Sony shuts down Concord: Customers will be refunded, game goes offline September 6

[Daniel Sims]

In brief: Sony's latest online shooter struggled to inspire confidence after its initial unveiling, and player interest never improved during the beta or following its official launch. Now, the company is pulling the plug after just two weeks on the market. Whether Sony will resurrect Concord as a free-to-play game or shelve the project remains unclear.

Concord players should begin seeing refunds for the game starting Tuesday. Sony has delisted its AAA online shooter and will shut down its servers on Friday following disastrously low sales.

Users who purchased the Overwatch-like team shooter through the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct will receive refunds through their payment providers. Meanwhile, Steam and the Epic Games Store will contact customers once they have processed the refunds. Those who bought physical copies must refer to their respective retailers.

Sony revealed the game with an expensive-looking CGI trailer in June and opened a free early-access beta on PlayStation 5 and PC the following month. However, player enthusiasm proved lukewarm, as Concord peaked at only 2,388 players on Steam and reached lows of under 500. No data for the PS5 version is available, but it likely didn't fare much better.

Unfortunately for Sony and developer Firewalk Studios, the beta's performance proved foretelling. Analysts estimate Concord sold only around 25,000 copies between PC and PS5 after its August 23 release.

The game is shaping up to be a significant loss for Sony, which purchased Firewalk in 2018 to help develop and publish Concord. Sony is reassessing the game's future, so it might drop its $40 price tag and resurface as a free-to-play title.

Observers will likely interpret Concord's failure as another example of the volatility of the live-service gaming model. The news follows the dismal commercial performance of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which resulted in deep layoffs for developer Rocksteady and a $200 million loss for Warner Bros.

Concord is only the latest sign of Sony's struggles with live-service games. The explosive success of Helldivers 2 was tempered by the company's decision to cancel a planned multiplayer spin-off of The Last of Us and pessimistic rumors surrounding an upcoming live-service revival of Bungie's Marathon series. The studio recently fired the game's director and laid off over 200 Bungie employees in early August.

Nonetheless, large publishers will likely continue funding ambitious live-service projects, as they now generate most of the video game industry's revenue. However, the most successful titles in that category were initially released at least four years ago, indicating that the market has solidified.

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Sony shuts down Concord: Customers will be refunded, game goes offline September 6

 

[Neatfeatguy]

That's just sad, but the game looks like crap so I guess it's not a loss. At least Sony is offering refunds.

 

[The Talking Tech]

That's just sad, but the game looks like crap so I guess it's not a loss. At least Sony is offering refunds.

It's not like Sony had a choice on the refunds, unless they wanted to get sued till kingdom come.

 

[i like foxes]

Since the player count is so low it wont be big of an issue for Sony to initiate refunds . lol

 

[The Talking Tech]

Goes to show Sony's nonsensical push for LIVE-SERVICE games becoming more of a failure than what's worth.

Even PlayStation exclusive FoamStars had no choice than to go Free-to-Play....and of course we already know what happened to Babylon's Fall.

 

[i like foxes]

Steve , where are you to call the game a flop . lol

 

[toooooot]

Did you guys see character designs? Some of them were just...
Well, extremely unattractive. I felt repelled by just looking at them.
To make people buy product, it has to be attractive.
And I guess, calling potential customers untalented freaks does not help sell as well.

 

[Alfonso Maruccia]

"Live-service games are the future of the industry".

Or so they were saying ten years ago. Now I'm back to 2024, playing eminently single-player experiences (Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree, DOOM Eternal, Diablo II LOD) with absolutely no intention to even try multiplayer stuff once again in my life.

Now, onto the second chapter of this "AI is the future of the industry" horror show...

 

[holydiver]

Go woke go broke.

 

[GABulldog]

Instead of playing lip service and saying the games demise was because of Live-Service, why don't you give the real reason and say the games demise was because of wokeness. Sony lost 100 million dollars because of it. Instead of Sony creating a part 2 of Days Gone, they chose wokeness and lost.

 

[SirDigby]

Since the player count is so low it wont be big of an issue for Sony to initiate refunds . lol

I saw an estimate that put sales around 25,000 across PC and PS5, at $40 a pop that's $1mil, and the dev costs are between $100-200mil.... ooof

 

[Shaitan]

So instead of focusing on game atmosphere, fun and replayability, we are supposed to embrace the tr@ns characters, pronouns and so on?
Ok. No.
Get woke go broke.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I saw an estimate that put sales around 25,000 across PC and PS5, at $40 a pop that's $1mil, and the dev costs are between $100-200mil.... ooof

At $200 mil, just to break even on revenue, you'd have to sell 5 MILLION copies. That's not including valve's cut for steam, sony's cut for console, the cut for any retailers, taxes paid on revenue, OR the continuing cost of producing those weekly cinematics, making new content for the game, and maintaining the servers for millions of people.

Including those, my rough math puts their needed sales at closer to 11 million copies. Plus another 1-2 million per year to sustain future development, let alone actually making a profit. Which is absolutely insane. That's Overwatch levels of success.

Instead of playing lip service and saying the games demise was because of Live-Service, why don't you give the real reason and say the games demise was because of wokeness. Sony lost 100 million dollars because of it. Instead of Sony creating a part 2 of Days Gone, they chose wokeness and lost.

Meh, was wokeness the real issue here? It definitely contributed, with the ugly characters and focus on gender war nonsense and the atrocious Whedon quip writing, but in the grand scheme of things Concord's biggest failure was that it was boring. The cringe was so mild nobody can even remember who these characters are, or what the game is like. These characters all combined dont have an ounce of the charismatic staying power of, say, Gorlock the Destroyer. That is a death knell for any game, but especially a hero shooter type that relies on a huge player base to function. You need memorable characters for these things to stick.

