On September 6, 2024, Sony will pulling Concord from sale, its new multiplayer hero shooter, two weeks after initial launch. Concord was launched on August 23 as a live-service game that Sony hoped would be one of the PS5’s flagship titles. But the game quickly flopped — selling poorly despite being in development for eight years.
Concord was billed as a hero shooter similar to Overwatch and Valorant, earning mixed reviews for its shiny graphics but absence of originality. The $40 price tag for a free-to-play-centric game didn’t help motivate many to pay up and try what some perceived as a rather basic experience.
For some reason, the game failed to distinguish itself in what is already a crowded genre. Both players and critics observed that Concord failed to innovate when it came to the hero shooter genre, giving them gameplay as well as character designs that had already been done before.
SteamDB reports show that Concord reached only 660 concurrent players at its peak, an absurdly low number when you compare it to the tens of thousands and even millions of players common for AAA titles upon release. Big-name multiplayer games, like a new Call of Duty or Overwatch 2 might regularly breach the six-digit concurrent player count well into launch window.
Sony announced that it would issue full refunds to all players and that the team would reassess the game’s future direction.