What went wrong at Concord?

Sony announced Concord, developed by Firewalk Studios, at the end of May. It was shown off with a pre-rendered trailer and was expecting a small gameplay reveal after the Sony event. To say the game got off to a flying start would be a lie, as our comment sections and social media and other major gaming forums began to be flooded with criticism about gameplay that didn’t seem particularly engaging and character designs that looked so anonymous that we barely remember what the fighters look like after playing them.

So what was it then? A team-based action game in the same vein as Overwatch, but also borrowing heavily from games like Apex Legends, Paladins, and even Cliff Bleszinski’s Lawbreakers. A so-called Hero Shooter. It’s a genre that certainly has a market, but people just don’t seem to see any reason to play it. The PlayStation audience is demanding, used to Sony’s premium entertainment, and that’s simply not being met.

This meant that interest in the game was minimal, and when a beta ran in July, player numbers were alarmingly low. Perhaps Firewalk Studios and Sony were hoping that interest would pick up because it was set to premiere the following month (August 23). But it didn’t take long before we started to sense that something wasn’t right. Six hours after the game went live – around the same time that servers for popular games tend to struggle – there were a maximum of 697 players playing simultaneously on Steam. A chillingly low number, to be sure.

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Things didn’t get any better after that, they got worse. The hope was that only PC gamers would miss out on Concord, but it had a wide audience on PlayStation. Yesterday we got proof that wasn’t the case. Sony announced that it was pulling the plug on Concord, stopping sales and shutting down the servers. Those who bought the game will get their money back, a move Microsoft has already made after the Redfall fiasco.

Let’s continue talking about Redfall, which hit rock bottom last year and was also cancelled early – it reached a maximum of 6,124 concurrent players on Steam. It was rated incredibly bad, but Concord (as mentioned above) reached 697. The fact that Redfall is nearly ten times more popular perhaps speaks to the scale of the fiasco. Even the biggest flop and perhaps worst game of last year, the infamous Lord of the Rings: Gollum, reached more players than Concord.

The game was in development for about eight years and its estimated budget was as follows: Between $100 and $200 millionSony is planning to make a new Twisted Metal No We know he said that, and also canceled the multiplayer game The Last of Us: Factions. Logically, the entire cost of Concord would have been enough to both make Twisted Metal and kill Factions.

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So why is it so hard? It’s no secret that Sony has been cutting back on its big single-player adventures and focusing more and more on live service projects instead. Not because their community wants it, but because they’re more profitable. They still have a bunch of projects in the works, and it’s suspected that some strange PlayStation executive is nervously examining the projects they’re currently working on.

As I mentioned before, everyone wants to make the next big multiplayer game at all costs because the potential profits are semi-infinite. But there are only a few markets for these types of games, making them an incredibly difficult goal to achieve. Hopefully the pendulum will eventually start to swing back (see games like Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, Elden Ring, and Dragon’s Dogma 2 – just to name a few), but we’re definitely not there yet.

So what specifically went wrong at Concord?

A big problem is that hero shooters are a pretty narrow market. I’m not saying it can’t grow, but for a game to do really well, it needs to attract players from other greats in the category. And then it needs to be so good and unique that people feel it’s worth switching to. As Petter wrote in our article review “Given that they borrow so generously from Paladins, Overwatch, and even Lawbreakers, and thus fail to establish their own identity, there’s no reason for me to keep playing when I can still enjoy the originals.”

Another big problem is its characters. Since the beginning of time when representation, inclusivity and diversity in the entertainment industry were supposedly pretty weak, the pendulum has pretty much swung the other way. Today, it feels like film and game creators are almost stuck in a kind of template that they have to follow in order to include everything, which means creativity suffers when everything has to be a certain way. It’s clear that this is especially important in Concord, and when the game was first revealed, we saw how all the characters clearly had their pronouns. Whatever you think of that (and you can safely say that people do), but it’s clear that there’s a pretty diverse group of people who immediately walked out of the game without batting an eyelid.

This template, combined with other common trends like body positivity and the belief that not all heroes have to be good-looking, results in a bunch of characters that are designed to annoy everyone instead of creating truly great characters. A collection of very average fighters, if you will, who completely fail to create any kind of engagement. The result is a bunch of heroes that people don’t care about, complete with the developers’ terrible fashion sense (hairstyles, clothing, etc.). I don’t play them because I identify with Street Fighter-Guile, Dead or Alive-Kasumi, and Overwatch-Winston – they’re everything I’m not.

Another common mistake was actually charging for Concord. While Fortnite, Apexz Legends and Overwatch 2 were all free to play, Sony instead charged £35. For that money, you get a multiplayer game that looks like it could be played for free in every way, but there’s sure to be some extra content that costs extra. This meant that very few people were willing to test out whether it was something for them.

Finally, there’s the fact that the game isn’t very good. It’s not bad, but it’s still average. We gave it a six-star rating, and Petter wrote in his review, among other things: “All in all, Concord isn’t a bad game. Not at all. It’s passable from start to finish. The matches aren’t bad in terms of entertainment value, the gameplay isn’t bad, and the developers have done a good job of building their own hero festival around Blizzard’s track record.”. But… just making a passable game is clearly not enough in the fierce competition that exists. Concord would need to outperform the other games it competes with for people to want to pass.

InsidePress release Confirming the closure of Concord, Sony wrote: ‘We have decided to take the game offline as of September 6, 2024 and explore alternatives that will better reach our players’. This gives the impression that Sony hasn’t ruled out the possibility of Concord making a comeback, then presumably free-to-play. But I doubt that will actually happen. After all, people didn’t even want to play Concord when it went free in beta in July, and I listed a few of the glaring flaws above. And I don’t think Firewalk Studios or Sony are willing to try another launch and then another potential fiasco.

My guess is that instead of the game being forgotten, it will remain on ice until we hear it’s been canceled. Cancelled “In a few years’ time, it’s going to get better. With just two weeks on the market and this staggeringly poor showing, Concord will be considered the biggest gaming flop of all time, and I suspect it will be seen as a cautionary tale in education and among developers for a long time to come.”