Couple that with the ludicrous dev budget and lack of marketing, and they were set for failure from the word go.

 

[Skjorn]

Ah, TLoU on PC... didn't buy it because no mp.
That game on ps3 was one of my favorite mp experiences ever.

 

[ferrellsl]

Everything woke turns to shít! -- Donald Trump

 

[ZedRM]

Go woke go broke.

That about sums it up..

Kinda surprised it failed this hard though.

 

[dangh]

Goes to show Sony's nonsensical push for LIVE-SERVICE games becoming more of a failure than what's worth.

you mean every corpo nonsensical push for live service? saas, gaas, gp and all that crap is everywhere, and Sony actually was quite resistant to it.

Good side of this failure is that Sony might focus on what they do the best - single player experience and story driven games. I really hope that will be the case.

 

[The Talking Tech]

you mean every corpo nonsensical push for live service? saas, gaas, gp and all that crap is everywhere, and Sony actually was quite resistant to it.

Good side of this failure is that Sony might focus on what they do the best - single player experience and story driven games. I really hope that will be the case.

"Sony was quite resistant to it"?...out of the 3 console manufacturers Sony has been the one with the most push on LIVE-SERVICE even going on the record about having major plans for that genre in the future...Sony is not just making them but also paying for their exclusivity, or have you forgotten about FoamStars? BabylonFall? among others....

Let's not cover the facts with wishful thinking....

 

[dangh]

"Sony was quite resistant to it"?...out of the 3 console manufacturers Sony has been the one with the most push on LIVE-SERVICE even going on the record about having major plans for that genre in the future...Sony is not just making them but also paying for their exclusivity, or have you forgotten about FoamStars? BabylonFall? among others....

Let's not cover the facts with wishful thinking....

I think you're mistaken. MS Live! was the first and most limiting one. You had to pay for online on xbox 360, but not on ps3. You had to pay for online on f2p games on xb one, but not on ps4.
Paying for exclusivity was something ms started as well on a larger scale with x360. And I think it was the best thing they initially did, as at that point it delivered great games, well optimized, and was great from competition point of view. For some reason it failed from xb one onward, mostly due to the service push, while Sony was continuing to work on single player games, which just recently started to fail as well.

Lets not cover the facts with sclerosis...

 

[GFitzpatrick47]

At $200 mil, just to break even on revenue, you'd have to sell 5 MILLION copies. That's not including valve's cut for steam, sony's cut for console, the cut for any retailers, taxes paid on revenue, OR the continuing cost of producing those weekly cinematics, making new content for the game, and maintaining the servers for millions of people.

Including those, my rough math puts their needed sales at closer to 11 million copies. Plus another 1-2 million per year to sustain future development, let alone actually making a profit. Which is absolutely insane. That's Overwatch levels of success.

Meh, was wokeness the real issue here? It definitely contributed, with the ugly characters and focus on gender war nonsense and the atrocious Whedon quip writing, but in the grand scheme of things Concord's biggest failure was that it was boring. The cringe was so mild nobody can even remember who these characters are, or what the game is like. These characters all combined dont have an ounce of the charismatic staying power of, say, Gorlock the Destroyer. That is a death knell for any game, but especially a hero shooter type that relies on a huge player base to function. You need memorable characters for these things to stick.

Couple that with the ludicrous dev budget and lack of marketing, and they were set for failure from the word go.

I always find the arguments that "wokeness" is causing various forms of media to lose money/fail to be incredibly lazy.

The business reality is that many publishers hopped on the live-service train years back when it was the hot new thing, and invested tens of millions (if not hundreds of millions) of dollars into games that eventually suffered from massive feature creep. Inevitably, they were then faced with massive financial holes that the game had no chance of filling because the live-service bubble had burst, the majority of those fans had settled into their favorite 1-2 games, and new releases would get squeezed out. So, either they cancel the release entirely or they follow through with a release to recoup at least some of the investment.

The other issue is that Concord simply had little to no marketing, and the marketing it did have was bad. As you said, the game looked boring, the game looked generic, and it would've ran into the buzzsaw of 2024-2025 releases which have and are shaping up to be two of the biggest years in terms of gaming releases in a very long time. Maybe if it released during the height of Covid it might have caught on, but a $100m dollar, multiplayer-only live-service shooter that's a new IP in 2024? It didn't stand a chance.

The story and characters could've been copy-and-pasted from late-90s era Duke Nukem or Serious Sam, and the game still would've failed. Ascribing the failure to "wokeness" is just projection from people who can't formulate a business argument as to why a game they never intended to play failed. As much as these people complain about politics being interjected into their gaming, they're often the first people to interject their own political biases into a conversation where it's entirely irrelevant.

 

[The Talking Tech]

I think you're mistaken. MS Live! was the first and most limiting one. You had to pay for online on xbox 360, but not on ps3. You had to pay for online on f2p games on xb one, but not on ps4.
Paying for exclusivity was something ms started as well on a larger scale with x360. And I think it was the best thing they initially did, as at that point it delivered great games, well optimized, and was great from competition point of view. For some reason it failed from xb one onward, mostly due to the service push, while Sony was continuing to work on single player games, which just recently started to fail as well.

Lets not cover the facts with sclerosis..

Obviously you are trying too hard to make an excuse for Sony as you quickly forgot that Online Gaming Platforms like Xbox Live or PSPlus are NOT considered LIVE-SERVICE games neither standard exclusivities.

But hey you gotta try anything to cover the truth right???...