Concord was worse than bad — it was forgettable
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Sony
After eight years in development, it took less than a month for Concord to die.
Yesterday, Sony announced that the game, which only launched on August 23rd, would be shutting down on September 6th. Ryan Ellis, game director at developer Firewalk Studios, said that it “didn’t land the way we’d intended.” That seems to be an understatement: the game is going offline, full refunds are being issued, and it’s unclear if Concord will ever come back. While the speed at which the game ended may be surprising, the fact that it happened isn’t. Concord is just the latest victim of publishers chasing the live-service trend with outsize expectations. Unfortunately, there’s only so much room — and Concord was too generic to find space.
It’s easy to see why so many studios and publishers want in. The longevity and profitability of games like Fortnite and League of Legends are impressive. They’re also nearly impossible to replicate. Concord follows other high-profile failures like EA’s Anthem and Xbox’s Redfall. Both instances saw beloved single-player studios — BioWare and Arkane Austin, respectively — pivot to persistent multiplayer games with disastrous results. (Each lasted longer than Concord, but still had relatively short lives in terms of updates.)
They’re far from the only examples. Sega canceled a multiplayer shooter called Hyenas, Warner Bros.’ fighting game Multiversus was taken offline for almost an entire year for retooling, and Amazon and Bandai Namco just ended the anime MMO Blue Protocol. Those are just a few examples that actually launched. Plenty — like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us spinoff, Remedy’s multiplayer partnership with Tencent, or Ubisoft’s battle royale take on The Division — were never released at all.
There are a few obvious errors specific to Concord. It was a hero shooter, a genre with entrenched competition like Overwatch and Apex Legends, making it a tough sell. Its reach was limited to the PS5 and PC. Worse still, it was a full paid release in a space where free-to-play is the standard. But Concord’s biggest problem was that it was just fine. With generic characters and frustrating map design, there was nothing to make it stand out among so much competition. In the live-service space, where games are designed to suck up as much of your time (and money) as possible, being an average game isn’t enough. There’s only so much of both to go around, and pulling players away from their existing time sinks is not an easy thing. When you’re up against Fortnite, you need a hook.
We’ve seen this play out with the few games that have managed to carve out some longevity in the space. Rare’s pirate sim Sea of Thieves is unlike any other virtual world, while Riot cleverly saw room in the Counter-Strike market when it launched Valorant. These experiences also keep expanding their presence in terms of both content and platforms; Sea of Thieves hit PS5 this year while Valorant made its debut on consoles. Helldivers 2 came out of nowhere to offer a distinct co-op experience. Other smaller games have similarly managed to generate buzz with a notable gimmick, like the dual bodies in Spectre Divide or the game show theme of The Finals.
But those kinds of sustained hits are rare, and Concord will almost certainly not be the last to be buried in the live-service graveyard. It probably won’t even be the last from Sony itself. The company previously announced plans to go hard in the space and then scaled those ambitions back considerably. (Those early plans were the main impetus for spending so much on Destiny developer Bungie.)
It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s no such thing as too big to fail when it comes to a live-service game, which means that a lot of the high-profile releases coming out soon are not sure things. That includes the likes of Bungie’s Marathon, NetEase’s Marvel Rivals, and even Valve’s Deadlock. (If you think Valve is immune to failure, might I point you to the existence of Artifact.) They might not shut down as quickly as Concord, but it’s not inconceivable that any of them could fail to garner enough sustained attention.
In the post announcing the game’s closure, Ellis said that Concord’s developers were going to “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” Most likely, that means the game might appear again in the future, with a free-to-play structure and maybe some gameplay tweaks. But addressing those core problems will be a lot tougher than that. When every game wants all of your time, players need a really good reason to give up their favorites. That’s what Concord was missing.
Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Sony
After eight years in development, it took less than a month for Concord to die.
Yesterday, Sony announced that the game, which only launched on August 23rd, would be shutting down on September 6th. Ryan Ellis, game director at developer Firewalk Studios, said that it “didn’t land the way we’d intended.” That seems to be an understatement: the game is going offline, full refunds are being issued, and it’s unclear if Concord will ever come back. While the speed at which the game ended may be surprising, the fact that it happened isn’t. Concord is just the latest victim of publishers chasing the live-service trend with outsize expectations. Unfortunately, there’s only so much room — and Concord was too generic to find space.
It’s easy to see why so many studios and publishers want in. The longevity and profitability of games like Fortnite and League of Legends are impressive. They’re also nearly impossible to replicate. Concord follows other high-profile failures like EA’s Anthem and Xbox’s Redfall. Both instances saw beloved single-player studios — BioWare and Arkane Austin, respectively — pivot to persistent multiplayer games with disastrous results. (Each lasted longer than Concord, but still had relatively short lives in terms of updates.)
They’re far from the only examples. Sega canceled a multiplayer shooter called Hyenas, Warner Bros.’ fighting game Multiversus was taken offline for almost an entire year for retooling, and Amazon and Bandai Namco just ended the anime MMO Blue Protocol. Those are just a few examples that actually launched. Plenty — like Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us spinoff, Remedy’s multiplayer partnership with Tencent, or Ubisoft’s battle royale take on The Division — were never released at all.
There are a few obvious errors specific to Concord. It was a hero shooter, a genre with entrenched competition like Overwatch and Apex Legends, making it a tough sell. Its reach was limited to the PS5 and PC. Worse still, it was a full paid release in a space where free-to-play is the standard. But Concord’s biggest problem was that it was just fine. With generic characters and frustrating map design, there was nothing to make it stand out among so much competition. In the live-service space, where games are designed to suck up as much of your time (and money) as possible, being an average game isn’t enough. There’s only so much of both to go around, and pulling players away from their existing time sinks is not an easy thing. When you’re up against Fortnite, you need a hook.
We’ve seen this play out with the few games that have managed to carve out some longevity in the space. Rare’s pirate sim Sea of Thieves is unlike any other virtual world, while Riot cleverly saw room in the Counter-Strike market when it launched Valorant. These experiences also keep expanding their presence in terms of both content and platforms; Sea of Thieves hit PS5 this year while Valorant made its debut on consoles. Helldivers 2 came out of nowhere to offer a distinct co-op experience. Other smaller games have similarly managed to generate buzz with a notable gimmick, like the dual bodies in Spectre Divide or the game show theme of The Finals.
But those kinds of sustained hits are rare, and Concord will almost certainly not be the last to be buried in the live-service graveyard. It probably won’t even be the last from Sony itself. The company previously announced plans to go hard in the space and then scaled those ambitions back considerably. (Those early plans were the main impetus for spending so much on Destiny developer Bungie.)
It’s becoming increasingly clear that there’s no such thing as too big to fail when it comes to a live-service game, which means that a lot of the high-profile releases coming out soon are not sure things. That includes the likes of Bungie’s Marathon, NetEase’s Marvel Rivals, and even Valve’s Deadlock. (If you think Valve is immune to failure, might I point you to the existence of Artifact.) They might not shut down as quickly as Concord, but it’s not inconceivable that any of them could fail to garner enough sustained attention.
In the post announcing the game’s closure, Ellis said that Concord’s developers were going to “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” Most likely, that means the game might appear again in the future, with a free-to-play structure and maybe some gameplay tweaks. But addressing those core problems will be a lot tougher than that. When every game wants all of your time, players need a really good reason to give up their favorites. That’s what Concord was missing.