Sony’s latest first-party game, Concord, got off to a rocky start, at least on PC, failing to even attract 1,000 simultaneous players on launch day.
The day a game launches is usually the day with the highest number of players, so for developer Firewalk and publisher Sony, Concord’s reported player numbers are certainly at least a little concerning. According to SteamDB data, Concord’s peak number of concurrent players was only 697.
This is significantly lower than the beta of the game itself a few weeks ago. In fact, to put things into perspective, even Redfall, which was considered a huge failure, attracted over 6,000 players when it launched last year. And it was also available on Game Pass at the time, giving people even less reason to pay full price on Steam. The Redfall is also significantly cheaper than the Concord, which costs £34.99.
This is a far cry from the huge success Sony had with another live game it launched earlier this year. Helldivers 2 was a huge success for the company, still attracting 20-30,000 concurrent players every day.
Of course, these numbers don’t take into account how many people are playing PS5. There are probably thousands of people enjoying it on Sony’s machines, but overall I think the Steam numbers are a good indicator that Concord is underperforming.
This is a major problem because Concord seems to have been in development for a long time. A few days ago, lead character designer Jon Weisnewski revealed that Concord has actually been in development for eight years. Weisnewski spent five of those eight years working on the game.
Now, to be fair, that could mean a few things. The game may have been in the concept stage for several years before entering full development. Or his statement can be taken at face value and Concord has indeed been in development for 8 years.
When you think about it, this makes sense. The game has been compared to games like Strike Force and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, both of which were very successful at the time of Concord’s founding.
But importantly, it performed pretty well. Keep in mind that only a few reviews were filtered out, mainly due to the late release of the code and the media’s desire to test real-world performance, and the Metacritic score is 68.
The game also currently has a “mostly positive” review on Steam, based on hundreds of reviews.
The criticism brings us to @anim_xander, a former animator at Firewalk who handled first-person animation for several Freegunners in the game (notably Daw, Duchess, and Kyps). While talking to another user on People put in a lot of effort to make a great game, why should I care about a bunch of incompetent freaks who hate it?
Needless to say, this now-deleted response didn’t go down well, as people rightfully pointed out that calling people who don’t like the game “talentless freaks” is an immature way to handle criticism. Way.
It’s unclear exactly who the former developer was targeting with his comments. I guess this is to counter criticism that Discord is heavily influenced by DEI ideals. However, this could also be a reference to the other major criticism I’ve seen online, which is that the character designs are ugly. Even many positive Steam reviews mention this.
No matter what group the former developers were targeting, the result is the same: It’s not a great look for a game that needs all the good publicity it can get right away. Concord can claw its way back from defeat here, just as other games have managed to do through positive word of mouth and the trust that’s been built over time. After all, Sony and Firewalk have committed to producing at least a few seasons of content.
But the current reality is that Concord is a huge failure, especially for Sony, which acquired Firewalk Studios in 2023, presumably because they thought Concord would be a hit and the perfect next step into the live services market. Could such a low player count lead to the game becoming free-to-play, perhaps even available to PS Plus Extra members? Or will Sony try to weather the storm?
