What went wrong with Concord?

It was at the end of May that Sony announced Concord, developed by Firewalk Studios. It was shown off with a pre-rendered trailer, and after the Sony event, a small gameplay presentation was then waiting. To say the game got off to a flying start would be a lie, because our comments sections and social media as well as other major gaming forums quickly began to fill with criticism about a gameplay that didn't look particularly engaging, and a character design that looked so anonymous we barely remember what the fighters look like even after playing it.

So what was on show then? Well, a team-based action game in the same vein as Overwatch, but also borrowing liberally from titles like Apex Legends, Paladins and even Cliff Bleszinski's Lawbreakers. A so-called Hero Shooter. It's a game type for which there is definitely a market, but people seemed to see no reason to play it. The PlayStation audience is a demanding one, used to first-class entertainment from Sony, and this simply didn't deliver.

This meant that interest in the game was minimal, and when a beta was run in July, player numbers were worryingly low. Perhaps Firewalk Studios and Sony were hoping that interest would pick up, because the following month (23 August), it was time for the premiere. But it didn't take many hours before we could sense that something wasn't right. Six hours after the game's release - around the time when servers tend to have problems for popular titles - there were at most 697 players playing simultaneously via Steam. An absolutely hair-raisingly low figure.

After that, things did not get better, but rather worse. The hope was that it would only be the PC players who missed Concord, but that it had found a large audience on the PlayStation. Yesterday we got proof that this was not the case. Sony announced that they are simply pulling the plug on Concord, stopping sales and closing the servers. Those who bought the game will get their money back, a move Microsoft previously used after the Redfall flop.

To continue talking about Redfall, which made an unprecedented belly flop last year, and was also prematurely cancelled - it reached a maximum of 6124 concurrent players via Steam. It was considered incredibly bad, but Concord (as mentioned above) peaked at 697. That Redfall was almost ten times more popular perhaps shows the extent of the flop. Even the reviled The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, last year's biggest flop and perhaps worst game, reached more players than Concord.

The game had been in development for around eight years and had an estimated budget of between $100 and $200 million. We know that Sony <a href='https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/firesprite-s-twisted-metal-game-among-canceled-playstation-projects' target='_blank'>said no</a> to making a new Twisted Metal and they also cancelled the multiplayer title The Last of Us: Factions. Reasonably, all the money Concord cost would have been enough to both make a Twisted Metal and finish Factions.

So why did they go for it so hard? It's no secret that Sony has cut back on its big single-player adventures, and instead has been focusing more and more on live service projects. Not because their community asked for it, but because they're considered more profitable. They still have plenty of projects in the pipeline, and one suspects that the odd manager in the PlayStation department is now nervously going through the projects they are working on.

As I've mentioned before, everyone wants to make the next big multiplayer game, at any cost, because the potential profits could be semi-infinite. But there is only a market for a few such titles, making it an extremely difficult goal to achieve. Hopefully the pendulum will start to swing back eventually (look at 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 went wrong with Concord in particular?

One big problem is that hero shooters are a fairly tight market. I'm not saying it can't grow, but for a game to do very well, it has to take players from other greats in this category. And then it has to be so good and unique that people feel it's worth switching. As Petter wrote in our review "Given that they have borrowed so liberally from Paladins, Overwatch and even Lawbreakers and thus failed to build their own identity, there is no reason for me to continue playing - when I can continue to enjoy the originals instead."

Another big problem is its characters. Since the beginning of time, when so-called representation, inclusiveness and diversity in the entertainment industry was quite weak, the pendulum has almost swung the other way. Today, it feels like film and game makers are almost stuck with some kind of template that must be followed to include everything, which means that creativity takes a hit when things have to be a certain way. That this was particularly important in Concord is obvious, and already when the game was first shown, we saw how all the characters' pronouns were clearly visible. You can think what you want about that (and you can safely say that people did), but it's clear that immediately afterwards there was a fairly diverse group of people who opted out of the game without even blinking.

When this template is combined with consideration of other prevailing trends such as body positivism and a belief that not all heroes have to be good-looking, we end up with a bunch of characters that seem designed to rub everybody the wrong way rather than create really cool characters. A collection of very middle-of-the-road warriors, if you will, who completely fail to create any kind of engagement. Ultimately, when this is topped off with some lousy fashion sense from the developers (hairstyles, clothes and so on), we have a bunch of heroes people don't care about. It's not because I identify with Street Fighter-Guile, Dead or Alive-Kasumi and Overwatch-Winston that I play as them - it's because they are everything I'm not.

Another general mistake made was to actually charge for Concord. Where Fortnite, Apexz Legends and Overwatch 2 are free to play, Sony instead charged £35. For that money, you get a multiplayer game that looks free-to-play in every way, yet we know for sure that there will be extra content that costs extra. This meant that extremely few people were actually willing to test if it was something for them.

Finally, there is the fact that the game was not very good. Not bad either, but again middling. We gave it a score of six, and in the review Petter wrote, among other things, that "At the end of the day, Concord is not a bad game. Not at all. It's passable, all the way through. The matches are okay in terms of entertainment value, the gameplay is okay, and the developers have done a decent job of building their own hero-fest based on the track record of Blizzard.". But... making a passable game that's just okay is obviously not enough in the fierce competition that exists. Concord would have to outperform the other games it competes against for people to want to switch.

In thepress release confirming Concord's closure, Sony writes 'we have decided to take the game offline as of 6 September 2024 and explore alternatives, including ones that better reach our players'. This makes it sound like Sony isn't ruling out the possibility of Concord making a comeback after all, then likely as free-to-play. But I doubt that will actually happen. After all, people didn't even want to play Concord when it was free with the beta in July, and I've listed several of the obvious flaws above. And I don't think either Firewalk Studios or Sony are keen on attempting another launch followed by another potential flop.

My guess is that instead of being forgotten, the game will remain on ice until we hear that it has been cancelled for good in an interview in a couple of years. With only two weeks on the market and this astonishingly poor result, Concord will be regarded as the biggest gaming flop of all time, and I suspect that it will be seen as a cautionary tale in education and among developers for a long time to come.