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Sony is shutting down Concord, refunding players after just two weeks

Team-based shooter eight years in the making had just 25,000 estimated sales.

Kyle Orland – | 579
This team-based FPS combat scene was apparently too familiar to attract all that many players to Concord. Credit: Sony
This team-based FPS combat scene was apparently too familiar to attract all that many players to Concord. Credit: Sony
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Sony’s team-based online shooter Concord has been removed from sale and will be taken offline on Friday, September 6, just two weeks after its August 23 launch. Firewalk Studios Game Director Ryan Ellis said in an announcement Tuesday that publisher Sony will offer refunds to all players who purchased the game on PC or PlayStation 5.

Sony may not need to pay out that many refunds. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last week that he estimated an underwhelming 25,000 total sales for the game across PS5 and PC. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, meanwhile, said that just 0.2 percent of all active PS5 players were playing the game last Monday, making it the 147th most-played title for that day.

The Steam version of the game peaked at well under 700 players just after launch, according to SteamDB tracking. On PlayStation, popular opt-in trophy tracking site PSNProfiles logged just over 1,300 players who owned Concord, a relatively small showing compared to popular recent releases like Star Wars Outlaws (4,300 PSNProfiles owners) and Black Myth: Wukong (16,000 PSNProfiles-tracked owners).

“While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” Ellis wrote.

What went wrong?

Suffice it to say, this quick shutdown is not what Firewalk or Sony envisioned for the game. Just under a month ago, Ellis was talking up Concord‘s impending launch by teasing a “major content drop” planned for October and the long-term potential for custom crew buildouts.

“We see launch as just the beginning,” Ellis said in the August promotional post. “The beginning of not only the vision we’ve set out for Concord, but also the beginning of how we support and grow the game with our players.”

Concord was the first game from Firewalk Studios, which formed in 2018 before being acquired by Sony just last year. The game has been in development for around eight years, according to lead character designer Jon Weisnewski, meaning work on the title started when Blizzard’s Overwatch was a hot new concept rather than the aging progenitor of a crowded genre.

Concord was teased at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase last May and was first shown in a rough playable form this May. By August’s launch, though, it was clear there was little market appetite for yet another live service team shooter that didn’t bring much new to the table. Concord was only recommended by 24 percent of reviewers tracked by OpenCritic and is sitting at an extremely underwhelming score of 65 on Metacritic.

Concord‘s fate brings to mind that of Amazon’s Crucible, another newcomer that found it hard to find a place in a crowded shooter market. That game managed to limp along for just six months before being shut down, though it was delisted from Steam well before that death.

Despite Concord‘s quick shutdown, the door has been left open just a crack for a potential revival at some point. Ellis writes that Firewalk and Sony will “determine the best path ahead” and “explore options, including those that will better reach our players” in the future. Perhaps another increasingly common pivot to a free-to-play model is in Concord‘s future?

Listing image: Sony

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Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
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Overwatch itself is barely tolerable and has essentially total market dominance among the people who can tolerate that style of game.

The idea of even trying to compete directly with a nonexistent IP no meaningful innovations and an actual price barrier is just so poorly thought out it's stunning.

I wouldn't jump to simplistic conclusions though.

I think there was break down on how 'free to play' games like Fortnite is full of paid for cosmetics, doesn't have any solid story and is just grindatons.

These are actually valid complains from players. From 8 - 6 years ago though, but they are still valid today.

Thing is, this game had lot of things working against it:
  • market is incredible shrunk right now. New IP with price tag, that is multiplayer title, even with story is very hard sell;
  • people decrease spending even on Fortnite;
  • fact that it is clone of Guardians Of Galaxy does not help, although i didn't mind trailer, it was professionally put together;
  • people who liked it really liked it. But they very very few;
  • This comes to main conclusion - such games can't have huge AAA budgets at launch. They just can't;

And in the end, Sony sent it out to die. With zero advertising. Because that costs.

My heart goes to devs who worked on this for years. Yes, it might not be excellent game, but it did not look complete disaster as Suicide Squad and that is still going.

Overall gaming maybe lucrative...for some, but remains hugely risky for everyone. It is entertainment. Replayable entertainment. It just doesn't scale, when year after year more games are kept added to catalogues and there is more selection than ever to play.
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