Game Over for Sony’s Concord

Has the age of consumer-led gaming finally arrived? It appears to be the case if we are to understand Sony’s shutting down of it’s team-based online shooter – Concord.

In less than two weeks – having being launched on 23 August – Sony announced that as of tomorrow (6 September), Concord will be removed from sale and taken offline, including the issuing of refunds to all players who purchased the game – which most certainly will not break the bank! According to gaming analysts, Concord was the 147^th most played game of all active PS5 games on Monday, 26 August, while the Steam version peaked at 697 concurrent players following on the launch.

This brings to mind another shooter, namely, Amazon’s Crucible, which struggled for about six months before being shut down. Not forgetting other launch crashes such as Battlecruiser 3000 AD, X Rebirth, Dead Island and Fallout 76 – admittedly these were all mostly bug-related.

So Why the Crash?

Concord had been in development for about eight years and was the first game from Firewalk Studios, which was formed in 2018 before being acquired by Sony last year.

Concord was teased at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase in May 2023, was shown in a basic playable form in May of this year. But by August’s launch, there seemed to be very little market appetite for yet another team-based online shooter that delivered nothing new compared to the rest of the genre and, in this writer’s opinion, consisted of bad character designs!

• Did the $40 Price tag doom Concord from the start? Especially when there are free hero shooters like Apex Legends, Overwatch, Valorant, and even Valve’s beta of Deadlock available to play.
• Were the mixed reviews – recommended by only 24 percent of reviewers as tracked by OpenCritic and scoring only 65 on Metacritic – too big a hurdle to overcome?
• Was there not enough done on the marketing side? Especially with many across multiple social platforms reflecting a similar view of “[I am] a dedicated gamer and saw absolutely nothing about this game until the reports of its terrible launch”.
• Are gamers shifting away to more single player games?

There is so much that we don’t know, but what we do know is that we have all just witnessed a big-budget Sony game being shut down in less than a month! 

This is going to sting and will certainly have the Sony PR peeps on the defensive for quite some time. Will Concord become another Anarchy Online (2001), with developers spending months tweaking things and ultimately offering up free trials (or free-to-play options) in order to win back fans and grow a player base?

Time alone will tell, so let’s watch this space.