Summary
Concordhas been in a death spiral since it launched. Itnever managed to crack 700 concurrent playerson PC, and it only got worse from there – player countsdipped into the 200s, andeventually the double digits. Ittook ages to find matchesto even play the game, even with cross-play enabled, because so few people were playing at any one time.
This has now culminated in the game being pulled from thePlayStationStore entirely, less than two weeks after launch. In a move that shocked many, myself included, Concord game director Ryan Ellisposted a statementon behalf of Firewalk Studios announcing that the team has “decided to take the game offline beginning June 27, 2025, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players”. Sales of the game will cease immediately, and the studio will offer full refunds to anybody who purchased the game forPS5orPC.
Many of us expected Concord to eventually be retooled, but very few expected that the developer would take action so quickly. 15 days is an extraordinarily short amount of time for a game to be out in the world before it’s clawed back entirely – evenBioWare’s failed live-service entry,Anthem, tried to make it work for a couple of years before giving up. Perhaps it’s because Concord’s fate was written on the wall from the start – it’s not a bad game, butnobody would give it a shotbecause nobody believed it had a fighting chance. Buttwo weeks?
On the one hand, it sickens me to imagine being one of the developers who worked on this game right now. Because I actually like video games, I don’t celebrate when games fail – every bad launch has a human cost, especially right now as the industry is ravaged by layoff after layoff. To have eight years of work be out in the world for barely two weeks before it’s torn down must be incredibly difficult – eight years of work taken offline because Concord had to prove it deserved to exist within a matter of days to be considered viable at all. It’s likely that a lot of these developers will lose their jobs.
This isn’t entirely on the developers, who made what isby all accounts a decent game, if a boring one. Concord’s existence is the result of a combination of triple-A and live-service trends that publishers jumped on. Years of time and truckloads of money were poured into a polished game that nobody wanted by the time it was ready to be put into the world. Concord had a fleshed out plan for the long-term that never got time to shine because it was taken out of service so quickly.
On the other hand, I’m glad that Firewalk Studios acted early and quickly instead of letting the game languish for months and likely fade into total obscurity. The wording of the statement implies that Concord will be returning, just not in the same form. I’ve written thatI suspect Concord will be rereleased as a free-to-play game, though nobody expected that to be done quite so soon. In that piece, I wrote that going F2P could provide Concord the boost in player numbers it so sorely needs, and Firewalk acting so quickly after the title’s launch could be enough to give it new life through an influx of curious players.
But I’m not optimistic. Concord is facing the double whammy of being unoriginal and, inexplicably, getting dragged into a culture war against ‘wokeness’, because it has… uh… Black characters and pronouns? The reasoning is unclear. It’s also got far more established competition, and while the game has a cool concept, good graphics, and multiple game modes, it doesn’t have a gameplan to draw people away from the games they’re already playing.
Concord going F2P is not a guarantee that it will succeed, and worse, it will likely have to implement those nasty microtransactions everybody hates that its price tag served to circumvent. The aforementioned Anthem also underwent a rework, and ended up dying anyway before it made it out of the door. But doing literallyanythingwith this game is better than throwing eight years of work into the void to disappear forever.
Either way, Concord is a mistake that never should have been made, and it was a direct result of C-suite decisions to prioritise massive triple-A live-service projects in a time when they were already falling out of favour. I hate to say that game cancellations are the best outcome, because that’s still years of developer work going down the drain, but it does feel like the best case scenario here is that Sony sees Concord’s failure as a sign to stop working on its absurd line of upcoming live-service games and pivot to something, anything else. I don’t want to see this happening over and over when it should never have happened at all.
Concord
WHERE TO PLAY
Concord is an upcoming FPS from Firewalk Studios, part of the PlayStation Studios family. A PvP multiplayer title, it is slated for launch on both PS5 and PC in 2024.
