Just under two weeks after its release on Playstation 5 and PC, Concordthe multiplayer shooter produced by Sony, is no longer available for purchase and its servers will be taken offline by Friday. All those who purchased the game will be refunded.
The first game from industry veteran studio Firewalk, Concord was in development for nearly eight years and was the flagship late-summer release for Sony’s video game subsidiary, PlayStation. For a game of its caliber and the speed at which it came, this announcement is unprecedented.
With its reviews barely more than passable — the game got 62/100 on the rating aggregator Metacritic — and the players who didn’t seem to be there — having failed to cross the 700 player mark on the Steam platform on the day of its release on August 26 — Concord seemed to be a failure for Sony.
Through an announcement on its platforms, Playstation confirmed this feeling by indicating that “while many elements of the experience resonated positively with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch did not go as we had planned.”
“While we determine the best path forward, sales of Concord will cease immediately and we will begin offering full refunds to all players who have purchased the game,” the company said.
The announcement rekindles the debate over video game preservation, which is increasingly fragile for games that are played exclusively online. In August, the European collective Stop Destroying Videogames launched a petition that has collected more than 280,000 signatures, asking publishers not to “kill” titles they no longer want to take care of.
“Exploring options”
Playstation and Firewalk say they will “explore options” to improve the way they reach players. Concord was a “game as a service”, that is, a video game that evolves over time thanks to a constant flow of content to renew the offer. The most popular of the genre, such as Fortnite Or Destiny 2are usually free to provide an easy entry point for players.
Here lay one of the main criticisms of Concord : Behind its paywall, the game didn’t offer enough to differentiate itself from other shooting games on the market like Overwatch 2 — which in addition to offering similar gameplay, runs on the same system of a game as a service. While being free.
Concord had also promised to offer a new animated short film featuring the game’s characters every week to strengthen the narrative. An ambitious proposition that adds to the expectation of new game modes or new characters.
Rather than fulfilling its promises, PlayStation has decided to pull the plug Concordwithout specifying when or how it would be reconnected.