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. Everyone who purchased the game will be refunded.
The first game from industry veteran studio Firewalk, Concord has been 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 given the speed at which it came, this announcement is unprecedented.
With critics barely giving it a passing grade—the game scored 62/100 on review aggregator Metacritic—and players not seeming to be there— Concord seemed like a failure for Sony. The game failed to reach 700 players on the Steam platform on the day of its release, August 26.
Via an announcement on its platforms, PlayStation confirmed this feeling by stating that “while many elements of the experience resonated 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 on the preservation of video games, increasingly fragile for those that are played exclusively online. In August, the European collective Stop Destroying Videogames launched a petition that collected more than 280,000 signatures and which asked publishers not to “kill” the titles they no longer want to take care of.
« Explorer des options »
PlayStation and Firewalk said they would “explore options” to improve the way they reach players. Concord was a video game as a service (games as a servicein English), 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, like Fortnite or Destiny 2are usually free to provide an easy entry point for players.
This was one of the main criticisms of Concord : behind its paid access, the game did not 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, being free.
Concord had also promised to offer a new animated short film every week featuring the game’s characters to strengthen the narrative. An ambitious proposition that adds to the expectation of new game modes or new characters.
Rather than deliver on its promises, PlayStation has decided to pull the plug Concordwithout specifying when it would be reconnected or how this would be done.
