PS Studios Show Support for Marathon's PS5 Launch with Brilliant Artwork

Looking forward to the Pushsquare review. You guys didn’t fall into the hate with Concord and gave an honest impression (and I agreed with it) and I’m sure you’ll do the same here

@species It’s great to see them resist the art of imitating the voice of their audience and present an honest opinion. Personally, I trust Pushsquare’s reviews precisely because they aren’t always iterative of the internet echo chamber that is modern gaming journalism. They are aware of the trends, aware when there will be pushback, but they speak their truth. It’s honest. Whether I or anyone else in the audience agrees or disagrees is irrelevant. We have the option to respond in the comments, and many of us respond. A lot. That is good journalism in that it spawns discussion.

@Northern_munkey @species Personally, I felt Concord was a 7-ish too. I enjoyed it for the most part and agree with most of the points in their review. Concord was a solid game that was marketed poorly and failed spectacularly because Sony didn’t respond to “the internet.” They never properly sold the game or addressed the player numbers or hate the game received and that was a bigger problem than the actual game itself. Also, 7/10 isn’t a review score that sells people on games anymore.

I don’t need reviews to tell me which games to buy and I frequently disagree with many reviews I read, but I’ve been reading Pushsquare for well over 10 years now and they’ve always been honest and followed the beat of their own drum. I don’t read it because it follows my thoughts, but rather because there may be a perspective I didn’t know or agree with and I learned something from it. If you need others reaffirm your thoughts, that’s ok, but don’t expect it in the Pushsquare reviews. In this world, we’re all tired of things being iterative and playing it safe for the sake of “their audience” in our media. Why ask a review site that doesn’t do that to start?

@species Exactly why I’m being vocal about it too because I think there’s a complacency in the rage machine that’s become industry coverage. I liked that Pushsquare looked at Concord as a game without reputation and evaluated it in comparison to other titles that are similar, which is what I tried to do when playing it as well. It ultimately failed not because it was a bad game, but because it lacked support. I still find it baffling that Sony invested so much into it just to let it fizzle the way it did. Wild approach to game management. Personally, the lack of care towards it hurt my opinion of Sony, for sure, and I didn’t even love the game. I just thought it had potential.

Concord, in my opinion, was an interesting piece of gaming history, in that, some people reacted so strongly against it that it kept casuals from even trying it. It was a B tier hero shooter. Personally, I felt it was stronger than Apex at its foundation, but weaker than Overwatch. I could see what Sony saw in it to greenlight it and knew quite a few people that I knew would enjoy it. Most of them refused to play though because they were afraid to enjoy the game on the basis they feared the game would shut down. To me, this shows a Sony problem rather than a journalistic one. From every angle, Sony botched selling the game to its fanbase and allowed it to become a meme. It was quite strange to see Sony fail to defend their own massive investment in such a way.

The shame about gaming journalism is in 2026 that we’ve hit a point where even casuals need to research to see if a game is going to survive long enough for them to play it and the casuals tend to avoid games that review below 8/10, based on current market data. And yes, there is a lot of bias. I agree with that. When you look at Soulslikes, for example. They are almost always evaluated by someone that has a predilection towards that genre and that tends to create genre biased reviews. FromSoft, Atlus, and Larian tend to be protected by reviewing organizations, I believe. Not to say they don’t make great games, but there’s a tone of the fans reviewing their favorite games for them sometimes. First party titles tend to get the same treatment.

@species I don’t disagree the characters in Concord were sort of generic, but again, I think that’s more Sony’s fault than anything else. After all, Sony marketed the game as a cinematic multiplayer game that would receive weekly cutscenes, but then didn’t do anything to introduce the characters before the beta. When the game had already landed a clunker of a beta, instead of trying to get people interested THEN they started introducing the characters in short segments. What were they thinking with that? It’s one of the most misguided marketing campaigns of anything I’d ever seen. It was impossible to like the characters because all anyone could do is say that it’s an Overwatch clone, but it didn’t have to be that way. It had different gameplay from Overwatch that was sort of like a blend between Overwatch and Destiny that could’ve gone somewhere if they worked it out a little bit more. If Sony read the room and pushed cinematic instead of live shooter, Concord might’ve had more of a shot. I think they learned their lesson a little bit because Marathon pivoted to a much more cinematic style of branding the last couple months.

I think Expedition 33 definitely had success because of marketing too though. It’s actually a great example of how good marketing works. They advertised it as a budget game, knowing full well that it was a full length RPG style game, earning them instant goodwill from the crowd that was upset with game price increases and then they got super lucky with Mario Kart announcing that it would be the first $80 release title. The comparison of price points landed right in their lap and spun Mario Kart out in a negative light that it still hasn’t escaped from. Xbox had been marketing E33 heavily as well, almost to the point that you’d be forgiven if you thought it was a first party game. In carefully articulated interviews, the team highlighted too how the game was deliberately focused on making a game similar to Final Fantasy of old with modern visuals and being ex-Ubisoft devs, they made populist jabs on how they’d be making something that wasn’t like Ubisoft at all in approach. It was a rather brilliant way to approach getting word out about the game. They knew what they were doing with their marketing and exactly which demographic of gamer they were marketing to. It’s exactly why the critical consensus loved it and why almost everyone and their mom played it, even though there’s many out there that don’t feel it’s the masterpiece it was made out to be.

Seriously, the biggest hits and misses the last five years have a lot to do with how they’re marketed and publisher response to criticism, definitely more than ever before.