What Killed PlayStation’s Multiplayer Shooter, ‘Concord?’

PlayStation’s Concord launched on Aug. 23; as of today, it’s dead. Conceived eight years ago by former Bungie developers (Destiny, Halo) by then working at Firewalk Studios, Concord and its team were brought into Sony PlayStation’s first-party portfolio in April 2023. The goal was to help bolster the live-service strategy on which the company was pinning its future success, as reported by The Verge.

See, games are expensive to make these days. Although Sony’s single-player titles are critically acclaimed and the vast majority sell well, the revenue they earn is capped by how many PlayStation consoles are in the wild. Looking to solve that problem, Sony turned to live service games as a solution, and, as reported by Eurogamer, at one point had more than 10 in development.

Concord was the first new IP Sony had built from the ground up as a live-service, with hopes for it to be their own Fortnite or Destiny — a gigantic multimedia IP aiming to generate money for years to come from its player base across PlayStation 5 and PC. Now, after just two weeks, the game has been pulled from sale and had its online servers shuttered. Players who purchased the game have been refunded their money. Concord’s future is at best uncertain and at worst already six feet under.

How did one of the most successful game publishers of all time release one of their biggest commercial failures in its history? Here is what went wrong.

What is Concord? 

Concord was a 5v5 competitive multiplayer shooter set in an original sci-fi universe with mercenaries known as Freegunners completing jobs as a part of crews across the galaxy. As a Freegunner crew, you jump into these multiplayer matches and aim to come out on top in a variety of modes against other crews, from your traditional Team Deathmatch (called “Takedown”) matches to objective-based modes like Area Control. 

You were able to choose from 16 different characters at the start of a match and switch between them freely each time you respawned after a mid-game death. All of these characters had their own unique abilities and weapons in a similar style to Overwatch, which the game was clearly modeled after. 

Haymar, for example, was a human who had an exploding crossbow she could use to kill opponents, alongside fire walls and blinding grenades that could push enemies back from an objective. 1-0FF, on the other hand, was a giant yellow robot who could suck up enemy projectiles with his cannon and fire air from it to damage enemies, as well as place large wind tunnels that diverted projectiles away from your team. Star-Child was a bulky tank class who could rush into groups of enemies with his shotgun and generate shields for himself.

The different abilities and roles of each Freegunner meant that you could work together as a team, utilizing their abilities and deployable items to gain an advantage in a match.

Despite being an original IP, Concord felt entirely derivative from the moment it was announced. Many of its ideas had been seen before. It pulled pieces and parts from other games, movies, and areas to create its own version of them — a fact mentioned in our impressions of the game back in July. Star Child felt just like Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy. 1-0FF’s one-note personality could have been found from one of the droids in Star Wars. Other characters had abilities lifted directly from other shooters’, like Jabali’s healing and damage orbs, which were almost identical to Zenyatta’s orbs in Overwatch.

Similarly, the six game modes here, spread across three playlists, can all be seen in Call of Duty, Overwatch, Valorant, Counter-Strike, and various other shooters that have existed for years. Aside from the multiplayer, the game had some training modes and a firing range, alongside a variety of progression systems to unlock cosmetics for characters, although most of these were simple reskins. 

The game also had something called the Galactic Guide, effectively a giant lore book full of information about Concord’s universe and all of the Freegunners’ lives before they entered this space-faring life. Weekly cutscenes would have expanded on this lore as a part of the game’s live-service model.

Is Concord good? 

Depending on who you ask, Concord was either a decent alternative hero-shooter to Overwatch or a game out of time chasing a trend from almost a decade ago. For some it was both. Review scores range greatly on Metacritic, but there are a lot of middling scores that highlight the game’s lack of original ideas and underdeveloped characters.

Many felt that the game was too familiar, resembling the well-worn style of games like Overwatch or Valorant, while failing to forge its own identity. IGN said, “As competitive hero shooters go, this sci-fi contender from Sony plays it quite safe.” PC Gamer was even more critical, saying that the game’s characters were “by and large forgettable, lacking the distinctive flavor of their contemporaries.”

However, most critics didn’t think it was an absolute failure, just a misguided game that should have been free-to-play instead of having a $40 entry fee. With big ambitions, many saw a future for the game — that was until the player numbers came in.

