Concord, the latest PlayStation-released live shooter, is here, but so far, the launch numbers are looking pretty bad.
Numbers don’t always matter when it comes to concurrent player counts, especially for single-player games, but the same cannot be said for live-service games. Valve’s new hero shooter “Deadlock” was finally officially released last week. According to SteamDB data, just yesterday the number of simultaneous online players reached a peak of 89,000. For a game that has not yet been launched, this is a very high number. Impressive numbers. However, while it’s been playable for a while, as long as you received an invite, Concord, another real-time hero shooter, did launch this weekend. However, its Steam data performance is not ideal, with only 697 players accumulated on the day the game was released.
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The numbers get worse on the weekends, when you expect more players to log in to see, but no, Saturday was worse than Friday, and Sunday was worse than Saturday. That Friday release number was also pretty dismal for another reason: It was smaller than last year’s The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which had 758 players (it Received it at launch, but then never exceeded)).
This is obviously a huge, unintentional indictment of Concord, a premium live-service game released in an era when such games were generally free. This obviously doesn’t take into account the PlayStation player count, which is probably higher considering this is a PlayStation-published game, but it’s still not a good sign. So where does Sony go from here?
As Sherif wrote in January, PlayStation is finally delivering on its live service promise in 2024, but he questioned whether anyone would care. They did have great success with Hellraiser 2, and while that was certainly boosted through word of mouth, Concord likely won’t be able to do the same, no matter how good it is.
There’s a problem here too, Fran gave the game 3/5 stars in his review, saying it was almost a “shooter by committee”, which doesn’t inspire confidence at all.
It doesn’t help that Concord took eight years to develop (what game came out eight years ago? Battlefield), so overall it just highlights how risky just-in-time services can be. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if PlayStation pulls out of the live service further – it already did so last year as it postponed six of its games and had its potentially biggest game canceled outright at the end of 2023. If you ask me, I’d say it’s time for PlayStation to get back into the first-party single-player game with some fresh IP. Maybe we should both pour a drink for Concord.
