Concord, there are so many jokes to be made here, I’ll make one right now. There are more articles about how bad, bland or about its dismal player count than there are players for it. It was developed by Firewalk Studios under Sony, it was released on August 23rd of this year and it shut down on September 6th.
The Live Service Gamble
It was reported that Sony had immediately bought Firewalk Studios after having played the game and they were so certain that this new Intellectual Property (IP) was gonna be such a hit that they skipped marketing it at all. Thus nobody heard of the game, even when a trailer was shown at the Playstation State Of Play in May of this year.
It is not to be said lightly, this one of the most expensive flops in the industry to date, the idea was reportedly conceived 8 years ago and was being developed for 4 years, there are multiple reports with multiple triple digit numbers being thrown around, some say it cost 200 million some say 150 million but its the Sony executives who could have never seen this coming in a million years.
We have actually seen this before with Arkane Studios’ Redfall, another live-service that bombed so badly that Microsoft shutdown the Studio, but Phil Spencer, the CEO of Microsoft Gaming had said that internal reviews of the game was putting it way above what regular players and critics had to say.
It’s clear that all these big companies see is money, they think that just because Overwatch 2, Apex Legends and Valorant can do it, they can also get into the market on their own live service and thus make a bunch of money, business is easy right? Unfortunately Sony realized too late that presenting yet another hero shooter wasn’t going to attract anyone much less those who’ve already played Apex Legends or Valorant.
I See 4 Years Of Development, I See 0 Years Of Creativity
The lack of creativity is being relayed as one of the big reasons for its downfall, the characters are simply boring. Nothing about their design speaks to their abilities or roles in the game and everyone’s first thought after looking at the cast of characters was “This is Guardians of the Galaxy at home”.
It doesn’t at all help Concord when Sony fails to learn from its mistake as this game is also unavailable in however many countries Helldivers 2 was unavailable in because of Sony’s requirement for a playstation account, they truly only see money and how to make it by following the current trend.
They Priced It At 40 Dollars, Why?
Again, while there aren’t any players in Concord’s servers right now, it seems like Sony is playing the speedrunning game of choosing every bad decision. They thought they could compete with the likes of Apex Legends, Valorant and most recently Marvel Rivals with a 40 dollar price tag when all of Concord’s competitors are Free-to-play.
Although the letter by Firewalk Studios’ game director, Ryan Ellis did indicate that it may shift to the free-to-play model later on, but that still may not be enough as a lot of the core gameplay systems of Concord need proper work, these problems were reported by every critic and journalists who played the game before the official release of Concord but alas those words fell of Sony’s dollar clogged ears.
Companies Have To At Least Try and Take Some Notes
At the end of the day there are multiple reasons why it failed, horrible mechanics in the game which either felt that it was there to differentiate itself for the sake of differentiation and nothing more, uninteresting characters, uninteresting story, everything felt too generic and something we’ve seen before.
This should be taken as a lesson to other big companies that pouring money in to a new IP that follows the same trend and isn’t even trying to innovate to bring something new to the genre isn’t really worth the huge investment, Sony could’ve easily made this a non live-service game with an actual campaign or they could have listened to the dozens and dozens of reviewers telling them to put this back in the oven let it cook some more.
Alas the cycle will now repeat, big company executives make horrible, zero IQ decisions and the ones that get punished are the developers who were told to make the game by said executives getting fired, while they get a pointless bonus and expand their useless car collection.
