Is this the fastest game shutdown ever?
After a launch into “mixed” user reviews and tiny concurrent player counts on Steam, Sony has announced that Concord is going offline on September 6 so it can figure out where to go from here.
Sales of Concord will be halted “immediately,” Firewalk Studios game director Ryan Ellis said on the PlayStation Blog. Refunds will be offered automatically on all storefronts “over the coming days,” while anyone who purchased a physical copy will need to “refer to the refund process of the retailer you purchased it from to obtain your refund.”
This is an incredibly fast shutdown for an online game—Concord only launched on August 23—but was also probably inevitable. PS5 player counts aren’t shared publicly, but the Steam numbers are nothing short of catastrophic: The all-time peak concurrent player count, according to SteamDB, was just 697, while right now only 30 people are playing.
The speed and suddenness of the shutdown is even more notable in light of the fact that Concord had been in development for eight years, an astonishing amount of time (and, no doubt, money) for a game that folded in less than two weeks.
Ellis said Firewalk will “explore options” following the shutdown in order to “better reach our players,” and one obvious move is to make Concord free to play. At launch it was priced at $40/£35/€40, which put it at an immediate disadvantage in a world filled with free-to-play hero shooters.
That challenge was compounded by the fact that it really didn’t offer anything that made it stand out from the crowd—”Concord’s occasional moments of satisfaction are waylaid by a competitive shooter experience that’s too often sluggish, boring, and devoid of any interesting tactics,” we said in our 45% review—and of course the abysmal player numbers, which makes it hard to find and finish matches, didn’t help.
But it’s also possible that Concord publisher Sony decides to pull the plug for good. BioWare’s Anthem suffered a very similar fate: After a disastrous launch, Electronic Arts committed to a “complete overhaul” of the game, but a year later put it down for good. Concord’s problems go well beyond just its pricing, and the reputation it’s been saddled with by this complete flop of a launch will be tough to shake no matter what Sony and Firewalk Studios do with it.
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