Sony Interactive Entertainment's Firewalk Studios, which developed a 5v5 first-person shooter called Star Attack, was a lukewarm hit shortly after its release on August 24.

According to the latest news, Sony has announced that the game will be out of service on September 6 and will offer a full refund to all players. This means that the game lasted less than half a month from the official launch to the suspension of the service - less than two weeks to be exact.

The Screaming Attack didn't perform well at the start of its release, with a peak of 697 players online within 24 hours of its first day of launch, well below the peak of about 2,400 during the beta period. According to Omdia's chief analyst Liam Deane, the game sold only about 25,000 copies across all platforms, including about 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PS5.

Analysts point out that although there is no exact data on the PS5 platform, the sales performance of the Steam platform is enough to show that the market performance of the game is very poor.

The controversy over political correctness, DEI and LGBT

Many attribute the failure of "Starming" to DEI-related controversy. For example, the game's character design was pointed out to have too much emphasis on LGBTQ+ elements, which caused some players to be disgusted to a certain extent, thus losing a certain market. Some gamers believe that game companies are trying to convey specific values through games.

There is an opinion that the game's character design lacks inspiration and does not stand out, making people feel stuck in a bygone aesthetic era. And gamers are already tired of LGBTQ+ elements, and they want something truly beautiful, not politically correct. Not only does this design of the game fail to appeal to the target player base, but it may lose out on a wider range of potential players by overemphasizing these elements.

However, the removal of LGBTQ+ from the game's label on Steam may have been an attempt to appeal to a wider player base, but this move has not significantly improved the game's market performance. The game's failure sparked a lot of discussion in the industry, with many in the industry expressing sympathy for the team and pointing out the game's missteps in design and marketing strategy.

But there are so many DEI games that it's not all right to attribute the failure of Starsong Attack to LGBTQ+ alone.

Outside of DEI, the game is full of problems

The Internet is full of jokes about "Black Myth: Wukong" beating DEI's full "Star Attack" with DEI, but if you really dig deeper into this product, you will find that DEI actually covers up most of its flaws - while the outside world is focusing on the problems of "Star Attack" DEI, it actually ignores more problems with the game itself.

For example, in terms of class balance and map design, "Starring Attack" has some hard flaws, and these problems were exposed in the July test, but Firewalk Studios failed to deal with these problems properly, or did not have time to deal with them.

Some test players said that although "Star Attack" is excellent in terms of technology, its core gameplay is single, the tasks are highly repetitive, and it lacks enough challenge and freshness.

SOME PLAYERS ALSO SAID THAT THEY DIDN'T NEED TO SPEND $40 TO PLAY A WATCH LIKE, THERE ARE A LOT OF FREE ALTERNATIVES, AND "STAR ATTACK" IS NOT MUCH BETTER THAN THOSE COMPETITORS. And the pre-release publicity is insufficient, and the warm-up work is almost empty, which is not at all like what a $40 blockbuster should have.

"There's enough market for hero shooters, so why should I play you and pay $40? ”

On the other hand, Agent Starring has been in development for too long. The development of the global gaming industry in the past 8 years has been leapfrogging, if you imagine the popular games of 8 years ago, such as Assassin's Creed: Origins, Call of Duty: WWII, and compare it to the current games.

The online battle game has changed dramatically.

Some players have criticized the problems with Starring Attack on social media, but many of these voices have been overlooked. Since the storm caused by DEI seems to be bigger in the field of public opinion, perhaps these problems are buried in the noise of public opinion. The animators of "Screaming Attack" also tweeted "a bunch of untalented freaks" to the point that the DEI debate for Screaming Attack was further amplified.

In short, "Star Attack" is a problematic product that is difficult to match with a price tag of $40. DEI is just one of the problems with the game, but it's so loud that the outside world mistakenly thinks it's a game that died violently because of DEI.

Is Agent Xingming's failure a failure of the industry perspective?

Putting aside the dismal performance of development and after-sales, the resume of "Star Attack" is quite glamorous - the members of the developer Firewalk Studios are industry veterans with rich experience in triple-A game development from first-tier game manufacturers, and the executives have a development resume of star 3A projects, which can be described as the trump card of trumps.

However, it is such a team from Bungie and Activision, which has participated in projects such as "Destiny" and "Call of Duty", and is backed by Sony, but has achieved such dismal results.

Before the game was launched, people thought that "Star Attack" might fail, but they definitely didn't expect it to fail so completely, and it was added to the family of "the fastest server closure record in the history of the game".

With a big team, Sony's backers, and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, these combinations finally made "Star Attack" live for 11 days.

Not even as long as the milk in the player's fridge.

It's like a pro player who has come up with a good hand that looks like a king bomb individually, but when put together, it sets a record for the fastest surrender in a solid win.

Perhaps taking these seemingly winning cards, playing a combination, and the default market will accept it, is a kind of arrogance in itself.

Fight the black monkey and stay up late, work overtime until the early hours of the morning, and there is still time to remedy:

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