Scarce Concord Resources

If you haven't played Concord, the competitive, team-based shooter developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony ...well, you're not going to be able to change that fact. Concord was released on August 23, 2024. Then it was eventually shut down. And by "eventually" I mean "almost immediately" by which I mean two weeks later on September 6th. It's true that almost nobody was playing the game, but it was still a shocking, unprecedented move by a major publisher for a live service game that took eight years to develop and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

There's a few fascinating things about this story, but one has to do with the players and not the developers. Or even really the game itself. Because some players seemed determined to collect all the achievement trophies for the game, even after they knew that the game's days (heck, even its hours and minutes) were limited. On the Playstation 5, getting all the trophies is known as "platinuming" a game, since the final, platinum trophy is earned by getting all the other achievements in the game. 

On episode #167 of the Nextlander podcast, a listener wrote in to say that if you were curious how many people got this platinum trophy, you could look at a third party site like psnprofiles.com. Looking at it now, I see that only SIXTY NINE players got the platinum before the game shut down. Not sixty nine percent. Sixty nine PLAYERS. Some people apparently played the game obsessively after the game's shutdown was announced, forming cooperative truces between normally opposed teams where one side would hurl their characters over the side of the map so that the other side would win and more quickly progress towards the most time-consuming trophies in as little time as possible. Then the other team would reciprocate in the next match. According to the Nextlander listener, the last person to get the platinum trophy did it just 12 minutes before the game servers shut down forever.

But ...why? Why were people so intent on cramming for achievements and trophies in a doomed game when they could have been doing the same for any other game? I can think of two psychological phenomena at play: the scarcity effect and psychological reactance.

The scarcity effect describes how we tend to see something as more valuable when we see it as more scarce or about to become more scarce. I described how the scarcity effect works in Chapter 9 of my book, Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and the People Who Play Them:

Valuing something because it’s rare is just one of those decision-making shortcuts that sticks with us because it offers such a good tradeoff between accuracy and mental effort over a lifetime. Psychologist Stephen Worchel and his colleagues (1975) illustrated this with a study involving cookies, but not those that websites deal in. The researchers told subjects that they were participating in an experiment measuring people’s preferences for various consumer items. At a certain point in the spiel, the experimenter jabbed at a secret button under the desk. Psychologists love secret buttons, but instead of opening a trap door underneath the subject as usual, this one summoned a second experimenter bearing a jar of cookies. Depending on the experimental condition to which the subject had been assigned, this second experimenter delivered either a jar full of 10 cookies or an almost empty jar with just 2 cookies. Subjects were then asked to retrieve a cookie from the jar, take a bite, and then share their thoughts on taste, attractiveness, and what the cookies should be priced at. Relative to those who picked a treat from the mostly full jar, people drawing from a jar with only two cookies found them more delicious, more desirable, and worthy of a higher price. This happened despite the fact that the contents of both jars were exactly the same and came from a larger stash of just one brand of supermarket cookies. The perceived rarity of the cookies was influencing not only their perceived value but also their taste and appeal.

This is a staple of "limited time offers" and I think something similar happened with the Concord players. When they saw that the platinum achievement was going to be not just scarce but impossible to get after September 6th, having it on their Playstation profile became a lot more attractive.

But I don't think that's the whole story. Another well-researched phenomenon, psychological reactance. This is when we over-react to the idea of a lost freedom by pursuing whatever we think we're going to lose with intense, perhaps irrational vigor. (Rosenberg & Siegel, 2018). And oh look, I talked about this in Getting Gamers as well:

The threat of losing an opportunity to do something also triggers another psychological effect that I discussed in the chapter on quests and goals: psychological reactance. In short, we tend to value scarce things more highly, and the idea of losing them often makes us see them as better than more readily available alternatives. In one study of the effect, a group of psychologists studied Florida housewives’ reactions to the banning of laundry detergents containing environmentally unfriendly phosphates. Not only did those facing such loss of choice buy more of the product (both more than they did before learning about the upcoming ban and relative to a control group), but they also rated the phosphate-laden soaps as much more effective than the government-mandated alternative. This is a by-product of how the human mind has evolved to be more averse to losing something than gaining something of equal value, since we feel ownership of an opportunity even if we haven’t taken it yet.

Concord players who were told that they would soon be forbidden from playing the game and earning trophies may have reacted with psychological reactance and doubled down on their efforts to play. You're telling me I can't play or earn the platinum? Watch me. 

Was it worth it to those sixty nine players to repeatedly throw themselves off the map until they leveled up enough to earn the achievements they wanted? That's for them to say. But hopefully they'll remember why they did it the next time they see a limited time sale or a collector's edition produced in limited quantities.

REFERENCES

Madigan, J. (2015). Getting Gamers: The Psychology of Video Games and Their Impact on the People Who Play Them. Rowman and Littlefield.

Mazis, M. (1975).  Antipollution Measures and Psychological Reactance Theory: A Field Experiment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 31(4). doi:10.1037/h0077075.

Rosenberg, B. D., & Siegel, J. T. (2018). A 50-Year Review of Psychological Reactance Theory: Do Not Read This Article. Motivation Science, 4(4), 281–300. doi:10.1037.mot0000091

Worchel, S., Lee, J., & Adewole, A. (1975) Effects of Supply and Demand on Ratings of Object Value. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32(5). doi:10.1037/0022-3514.32.5.906.