news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

sorry guys, i really couldn't hold it together this time.

just today, sony announced that its new game "concord", also known as "xingming special agent" in chinese, has been officially taken offline, and will refund all users who have purchased the game.

less than half a month has passed since the game was released, and some players have already finished the game before they even started it.

compared with previous baosi masters, such as "the fall of babylon" and "anthem", it has set a new record.

some netizens joked that if star agent is not taken off the shelves, the server costs will exceed the total sales of the game.

after all, for a multiplayer game that has just been launched, the real-time online number of people can only be maintained at around a few dozen people. the lowest has dropped to more than 20 people, and the highest peak is difficult to break 700 people. maybe there are more people reading this article now than this number.

in comparison, the most popular stand-alone game in august, black myth, had more than 2.4 million concurrent online players.

you say that comparing it to black myth is too unfair, but the number of online players in half-life, an old game from 26 years ago, is 10 times that of star agent.

this means that the number of matched matches in the game may not even reach three, and the turnover rate is far lower than that of the mahjong parlor downstairs from my home.

in star agent, you can get a top 20 score in the world by simply opening a challenge mode.

everyone is a national player, and everyone is a top player ranked in the top 100.

this star agent was developed by sony's firewalk studio and released on ps5 and pc platforms.

in theory, it is a complete playstation first-party work, just like god of war, uncharted, the last of us, and spider-man.

you know, sony playstation has very few first-party works this year.

most of 2024 is almost entirely supported by "bad lone soldiers", so "star agents", which was chosen to be released in the second half of the year, is naturally highly anticipated.

this game can be considered a standard 3a configuration, with a large production, a cost of several hundred million dollars, and all the human resources of firewalk studios.

the gameplay is a competitive fps in multiplayer online mode.

it's a team-based shooting game similar to overwatch, with hero skills and the ability to switch heroes at any time.

not to mention that it is no longer fresh, it is even a bit outdated.

the game was launched in 2016, the summer when overwatch was at its peak.

even though this game has good control and its graphics and production standards are not low, its development team's parent company is still bungie, the studio that created halo.

but with this mediocre gameplay, even with sony's first-party promotional resources, it is powerless to turn the situation around.

the most distressing thing is that in today's f2p (free online games with in-app purchases) era, the standard version of this game is still priced at $40, or hkd 308 in hong kong, which is exactly the same as bad kids.

it's like you only see jedi divers getting a piece of the pie, but fail to see that it's a pve game with a foundation based on a previous game, whereas star agent is a pure pvp game under a new ip.

however, although the sales of this game are low, its attention has always been high.

because during the promotion period, this game was marketed as "guardians of the galaxy", but after its release it became an abstract game full of stereotypical lgbt elements.

the image design of the hero can only be said to highlight inclusiveness.

moreover, star agent is the first time in all my years of playing games that i have seen a game that marks the gender of heroes on the character selection interface.

he, she, non-binary, yet to be determined.

as for someone like xiaofa who identifies himself as an armed helicopter, we are still waiting for him to launch a new character.

in the past few days, overseas x has almost unanimously been attacking xingming agents.

the first thing that comes to mind is the poor image design.

it's not for the sake of aesthetics at all, it feels like the purpose is to make the character ugly.

you don't even know whether the production team is trying to be politically correct or deliberately deepening the stereotype.

community players, use black myth to ruthlessly torture the xingming agents.

it was found that the latter was ruthlessly crushed in terms of development time, cost, and team size.

the recent popular game "first descendants" from south korea also ruthlessly beats star agent in terms of data.

the first hou yi is a politically incorrect game that ostensibly focuses on "sexy characters".

the irony is even more apparent when the number of players on the two games is compared.

the most important thing is that various overseas gaming media gave star agent a high rating.

ign gave it a score of 7 and kotaku defended the game, hoping that everyone would give star agents a chance.

this familiar wave of face-slapping also triggered many players' sarcasm and memes.

in fact, judging from the standards of the gaming industry alone, this game does have the necessary strength.

this is the gameplay. those who want to try it have already played it in overwatch. what's more, overwatch is a basic free game (and the character selection logic of this game is not as good as overwatch).

