REACTION - Concord pledging to avoid the battle pass model is the correct approach for a budget price release
Smart play, friend.
By Jonathan Garrett
25/07/24
Much of the narrative around Concord has centred on its chosen release model and the notion of it wading in to an already crowded space. As a multiplayer hero shooter, it’s stepping into a busy market where gamers are quite particular over what they expect in terms of character design, mechanics, and post launch support.
Although there has been online sentiment suggesting it should go free to play, a recent series of tweet clarifications lead us to believe that the budget price model is in fact the way to go. The lack of any traditional paid battle pass, and a pledge from developer Firewalk to add maps, characters and modes post launch for free, represent a pleasing consumer friendly strategy that we hope folks can get behind.
We have our reservations about the core experience, but these are smart plays by a team trying to launch a new IP at the mid point of a console generation with significant big hitters all vying for mindshare. If Concord can address it’s balancing issues and bring in some quality of life tweaks, it may carve a dedicated niche audience.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
