Sony’s Concord a historic failure
Sony announced today that live service Concord will be shut down only a week after release. The company also announced they will be offering full refunds to anyone who purchased it on PSN or Steam.
“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,” developer Firewalk said in a press release published on the official PlayStation Blog. “At this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”
This is unprecedented for the AAA industry as a whole, and Sony in particular. While there have certainly been plenty of bombs in the past, none have quite reached this magnitude. Concord is rumoured to have cost Sony up to $250 million to make, yet only sold an estimated 25,000 copies. At its $40 price tag, it would have to sell up 6.25 to 8.93 million copies (factoring in a 30% store cut for non-PSN sales) just to break even. To put it into perspective, it would have to sell more copies than Bloodborne before the game even started turning a profit. To have a reasonably good ROI, it would have to do the same numbers as the top ten PS4 games.
It’s clear Sony fully expected Concord to do significantly better than it did. They even released a special edition DualSense controller for it. However, it came under heavy criticism from the gaming community ever since the first trailer dropped. Independent reviewers have called it the Wish.com version of Overwatch, noting its derivative mechanics which don’t even attempt to do anything new. Meanwhile, it was the game’s characters that quickly caught the ire of gamers. Players were met with a “diverse” cast of unappealing “progressive” heroes to choose from, including an obese black woman and a trash can robot with pronouns. In short, the game was ugly and not particularly fun to play.
Last month’s beta showed rather tepid numbers on Steam. Firewalk rejected player feedback as “noise”. Then the game launched to an all-time peak of just 697 players. Those who did buy Concord complained of difficulty finding matches, as there often weren’t enough players to make two teams of five. In my 30 plus years of gaming, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything tank this bad from such a big company.
The good news is that Concord’s failure may be the beginning of the end for “wokeness” in video games. Concord was specifically created to cater to the “modern audience”. A new crop of socially conscious players who want their games to reflect them. For years, culture critics said this audience doesn’t exist. However they were brushed off as nothing more than bigots. Now we have concrete numbers. Even Squirrel With a Gun is pulling considerably higher player counts. And remember that’s a silly meme game made by a small indie team, on a fraction of a fraction of the budget. Producing these expensive, politically charged games just isn’t sustainable anymore. Nor are the long (it reportedly took Concord 8-years) development cycles that have publishers chasing fads that die off before the game can even release. Gamers are getting burnt out on this sort of corporate trash, and the numbers show it.
It’s likely Concord will now be retooled as a free-to-play title with microtransactions, in order to recoup some of the losses. Though it’s unlikely it will ever make its money back. With failures and layoffs mounting, it seems at this point the games industry isn’t just headed for another 1983 crash, they’re already well into it.
