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After a disastrous start for Concord, Sony pulls the plug and issues refunds

4/9/2024

Translation: Elicia Payne

The launch of Concord is every game developer’s nightmare. After a long development period and despite solid gameplay, the game hardly attracted players. Now it’s clear, Sony’s pulling the ripcord and refunding the purchase price.

Twelve days after the disastrous release of multiplayer PvP shooter Concord – and twelve days of radio silence – Ryan Ellis, head of developer studio Firewalk Studios, is back. In the PlayStation Blog, he apologises that the game didn’t live up to expectations. Concord will be removed from stores on 6 September and all who have purchased the game will receive a refund. Anyone who bought the game in the Sony Store or on Steam will automatically get their money back. All others must contact the retailer they purchased it from. Concord was taken off Steam’s list on 4 September already.

The studio wants to go through its remaining options after removing the game from the stores. Ellis adds that they’re also looking for ways in which Concord can reach players better. It’s therefore possible that the game could be revised and re-released.

Bad start for Concord

On 23 August, Sony released first-person PvP shooter Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC. However, the game met with little interest – analysts estimate they made 25,000 sales. For a game marketed by Sony, that’s devastatingly little. By comparison, Helldivers 2 sold more than eight million copies in the first month after its release in February 2024.

It’s particularly tough for the game’s developers, Firewalk Studios, that Concord hasn’t even reached four-digit numbers of simultaneous active users on Steam. The number of players on PlayStation is unknown. On SteamDB, you can see that the peak value on the day after release was 697 gamers. When I did the research for this article on 3 September, an average of just 32 people were playing Concord. By way of comparison, direct competitor Overwatch 2, which was released more than a year ago, has an average of 50,000 gamers online at the same time.

Development of simultaneously active players in the past week.
Source: SteamDB

When I saw these tiny numbers for Concord, my jaw dropped. How can it be that a game that Sony calls an «original AAA multiplayer game» attracts so few people? The game doesn’t seem fundamentally bad either. A look at the Steam reviews shows a 66 per cent rating. Overwatch 2 is significantly lower with only 35 per cent since release. The reasons for the breathtakingly poor performance of Concord in terms of sales and player numbers lie elsewhere.

I’ve read through the comments, reviews and assessments and realise this much – it wasn’t a surprise.

What kind of game is Concord and who’s behind it?

Just like in Overwatch, you play a premade hero in Concord and compete in teams of five against another team. Twelve maps and 16 different characters were available at launch – each with their own talents and abilities. This allows for different playing styles. It’s a common gameplay type; there are several PvP hero shooters. Best performers include Apex Legends, Valorant and the aforementioned Overwatch.

After launch, the studio planned to gradually add more characters and maps to the game. Updates to the story with more details every week would follow too – all free of charge. Whether this’ll go ahead after the disastrous launch, is unclear.

Firewalk Studios was founded in 2018. In April 2023 Sony announced that Firewalk would become part of PlayStation Studios. One month later, Concord was announced. The game is the American company’s debut project. The game was created by developers who had worked on (article in German) other major projects in leading positions, such as Destiny, Guitar Hero II, Bioshock Infinite – and Apex Legends.

Concord isn’t anything special

The gameplay trailer, released at the end of May, has already attracted largely negative comments. The main criticism is that Concord offers no gameplay of its own and is too generic. The five characters presented were clichéd and seemed like a Guardian of the Galaxy crew. Viewers also criticise the similarity to Marvel superhero films in the dialogues and the plot of the cinematic trailer.

Scene from the cinematic trailer.
Source: Firewalk Studios

A three-month-old comment almost predicted what happened: «One week after this game drops: we’re sorry this game didn’t meet your expectations. 6 months later: shuts down.»

Concord doesn’t appeal to the crowds because it lacks unique selling points in an already oversaturated genre. In July, one month before release, only around 4,100 Steam accounts had the game on their wishlist. It was the 793rd «most anticipated game», which, in other words, means nobody was actually waiting for this game. For an upcoming release, this is a very bad sign too.

A premium shooter in the free-to-play genre

The price of the game after release meant that too few people even wanted to try out Concord. The standard version on Steam cost 40 euros or francs, while direct competitors are free to play.

Even players who bought Concord and tried it out have got their money refunded. They think the game’s okay but not worth the price tag. Player «hamishgavin» spent 1.7 hours playing Concord and wrote a detailed review on Steam. In the end, it turned out pretty negative. The game had potential and seemed fun, but he’d requested a refund because it wasn’t value for money.

And he’s not the only one thinking that. In general discussions about the game on Steam, again and again, you’ll read how Concord should’ve been free-to-play so it could build up a fanbase.

Not enough marketing and criticism of the characters

Developing a new franchise in a competitive genre is risky. Without unique selling points and an existing fanbase, but with a comparatively high price, good marketing should’ve been essential to at least make the game more well known. Yet it was also lacking in that area. In addition to regular advertisements on Tiktok, marketing measures were only visible at some online retailers and in the Sony Store. Therefore, the game didn’t have as much visibility compared to other titles with a similar budget. The four-day open beta at the end of July was also unable to motivate many players: only just under 2,400 gamers were active on Steam at the same time.

Many comments and online reviews also indicate that Concord is being boycotted due to political reasons. Gameplay excerpts from an interview with the developers show pronouns being used for the game characters. Some players find pronouns such as «he/him» in a character overview (intended to provide information about skills and attributes) uncalled for. The character design also causes a lot of discontent. Some of the characters are perceived as ugly, their clothes as boring and ridiculous.

One of the playable characters.
Source: Firewalk Studios

How will things proceed?

Whether Sony will bury the game completely or make a comeback with a free-to-play payment model remains to be seen. It’s rare for games to be completely taken off the market and then re-released.

One example of a successful relaunch is Final Fantasy 14: in 2010, developer Square Enix received a lot of criticism after the release of its MMORPG and took the game offline shortly afterwards. Two years later, it was re-released as the heavily revised Final Fantasy 14: Reborn and became a huge success.

Only one thing is certain at the moment – Secret Level, a new TV series, will be released on Amazon Prime in December. Each episode of the animated series is dedicated to a different game. In the announcement, Concord was named as one of the games that will feature in the series. For the time being, it seems, the Concord episode in Secret Level will be the last appearance of this failed live service experiment.

Header image: Firewalk Studios - Cinematic Trailer

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Debora Pape

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Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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