Concord: the Biggest Flop in Gaming History

Well, that was quick. I think Sony just set a new record!

A few months ago, during PlayStation’s ‘State of Play‘ May event, we got our first look at Sony’s new IP: ‘Concord‘. First through a cinematic teaser giving us a glimpse of the characters and universe. Then through a preview showing off its hero-shooter gameplay.

Saying it failed to impress is the understatement of the century. Nobody wanted this game. A $40 hero-shooter in 2024, when the genre is brimming with long-established free-to-play games? An uninteresting ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ clone with ugly character designs and lackluster writing? Yet another unwanted live-service game in an oversaturated dying market? The writing on the wall was there from the start: this game was doomed.

Said writing only became clearer with the beta test. People got their hands on the game, and the consensus was clear: it was mediocre. Not awful, but not great. With no new interesting ideas or gameplay mechanics, it was the most generic hero-shooter you could get. There was literally no reason to play it over any of its contemporaries, let alone spend $40 on it.

It was almost impressive how unimpressive this game was. Eight years of development and a budget estimated at around $100 million dollars. All for a game that came out eight years too late.

Despite all the warning signs, Sony went ahead and released ‘Concord‘ on August 23rd. I was expecting the game to flop, but holy shit, this was astonishing! On its first day, it failed to even breach one thousand players on Steam. Barely even a week later, those already pitiful numbers dropped down into the double digits. The sales numbers for the PlayStation version haven’t been made available, but people have used PSN’s trophy tracking system to estimate that there were roughly 25,000 players on console.

I’ve seen some wild Steam charts in my day, but holy fuck.

Oh, but the failure doesn’t end there. See, Valve decided to do a power move when this game came out. For months, rumors of their new hero-shooter, ‘Deadlock‘, were bouncing around the internet. Then, on the same day ‘Concord‘ released, they opened the game up for public testing. While ‘Concord‘ was floundering, ‘Deadlock‘ was thriving, gaining over 100,000 players in a single day.

Friendly reminder that Sony shut down Japan Studio to invest in live-service games. They chose this flop over ‘Bloodborne‘. Let that sink in.

Player counts are the lifeblood of a live service. Even the worst games of the genre have a decent enough launch to keep them going for a few months or a year. ‘Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League‘ is a huge flop, but it at least had enough players to put it on life support for a year of seasonal content. ‘Concord‘ makes that game look a best seller!

Especially because Suicide Squad is still around.

Barely two weeks after launch, Sony has finally seen the numbers and pulled the plug on ‘Concord‘. The game is being shut down, and full refunds are being issued to every player. Provided they didn’t buy a physical copy; that’s between them and the store owner.

Ah, yes. Concord fans. All four of them.

For consumers, this isn’t a bad deal. Waste your time with a doomed game and get your money back. If you bothered to play it, you got to be in the top 100 players for competitive for a week! Win-win!

But for the developers at Firewalk Studios, it’s anything but. ‘Concord‘ didn’t even make them enough to keep the lights in their office on, let alone appease a corporate giant like Sony. If there are no lay-offs, or if the studio isn’t shut down completely, then I’m the Queen of England.

Say what you will about their game, but this isn’t fair to the developers. The corporate big wigs are the ones who demanded another slop live-service game. They’re the ones who made a poor investment. Yet it’s the devs who made the game, the poor foot soldiers who had no creative control over the project, who are going to lose their jobs. Meanwhile, those executives are going to get off without so much as a slap on the wrist and make the exact same mistakes with their next project.

Or maybe I’ll be wrong. Not about the layoffs, those are a sad inevitability in the industry these days. But perhaps the corporate honchos will finally pull their heads out of their asses. Hard to ignore what is very possibly the biggest failure in video game history. E.T. for the Atari crashed the industry, and even it outperformed ‘Concord‘!

I won’t cross my fingers, though. If there’s one thing a corporate suit can’t do, it’s learn.

You know what’s especially funny? Sony as so confident in ‘Concord‘, they paid for an episode about it in the upcoming anthology series, ‘Secret Level.’ More people are going to be watching that episode and wondering what game it’s adapting than there were people playing the game itself.

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