Sony Has Canceled ‘Concord’ — What Happens Next?

With a simple press release, Sony has put an end to Concord, their multiplayer sci-fi experiment from Firewalk Studios. The game will end service tomorrow, September 6th, after just two weeks of being live, Sony is already refunding consumers on both PC and PlayStation 5, and have informed people who owned physical copies of a process so they can be refunded as well. Though the press release talks about bringing the game back in “some form,” what that looks like remains to be seen. More on that later. For now, the game will no longer exist. However, for both gamers and Sony, this is just the beginning of a lot of questions that need to be answered.

But first, let’s get this out of the way: my heart goes out to the developers at Firewalk Studios. In an era where developing games is harder than ever thanks to increasing demands from investors and gamers, they tried to deliver a brand-new IP for audiences. They put in eight years of hard work on Concord, with a year’s worth of additional DLC plans that will likely never be seen by anyone. This wasn’t a cash grab for them; it was a passion project, and it sucks that the experience has been reduced to a press release image and low-effort memes from grifters on YouTube.

Nonetheless, this makes 2024 one of Sony’s weirdest years in recent memory. At a time where people were already doubting their first-party output, Concord’s failure makes things look even more shaky. Yes, Sony did pay for both Rise of the Ronin and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, with fans falling in love with both. However, they’re both limited-time exclusivity deals — an experiment that’s gone so poorly for Square-Enix they basically had to wipe the slate clean and say they plan to “aggressively pursue” multiplatform going forward.

This year was already rocky when Sony confirmed there wouldn’t be any major titles coming from their first-party divisions this fiscal year. True, Helldivers 2 turned into a monster hit that no one saw coming, but even that was marred by the strange PlayStation Network account fiasco. Now, Concord joins Sony’s miss rate after two weeks, and while Astro Bot certainly looks incredible, the way Sony’s marketed it makes it feel like they don’t care whether or not it’s a hit.

We’re a long way from the days of PlayStation 4, where even Sony’s “failures” — like Sony Bend’s Days Gone — sold seven-plus million and had a number of fans begging for sequels. At the time, it felt like Sony was incapable of missing, as they went on an incredible run from 2015-2020 that included titles like Bloodborne, Uncharted 4, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Marvel’s Spider-Man, and more. According to some sales estimates, Concord might have sold around 25,000 units. While that number isn’t confirmed, the mere fact that at launch the game had less than 700 concurrent players on Steam and Sony pulled the plug after a mere 16 days suggests it’s likely not too far off from the truth.

In a way, it’s hard to see any real way Sony set this game up for success other than pricing the game at $39.99, nearly half off the standard $69.99 price point for AAA games. Even that seems like a mistake with hindsight. We’re a long way from microtransactions drawing frustrated grumblings from the collective gaming audience; most gamers just either choose to pay for an additional costume or weapon skin, or don’t. The microtransactions are now the expectation, in exchange for actually playing the game being free.

This is also a reminder that multiplayer genres reach saturation point quickly. Battle royales, at one point, felt like a money glitch for everyone in 2020 — now just four years later nearly all of them except Fortnite, PUBG, Apex Legends, and Call of Duty: Warzone have closed down. That’s a much newer trend than the ones Concord seemed to be following, a mix of Destiny multiplayer and Overwatch. As many have already mentioned, this is perhaps the price of attempting to follow trends in an era where it can take upwards of six to seven years to release a AAA product.

It also speaks to just how difficult it might be for Sony to access the live service market. Sony struck it out of the park with Helldivers 2, but now we’re seeing just how terribly it can go. It actually feels like with each new failure these online multiplayer service games perform worse. Anthem was considered a colossal failure, but it sold five million copies. Likewise, Marvel’s Avengers is at least part of the reason Square-Enix wanted out of the Eidos Montreal/Crystal Dynamics business, but it still sold over three million copies. There are no numbers for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but it at least had 13,000 concurrent players on Steam at one point, while Concord couldn’t even manage 1,000.

There’s also a strong possibility this has a ripple effect for future PlayStation titles. Both Haven Studios’ Fairgame$ and Bungie’s Marathon operate in the same live service space as Concord. While fans are likely to give Marathon the benefit of the doubt due to Bungie’s reputation, Fairgame$ won’t be getting that same leeway. With Sony pulling the plug on Concord as fast as they did, players will be even more skeptical of future multiplayer games published by the company.

On some level, it’s hard not to wonder if there wasn’t some other reason for the failure. While many people might point to the game’s uninspiring character designs or the low review scores, games have scored far lower and looked much worse and still managed to sell in the low millions. That Concord couldn’t even pull that off suggests something else was the problem. The usual anti-woke crowd will crow about this game’s failure being a victory for them, but most gamers aren’t even aware they exist. And to be honest, that might have been the problem for Concord as well.

The game was first revealed during Sony’s 2023 PlayStation Showcase in a strange teaser trailer that seemed more focused on the cool spaceship players wouldn’t spend any real time in than explaining Concord was a multiplayer First Person Shooter. They promised a release in 2024, but there was literally nothing from the game for an entire year before it reappeared at Sony’s 2024 State of Play this past May. There, potential fans got a near ten-minute trailer that encompassed both cinematics and gameplay, with promises of an early access beta in the following months. Then, after two beta weekends a few weeks apart, the game launched just a few short weeks later at the end of August.

This short reveal-release cycle feels like the next step up from a shadowdrop, a strategy that may need to be rethought in this generation and going forward. Firewalk was a brand-new studio launching a new game with no connections to any outside gaming IP. Announcing Concord via a teaser trailer that gave no indication to what the game was about, then revealing actual gameplay a year later only three months out from release gave Sony no real time to market this title. At no point did Concord ever feel inescapable in advertisements, the way most games with this budget level need to feel for people to notice them.

Perhaps Sony and PlayStation believed their brand recognition alone would be enough for Concord. However, in an era where indie and AAA developers constantly introduce multiple new titles onto the market begging for attention, its easier than ever for even big budget games to slip through the cracks. For now, Sony seems comfortable only showing off games at their own pace, but that may need to change going forward if they’re going to push a lot of live services like their plans suggest.

With hindsight, that 2023 PlayStation Showcase looks more like the company’s biggest misstep in a long time. While it had its fair share of hits like Final Fantasy XVI and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, it was also the first time we got a glimpse of the PlayStation strategy to launch a half-dozen live service titles by 2026. Already a downgrade from the dozen they originally planned, their success rate for the remaining four titles is going to need to be a lot better than 50:50 to match the kind of run the PlayStation 4 went on, which at this point is no longer viewed as an incredible anomaly, but rather the expectation for PlayStation as a brand.

As for Concord, the press release implies the game will be back, mentioning they’re thinking about “determining the best path ahead”. When seeing that, most people assume free-to-play is the answer, but that doesn’t seem likely this time. In an era of low Steam concurrent numbers being considered news, Concord isn’t just a game that performed poorly, but an IP associated with failure. Worse, it wasn’t just considered unpopular; it reviewed terribly, sitting at a 62 on Metacritic.

PlayStation and Firewalk might honestly have a better chance coming up with a different game and setting it inside the same universe, like EA did with Apex Legends (technically part of the Titanfall universe). My personal wish is they take advantage of what’s clearly a rich new space opera universe and create a single-player experience — preferably third-person. Whatever it is, they’ll need to find a way to invest players in this universe before they even think of coming back to a live service, multiplayer shooter. For now, it’s hard to imagine seeing Concord again anytime in the near future.