Shockingly, Sony and Firewalk Studios admitted defeat and shut down Concord just two weeks after launching on PS5 and PC. The game has been removed from the shelves and will be officially offline on September 6.
If you’ve been following the news, you know why: no one is actually playing the game. On PC, the real-time shooter failed to attract even 1,000 simultaneous players on launch day. The numbers have only gone down. Over the past few days, Concord has been working hard to get over 100 simultaneous players. One would hope that the data would be better on the PlayStation 5, but that’s clearly not the case.
“Concord fans – we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since Concord launched on PlayStation 5 and PC, and would like to thank everyone who has joined Polaris on its journey,” game director Ryan Ellis wrote in a PlayStation Blog post road. “Your support and the passionate community growing around the game means the world to us.”
“However, while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognized that other aspects of the game and our initial launch did not live up to our expectations. As a result, we have now decided to make the game available starting on September 6, 2024. Take the game offline and explore options, including those that better engage our players.
It’s important to remember the language being used, because Sony and Firewalk clearly wanted to find some way to bring Concord back when the game was offline and no longer available for sale. Of course, the obvious answer is to make the game free-to-play again, as the low barrier to entry might attract some curious players. Note that one of the biggest reasons players cited for not liking the game was its art style, which caused people to dislike it upon release.
However, while Sony and Firewalk do seem to be leaning toward bringing Concord back in some form, Sony has also talked about toning down its push for the live streaming service. Can Concorde be scrapped entirely? This will be a bitter pill for Sony, but is it worth investing millions of dollars in the game without completely changing the art and redesigning the game to implement a free-to-play model?
The blog post goes on to say that everyone who purchased the game (estimated at around 25,000 a few days ago) will receive automatic refunds.
This was a heavy blow to Firewalk Studios, who had reportedly been working on the game for 5 to 8 years, which makes sense, as Battlefield was extremely popular at the time. Sony acquired Firewalk last year, presumably because they saw something they liked in both the team and Concord, so the financial hit wasn’t that devastating to them, although it was still a pretty stunning failure. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it might be Sony’s biggest failure in history.
The biggest concern right now is for everyone at Firewalk – hopefully this doesn’t lead to mass layoffs.
Is this another sign that the live-streaming service bubble is bursting? Despite this, many people who have played Concord say it is good. But in today’s free-to-play market, just being good isn’t good enough, because free-to-play games dominate, and free-to-play games cost nothing and are great to play. Above all else, live shooters must fight for the most valuable commodity one has: time. Most people will only invest their money and time in one or two live service games, and it would take something truly special to lure them away, and Concord just isn’t that.
Will Concord come back, or is this the end?
