PlayStation’s hero-shooter flop Concord taken offline, with refunds coming

Concord, PlayStation’s ill-fated attempt at a hero shooter, will be taken offline on Friday, Sept. 6 — just two weeks after it launched to minuscule player counts and widespread criticism of bland and derivative gameplay that took eight years to launch.

Those who purchased Concord for $39.99 from the PlayStation Store will have that purchase automatically refunded. Steam and the Epic Games Store are already processing refunds for PC users, developer Firewalk Studios said, and buyers can expect email confirmation when that is complete.

“While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” Ryan Ellis, Firewalk’s game director for Concord, wrote in a post published to the PlayStation Blog.

Ellis said Firewalk will “explore options, including those that will better reach our players,” and said the studio will now “determine the best path ahead.” But the rest of the post makes no guarantee that Concord will return.

Concord’s debut week on PC drew a peak of 697 concurrent players to that platform, coming during its Aug. 23 launch. Those figures are PC only, coming from SteamDB. Over the weekend, Concord hit 175 peak Steam users on Friday and slid to 110 on Tuesday.

Player counts are not available for PlayStation, the game’s publisher and lead platform, but comparatively speaking they aren’t expected to be much better, especially if the game is getting yanked less than a month after launch.

IGN reported on Tuesday that analysts pegged Concord at No. 147 in terms of PlayStation 5 daily active users, selling just 25,000 copies across its two platforms. Concord was heavily criticized for its $39.99 price point given its attempt to insert itself into a saturated genre where much of the Concord experience has been served up, served better, and served by free-to-play games for years.

Could Concord make a comeback to PlayStation and PC?

There is precedent, somewhat, for a game launching, being taken down, and still coming back. That’s the story of MultiVersus, developed by Player First Games, which pulled the free-to-play Smash Bros.-like in 2023, about a year after launch, then returned it this May, and it’s been reasonably successful since.

MultiVersus is also a free-to-play game, where Concord had no live service model (a battle pass, unlockable heroes, or other in-game content sold a la carte) in place. With PlayStation as the publisher (it acquired Firewalk Studios in 2023) it’s conceivable Concord could return as a free offering in the PlayStation Plus catalog, but lacking a monetized live-service component, it’s hard to see what that would gain the publisher, the studio, or Concord’s few remaining fans.

Featured image via Steam.

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