As reported by SteamDB (a stat tracking site for the Steam platform), Concord’s all-time peak player count on PC was a meager 697 players. Before that, during the game’s open beta, where anyone with a PC could join in for free, it only achieved a peak player count of 2,388 players, according to Sports Illustrated. 

That is well below the player counts of other games that were considered a failure or a “flop” by their publishers, like Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, Xbox’s Redfall, and Ubisoft’s Hyper Scape. The game reportedly sold around 25,000 copies across PS5 and PC, according to GameDiscover.co analyst Simon Carless, speaking to IGN. By comparison, Overwatch sold over 50 million copies prior to going free-to-play for its sequel.

Concord’s budget was likely enormous, with hyper-realistic character models, motion-captured cinematics already made to support the weekly release schedule, and the credits reveal a whole IP-building team who were helping shepherd this franchise to success. That team was even able to nab a Concord-themed episode in Amazon’s upcoming gaming anthology series, Secret Level, which is still set to release in December, according to a source from IGN.

Taking all of that into context, Concord is easily one of the biggest failures of investment in IP, in the live-service genre, and in gaming in general, that the industry has ever seen.

What went wrong with Concord? 

Trying to answer what went wrong with Concord is a tricky task because there isn’t just one thing you can point to. The sum of all the small things the game, Firewalk, and Sony got wrong led to the game getting pulled from sale and Firewalk Studios and Sony determining the “best path ahead” for it, as Firewalk’s Game Director Ryan Ellis said in a PlayStation blog post.

However, it can all be traced back to the game’s eight-year development. The entire business model is based on Overwatch’s initial success, launching as a $60 game back in 2016. Getting that model to succeed in 2024 is a risky move. By being stuck in production for so long, Concord was chasing a trend that had since gone by, leaving the game feeling like it is out of time. 

Huge subsections of players are tired of the saturation the live-service genre has seen in recent years. More and more games are fighting for their time to stay playing for weeks and even months to keep up with content drops, and being encouraged to spend money at the same time. Similarly, a lot of players are already invested years of playtime and hundreds of dollars in another shooter or live service. Call of Duty, Fortnite, and the most popular mobile games try to ensure you are only playing their game by offering up limited-time rewards and rapidly releasing seasons of content, so players experience FOMO.

One completely baffling aspect of Concord’s final product was the underdeveloped nature of the game’s characters and the pages and pages of lore and universe building buried in the Galactic Guide — none of which is anywhere to be found within the gameplay itself. Why was so much money spent on weekly cutscenes that resembled being drip-fed an hour-long TV show over a year? That money could have been spent on crafting compelling, six-to-10-hour story campaigns achieving the same level of universe building, if not more.

One of the oldest sayings when it comes to visual storytelling is “Show, don’t tell,” and Concord does way too much of the latter. The game buried character details and interesting environments in thousands of words of lore barely anyone will ever read. 

This can even be seen in the game’s box art, the first thing customers will see on the PlayStation Store or at retail. To anyone who doesn’t know what Concord is, this art tells them nothing about what kind of game it is or what they can expect. Sony also revealed the game in the worst way in 2023, with a vague CGI trailer showcasing a ship, and didn’t actually discuss what type of game Concord was in detail or show it off until three months before its launch. It was an incredibly poor first-foot forward. 

Sony also ignored many calls for a delay to improve the game’s systems and overall quality. As reported by The Gamer, reception to Concord’s first gameplay trailer was poor. Many creators and streamers were suggesting Firewalk and Sony delay the game after the beta’s weak reception to rework some of the game’s ideas and change the business model that relied on people spending $40. 

Given those criticisms, Sony could have delayed Concord, taken some time to rework its business model, and helped Firewalk rework some of the game’s systems (even potentially bringing in another studio to help support them). Instead, they decided to release it anyway, as games with considerably more momentum were set to be released, like Black Myth: Wukong and Star Wars Outlaws, drowning out Concord in the noise.

Smaller areas also stand out ,such as the game’s lack of a big general marketing spend outside of online ads and paid sponsorship streams and videos. Most Sony games will be marketed in movie theaters and on buses and billboards across the globe, like with Astro Bot (ironically releasing the same day Concord goes offline and is already one of Sony’s highest-rated games of all time).