cannot create anything new, they can only corrupt and ruin what good forces have invented or made". yes, you can take a franchise with an existing following and "reimagine" it for "modern audience" and succeed (financially) to some degree, but Concord had neither a following nor positive studio reputation to burn, and the result was painfully predictable for anyone with two brains cells to rub together from the moment they saw a glimpse of that steaming pile of shit.