It’s like nobody told them.
Yes, it is true. The recently released Hero Shooter Concord is going to be shut down on September 6th, just two weeks after launch. Sony has literally gotten a world-record speedrun when it comes to having a hero shooter fail.
Concord fans — we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar. Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us.
However, 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. Therefore, 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.
While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If you purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to your original payment method.
Customers who purchased from other digital storefronts will also be refunded. More information about refunds from Steam and Epic can be found below:
Steam Store – Steam Store will refund players who bought the game over the coming days. Steam will send confirmation of the refund once it has been processed.
Epic Games Store – Epic Games Store will refund players who bought the game over the coming days and will contact each customer directly to confirm that the refund has been processed.
Other retailer refunds – For customers who have purchased a physical copy at a retailer location outside of PlayStation directly, please refer to the refund process of the retailer you purchased it from to obtain your refund.
Once refunded, players will no longer have access to the game.
We’ll keep you updated and thank you again to all the Freegunners who have joined us in the Concord galaxy.
Concord was in development at Firewalk Studios for 8 years, and cost over $100 million to create. Sony bought the studio relatively close to release in early 2023, though. Despite this, not only did sales go poorly, but the playerbase was incredibly tiny. So much so, that the server costs alone were causing Sony to take a bath, such that maintaining them for a full month has been deemed not worth it.
And it really needs to be said: how is it that, over the course of those 8 years, no one told them that their characters were some of the most hideously ugly designs in the genre. The only design anyone liked is the trash can robot painted in “I think… I can climb this!” yellow. One of their most prominently advertised characters is Thugnificent after crashing into a thrift store. Each of these characters is deeply, deeply ugly in ways I find myself at a loss to describe, ranging from uninspired to uncanny calamity of stuff glued to a character model. Simply avoiding a “realistic” art style would have been one of the most massive improvements they could’ve made, and they didn’t. I could run down the entire roster, but I really don’t want to subject my eyes to that.
They have one generic CoD guy that looks like his space armor is a bunch of football pads.
David Ryder had a better costume, and I’m pretty sure it was just a tank top and silver lamé pants.
It actually gets worse, because Nintendo decided to put out an update on the upcoming Mario & Luigi game, which just so happens to be set in a place called… Concordia.
But the real stinger to all of this is the fact that Concord was chosen as one of the features for Amazon’s upcoming anthology series Secret Level. By the time Concord‘s episode airs, the game will have been dead for months. They really thought they had a winner with this one.
The sudden nature of the game’s end of service, however, has brought out the trophy hunters. And how are they getting those trophies? Well, character suicide, of course!
One of the major problems Concord faced (aside from its ugly ass characters) however, was the nature of Games as a Service (or GaaS, for the uninitiated). Almost all Hero Shooters, to some degree, function as GaaS games; they have a battle pass, extra hero skins, all of this meaningless stuff. And the fact of the matter is, the market only has so much bandwidth for these things that suck down anywhere from 1-3 hours of your time each day. Which means that if a player is already deep into the ecosystem of one of these games, they’re probably not going to pick up another one. The market has room for one or two kings, a smattering of lords, and the rest of these games are peasants fighting in the mud for scraps… if they’re lucky, and Concord wasn’t.
All that to say that unimaginative business suits have been pushing for GaaS since they can see the potential money, but don’t see the massive, very obvious pitfalls. And that’s how these games ultimately fail; they don’t have the necessary playerbase, because there’s not enough players left to be had. It will likely not be these suits that suffer the fallout of this failure, either.
So, anyway…
~F~
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