Concord feature

Sony shuts down Concord only two weeks after release

Sony has announced that it will be taking offline its latest multiplayer PVP first-person shooter, Concord. Concord came out on August 23rd, and it will be “shut down” on September 6th. This basically means that Sony is taking the game off the digital stores two weeks after release.

Concord has been in development for 8 whole years. According to reports, Sony spent $150 million on its development. And, from what we can see, this is one of the biggest flops in gaming history.

To be honest, the writing was on the wall. Sony launched an Open Beta for Concord earlier this year which did not attract a lot of gamers. Not only that but contrary to other titles, this was a $40 game.

Sony claims that they will “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” The company is also refunding everyone who has purchased it. So, my guess is that Concord will be re-launched as a F2P title. At least that’s the message I get from this PR statement.

And that is that. Since I’m not a big fan of online hero shooters like Overwatch, I didn’t play Concord. From what I saw, Concord did not bring anything new to the table. And that was its biggest issue in my opinion. Why would someone spend $40 for a game that plays like Overwatch, when Overwatch is free?

I also don’t know whether Sony will be able to salvage it. The game’s reputation has been hit hard. So, it may not succeed even if they re-launch it as a F2P title.

Since the game has already cost Sony A LOT of money, I don’t see them putting a lot of effort into it. I mean, it would be nice to see a complete overhaul. However, my gut tells me that the publisher will simply reshape it for a F2P audience, and then re-launch it. At least that’s the safest move (business-wise).

We’ve seen numerous games getting “canned” in a span of months. However, this is the first Sony first-party game that has failed to spark the interest of gamers all over the world. Moreover, it’s yet another GaaS game that has failed commercially, following Dustborn and, to a lesser extent, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.

Stay tuned for more!

81 thoughts on “Sony shuts down Concord only two weeks after release”

  1. No great surprise here, the market is saturated with online shooters most of which don't differ enought to attract players away from what they are already playing.

  2. Sony should strictly stick to single-player over the shoulder third-person action-adventure games. That is the only thing their developers know how to make and what the overwhelming majority of gaming audience expects them to make. Leave other kinds of games for other developers/publishers.

    1. for the first 15 seconds of the trailer when it looked like it was going to be sony's version of the Guardians of the Galaxy game, my friends and I were pretty hype.

    1. They're gonna keep trying. If the live service doesnt hit a target on launch theyll just start killing them quicker before moving on to the next attempt then try to write off the game as a loss for the tax benefits now.

    2. Bear in mind that this abomination was in devolopment for 8 fvcking years, which means that we'll see way more disgusting geh "games" in the near future.

      1. How can you predict this when this Epic Fail happens? If anything, they will put gay back on the closet in coming months (not years).

        1. Cause clearly there’s projects being developed right now that they still hope to become a success.
          Unless some alien species invades the Earth, I guess the geh shït will continue for a long time still.

          1. Just because this game took 8 years doesn't mean it was gay from the start, the easiest thing for game devs to do is to replace an asset, or change a bit of writing.

  3. Make it free, remove GAAS and allow the hosting of dedicated servers.
    People will at least try it when it's free and doesn't contain trash monetization.

    Sony's money is already gone anyway.

    1. Also allow modding so people can replace the garbage, but companies like Sony would rather flush all the work and assets down the drain.

    2. It already had open beta, nobody came.
      People dont want to play hero shooters where the heroes are disgusting abominations.

  4. So, no talk about how this garbage of game is full of wokeness?!. And probably the main reason no one playing it, ffs the robot has a prononce, everything about this gayme mehh. See this game failing is just like music to my ears. Go woke go broke.

    1. no one's talking about the wokeness because its an after thought when there were so many other glaring issues that everyone can agree with. $40 for a hero shooter when overwatch, tf2, deadlock, apex, paladins, marvel rivals and etc are free was a huge mistake. Characters across the board bland and whatever. Progression and game modes made no sense. MTX were expensive and nothing looked good. There are plenty of woke games that arent and havent gone broke, this is just sacrificial trash that no one wanted especially for $40.

      1. Kinda funny to see Jaxon upvoting this now that i know it's the same person… That aside, you can't brush over how they market the game as overtly leftist. May not be the only factor, but shows it doesn't sell as well.

        1. I guess at that point its subjective about how much it influences the sale. Id say its more visually progressive than leftists as I think leftist has more of an economic connotation. I guess I’d expect a game that was sold and developed like this that was more visually conservative or traditional to flounder similarly but with less fanfare. You can look at other games people call DEI, SBI or “Woke” that have done well but I guess I can’t think of a ton of games that are overtly conservative in the same sense.

