If you hadn’t heard the big news of the day, Sony and developer Firewalk Studios are shutting down Concord, the not-Guardians of the Galaxy hero shooter that has been flopping hard since its launch on August 23. The studio seems to be planning some kind of comeback, as the announcement says the shutdown on September 6 is so the team can “explore options” about what it will do next. In the meantime, anyone who purchased the game is eligible for a full refund.
Whether you like Concord or not, this should rattle you. Sony and Firewalk spent a lot of time and money on this game as part of its big live-service push, and it’s flopping so hard that Sony is pulling the plug before it can even hit its one-month anniversary. Somewhere in PlayStation business meetings, Sony was ready to invest heavily into the game and an extended universe spun off from it. There’s even an episode based on the game coming in Amazon’s upcoming anthology series Secret Level coming in December. That episode may be the last gasp from a game that was snuffed out in just two weeks.
How did we get here? People have a lot of theories, and the implications for PlayStation and the state of the video game industry at large aren’t pretty. Let’s get into some of the internet’s reactions to the (ostensibly temporary) death of Concord.
Plenty of people who have worked a corporate job, especially in creative fields, know the sting of big suits making decisions that will inevitably lead to the slow decay of something people love. As the public has become more aware of working conditions within the video game industry, some people’s natural inclination is to worry about the designers, artists, and programmers who will inevitably be affected by the management decisions that led to Concord.
Whether it’s fair or not, Concord has become synonymous with the pitfalls of PlayStation’s live-service pivot. Sony has been shutting down companies like Japan Studio and London Studio, while seemingly devoting swaths of its resources to live-service games like this one. It recently canceled a service game based on The Last of Us, cut jobs at Bungie, and just seems to have had an impossible time getting the PS5 era of first-party games off the ground. While Astro Bot is coming this week on September 6, things look bleak for PlayStation right now in terms of quality first-party games. It has folks wistful for games like Gravity Rush, which might not have been a big seller like The Last of Us or God of War, but was certainly more memorable than a live-service game that crashes and burns in mere days.
There are a lot of reasons Concord turned out this way. The game was divisive on a few fronts, even when it was first shown at the State of Play in May. It’s jumping into an overcrowded genre that games like Overwatch 2 and Apex Legends dominate. It had a $40 price tag instead of being free-to-play like several of its competitors. But overall, it lacked that certain character-driven spark that you need to get people to play a hero shooter. It’s not enough to be mechanically sound if people aren’t drawn to the heroes they’re playing. PlayStation and FIrewalk clearly hoped Concord could become as ubiquitous as its contemporaries, and it failed to reach whatever internal metrics it had so badly that it’s going dark two weeks after launch.
Concord was misguided, but considering the market it was entering, it would have been hard for even a much better game to penetrate the cultural consciousness, much less one that was so generic that it’s often only described in comparison to other works.
Officially, Sony and Firewalk Studios are planning to bring Concord back at some point. I think most people probably figured the game would go free-to-play to get rid of the $40 barricade between the shooter and its potential player pool. That seems like a reasonable path forward, and would certainly be more sensible than dumping years of work and millions of dollars down a well. But we’ve also seen games like BioWare’s looter shooter Anthem retreat for a retooling, only to end up dying anyway. How many live-service failures and missteps do we have to see this industry make before the suits realize this isn’t sustainable? I care more for the human cost of this failure, so I hope Concord gets a second chance at life in a better position for success. The PlayStation fan in me hopes that if it all comes crashing down regardless, someone at Sony realizes that this cannot continue and is righting the ship as we speak.