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.
The Steam version of the game peaked at well under 700 players just after launch, according to SteamDB tracking.
Concord was the first game from Firewalk Studios, which formed in 2018 before being acquired by Sony just last year.
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.
Just two weeks after its August 23 launch, Sony’s team-based online shooter Concord has been taken offline and removed from sale on Friday, September 6. Publisher Sony has decided to give refunds to all players who bought the game on PC or PlayStation 5, according to a statement made by Ryan Ellis, the director of games at Firewalk Studios, on Tuesday.
There might not be a lot of refunds Sony needs to give out. Only 0.2 percent of all active PS5 players were playing the game on Monday, according to pc\. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, and it was the 147th most-played title that day. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last week that he estimated an unimpressive 25,000 total sales for the game across PS5.
SteamDB tracking indicates that the game’s Steam version peaked with fewer than 700 players shortly after launch. In contrast to other popular recent releases like Star Wars Outlaws (4,300 PSNProfiles owners) and Black Myth: Wukong (16,000 PSNProfiles-tracked owners), Concord’s ownership on PlayStation was recorded by just over 1,300 users on the popular opt-in trophy tracking site PSNProfiles.
Ellis stated, “We acknowledge that some aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” even though many aspects of the experience struck a chord with players.
How did it go wrong?
That being said, neither Firewalk nor Sony had this rapid shutdown in mind for the game. Ellis was promoting Concord’s upcoming launch less than a month ago, hinting at a “major content drop” scheduled for October as well as the possibility of custom crew buildouts in the future.
Ellis stated in the August promotional post, “We see launch as just the beginning.”. “This marks the start of both the mission we have for Concord and the process by which we will work with our players to develop the game. ****.
Before Firewalk Studios was recently acquired by Sony, it was founded in 2018. Concord was the studio’s debut game. According to lead character designer Jon Weisnewski, the game has been in development for about eight years, so development began when Blizzard’s Overwatch was still a novel idea rather than the dated origin of a crowded genre.
Concord debuted in a rough playable form this May after being teased at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase in May of last year. However, by the time August’s launch arrived, it was evident that the market wasn’t particularly interested in yet another live-service team shooter that didn’t offer anything novel. With a very low Metacritic score of 65, Concord was only recommended by 24% of reviewers that OpenCritic tracked.
Concord’s experience reminds me of the struggles faced by Amazon’s Crucible, a somewhat newcomer to the competitive shooter market, as well as their own struggles. Even though it was removed from Steam much earlier, the game only managed to stutter along for six months before it was shut down. Though Concord was shut down quickly, there is a small chance that it will resurface in the future. Ellis states that in the future, Firewalk and Sony will “ascertain the best path ahead” and “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”. Is Concord about to make another increasingly common turn to a free-to-play model?