          1. Maybe overtly conservative nowadays would mean the rare game that resisted a harassment campaign disguised as concern trolling. Kingdom Come: Deliverance and it’s resistance to put POC NPC’s comes to mind, and that game sold fairly well for it’s target range. The new Wukong which devs stated in clear english “no feminism in streams” is also another example, and this one did stellar.

          2. That almost feels like pushing the goal post because I’d even be generous in that KCD portraying a more historically accurate version of the time instead could be viewed as Traditional or Conservative, and is another game I have scheduled within the coming months, but I wouldn’t think the issue with the BMW developers would equate to the same since It’s not something as visually noticeable in the game. As much as I like BioShock 2, I’d say that game maybe a good conservative/traditional game since there is the criticism of socialism/collectivism and the focus on family. However these things are definitely subjective and ultimately I just find it weird that people point to these intangibles instead of the factors we can all agree on about why games fail and under perform.

          3. I’m just saying, people who said the game failed exclusively because of that, and people that say wokeness was not the issue are both wrong.

  5. Both Concord and Dustborn marketed how insanely woke they were as a primary selling point. Don't think you can ignore this as contributing to their failure.

      1. John's always made clear he wants no political coverage on DSOG. I personally don't think you can separate gaming from politics when the developers are coming out and saying their games are political, but I get where he's coming from.

        I'm just happy there's still a gaming site around that isn't blatant political propaganda itself like IGN or Kotaku.

    1. I had to google Dustborn to see what it was. Only recognized that digital waste from those bully/cancel memes that were floating around.

      1. Dustborn is when you go so far to the left that you come out on the far right.

        The game plays like a woke parody, no joke.

      2. the game is so woke that its like it was written by 4 chan to mock woketards, i reccomend madam savyy's review on this, its insane, You got a power to get "triggered" and call people racist, another one is to "cancel" them and another one is to "bully" them. One of the main characters is a skin diseased fat s3x obsessed lesbian muslim, the other one is a albino nonbinary with a robotic arm. It cant get more woke than this.

    2. I don't think is one of the main problems at all, it's just that the game was a pile of steaming shi7, like pretty much anything these days, the woke cancer was only the box of this fecal cake.

  6. Concord, is what you get when you build a woke property from the ground up, and don't hijack an existing property that already has a fanbase held hostage.

    This is a true reflection of just how popular "wokeism" is. When it's not James Bond, Tomb Raider, Star Wars, Marvel Comics, or any other hijacked and established property, this is how many people woke gaming attracts.

    Keeping in mind, that this game was damned proud of how woke it was, tagging alphabet and political in its Steam page. This was built for the "modern audience", which everyone here knows, does not exist.

    1. Well said. At some point they will have to get back to the reality you cannot control the market, you cannot manufacture demand. Get woke go broke.

    2. The Concord team is shrugging off the criticism of their characters as ‘white noise,’ and dismissing it. That did not work our well for them.

    3. urinalist scum are running defense saying it wasnt because of wokeness and block anyone who says it was, they are running interface and counter signal us so the investors dont wake up. There is no being any lower than the games urinalist, because they are always taking the piss.

  7. Hopefully it gets reworked into something more people can enjoy. The first 15 seconds of the first trailer where the game looked like it could have been spin on that Guardians of the Galaxy Game from Square a few years ago genuinely had me interested. Once it was confirmed a live service shooter that you have to spend $40 to be mad at, I lost hope for the title. Didnt think Dustborn was a live service game.

  8. Every GaaS game that dies is progress for the gaming world. I am so happy to hear this. The suits in the upper management have to realize that milking players with such games does not work and loses them money.

    Today is a good day!

          1. typing error vs broken grammar
            Now do you understand what grammar is and isn’t or do you need more examples? lol

          2. I tought you where gonna school me on broken grammar, but here you are wanting to molest me. I’m too old for you, pevert.

  9. $40 to play a mid shooter and get mad when overwatch is free is wild. Dustborn is a live service game? I thought it was single player. Did you mean Skull and Bones or New World?

  10. Dustborn is not GaaS, just because the game GaaSlights you doesn't mean it is GaaS. Also, where is @dagoat to troll about how much business wise these companies are…

  11. i never used to enjoy seeing games or studios fail, but at this point i'm ecstatic.
    i hope the industry gets the message and corrects its course.
    so glad that people are finally voting with their wallets!

    1. i feel like the industry has been going backwards in game quality since 2008, but up until 2016 we had a few good games here and there, since 2018 all the way up to 2023 it was endless trash. People who say "2023 was the best year in gaming" are wrong we got tons of 7/10s while the last 4 years we had endless crap so it felt good, but by 2024 we are back at the crap and people finally realize that AAA is over, it cant be sustained. Thigs will only improve when there is a house cleaning done in the industry.

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