Has it been a year already? It has, as PlayStation released its hero shooter Concord on August 23, 2024, and now here we are, reflecting on what I think you could explicitly declare the worst video game release of all time. Not the worst game of all time, perhaps (though it was very bad), but an unprecedented failure of a launch the industry had never seen before, and may not see again.
The vibes were off from Concord from the start with its Guardians of the Galaxy-adjacent tone and its off-putting aesthetic including mostly bizarre character designs. Perhaps the biggest disappointment was the reveal that new studio Firewalk had made just another live-service hero shooter, one that had mapped out release plans ages into the future.
Concord shut down completely two weeks later. Refunds were issued globally. While there was some initial talk about perhaps a free-to-play revival, that did not happen. The game simply ceased to exist after two weeks. The studio was closed a short while later.
The playercount was historically bad. While Concord was likely not going to meet Sony’s expectations, alarms went off when its free open beta only netted a few thousand concurrent players on Steam. The $40 release ended up failing to hit even 700 concurrent players on launch day. For context, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the $200-million losing WB game, had 13,000 players at launch.
The two-week-shutdown is bad enough, but what makes this worse than the historic “dumping copies of the ET game in a landfill” story is just how much was invested in this. Firewalk started development around 2018, and the studio was bought by Sony in 2023 as part of its live service push. The game was previewed in April 2023 for the first time, and there were reports that Sony saw it as a tentpole IP going forward for its brand. That now, of course, raises significant questions about their executive judgement.
The cost of development was staggering. Reports range from $200 million to upward of a reported $400 million by the time PlayStation actually released it. The years, the money, the totally undeserved confidence, the playercount, the complete destruction of the game in two weeks, there’s just nothing that compares to it.
Since Concord, things have not exactly been looking up more generally for Sony’s live-service ambitions. The director of Fairgame$, a heist shooter, Jade Raymond just left the project and it’s not clear it will ever come out at all. Bungie’s Destiny 2 just released an expansion that put up a third of the numbers of its previous one, and will now have to be content with a much lower playercount going forward as it drastically reduces its content production.
Also at Bungie, there’s the in-development Marathon, Sony’s biggest new live-service project. After a bad gameplay reveal, an underwhelming alpha and a full-on plagiarism scandal, Marathon has been delayed out of this fall with no new firm date set, and Bungie “going dark” about the hero-based extraction shooter which must overcome a somewhat ill-conceived core concept. Critics have already compared it to Concord, and while there’s no way it hits that low water mark, things are not looking amazing.
There are probably too many lessons to learn from Concord to count. Don’t take seven year to trend chase. Don’t blow up your budget to a nonsensical degree. Don’t rely on an aesthetic that most people can easily see is awful. Don’t think you can charge $40 for all of the above in an extremely challenging, mostly free-to-play market.
But no, there has been nothing quite like what happened here, and I genuinely believe Concord is the worst video game disaster of all time.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