therefore, on the basis of the limited appeal of this game, a large number of politically correct elements are forcibly added. it can only be said that debuff is stacked like lego, and it is almost inevitable that it will be boycotted by a large number of players.

in fact, in recent years, the phenomenon of political correctness in european and american games has become more and more serious.

i have also specifically talked about the sbi incident that happened some time ago, and i guess many of you may have an impression of it.

if you don’t know what’s going on, you can click here to find out quickly.

this year's trend of political correctness has gradually begun to hit bottom.

the controversial new assassin's creed: shadow is the one that sets the japanese samurai protagonist as a black man named yasuke.

recently, some people also revealed that offline physical sales have plummeted.

the authenticity of the revelations is in doubt

just watch it for fun, don't take it seriously

however, a lot of online comments have already made it clear that this game will lose a large part of the asian market, mainly in japan.

it gives people the feeling that these game manufacturers would rather lose money than be "correct".

they forcibly set groups that should not be minorities as minorities, and would rather go against conventional wisdom and affect the quality of the game and the player experience.

no matter how good a game is, it can't withstand this kind of torture.

to put it bluntly, a state of confrontation has formed between ordinary players and game manufacturers.

because one fact can never be changed, that is, a large number of ordinary players do not want to see abrupt politically correct settings in their favorite games.

some games handle it well, like ellie in the last of us and heroes with different sexual orientations in overwatch, at least they can barely explain it.

but the cases nowadays can only be described as too deliberate.

it's as if they were deliberately making the facial model ugly and making the characters in the game more and more unpleasant to the eye, almost admitting that they were giving in to "correctness" and were not hesitant to destroy the characters.

faced with such practices, it would be good enough if minority groups did not complain about your smear campaign.

to take a step back, although there are indeed many diverse groups among real players, as long as they are real gamers, they actually care more about whether the game is reasonable and self-consistent, rather than whether the game is politically correct.

however, it may be questionable whether those so-called "minority groups" who make the loudest noises online actually play games.

manufacturers should at least know who they should please, otherwise the deficit and sales volume will prove everything.

at present, the only reasonable explanation is that the money-losing practices of these game companies can improve the overall scores of institutions such as msci, which is conducive to establishing a good image in the minds of investors.

the so-called msci rating can be simply understood as a form of scoring given to a company by multiple institutions, which is used for comprehensive market performance and reference.

the areas usually involved include environmental protection, social responsibility, employer responsibility, etc.

among them, some other evaluation systems will include "diversity" related conditions.

this means that when operating a business, a company needs to consider various different groups of people.

it's not just about gender, there are also people with disabilities and so on.

compared with industrial and manufacturing companies, game companies can do almost nothing about environmental protection, so they may pay more attention to the expression of human rights.

of course, these are just speculations.

we still don’t know why this trend of political correctness is becoming more and more intense.

xiaofa only knows that this is not profitable at all, it is just a pure loss-making business.

last month, microsoft disbanded its dedicated diversity team within the company and was criticized by some people.

it's not just microsoft. zoom, google, and meta have all cut their dei spending.

anyone with a discerning eye can tell that someone was definitely causing trouble at the beginning, and now the situation is finally collapsing.

at the end of the article, let’s talk about the game star agent.

a few days ago, the official released a questionnaire, asking the majority of players (barely considered a majority) if they had any suggestions on how to make the game better. it seems that they haven't given up completely yet.

this emergency shutdown is similar to the situation of 2077. public opinion exploded and the quality of the game was no longer acceptable. sony had to stop the loss in time to save its reputation.

simply put, there is no room for struggle and he cannot be saved.

the one that suffered the most was the firewalk studio. after they were acquired, they poured a lot of effort and money into their first masterpiece, but it ended up like this. there is really no worse case in the world.

xiaofa wants to say that a global entertainment work must indeed take into account the issue of the target audience.

it is also the responsibility of game manufacturers to try their best to satisfy all kinds of people.

but i hope they can understand one thing, that is, the largest audience will always be ordinary players who like to play games.