Like most gamers, I was pretty shocked when I heard the news that Concord was shutting down not even two weeks after it launched. But while most people have been mocking the game and roasting its demise, I can’t help but feel horribly depressed by the whole affair.
It isn’t because I’m a fan of the game. I’ve never played it and I had no intention of ever playing it. When I saw its extended preview in May’s State of Play, while the CG trailer had me interested, once the news came out that it was a live-service hero shooter, my interest evaporated instantly. I’m just more prone to single-player games than online games. No disrespect to those who love them, but they’re just not for me. And by all accounts, Concord was a by-the-books live-service game that seemed like every other live-service shooter. Again, from an outside perspective, I have no idea what Concord was offering players that other games like Apex Legends and Valorant.
And yet despite never having played Concord, I can’t help but mourn it. It’s a bomb, but its death reminds me of the horrible state of gaming that we’re in and how the industry is a bleak place right now. Because with the failure of Concord, it’s easy to see exactly what’s going to happen next over at Firewalk Studios and how Sony simply doesn’t care.
Before we go any further, while I’ve been seeing a lot of articles over the past few days looking at how and why Concord failed, can we all agree that the reasons it failed were pretty obvious? It was a new live-service game in a market that is already absurdly over-saturated with them and released at the tail end of August, a month that’s typically light in major game releases and right before the jam-packed holiday season.
That being said, Concord also had the misfortune of releasing not even a week after Black Myth: Wukong, which had sold millions upon millions of units before Concord even released. Plus, with a limited marketing cycle and only being advertised in May, there was little reason to get excited about Sony’s new IP.
It’s a shame though because, at least from interviews with the developer, there was genuine passion for Concord. It was Firewalk Studio’s debut game and they were developing it for around 8 years, which is an eternity in the game industry. Just for reference sake, that’s the same year that Overwatch kicked off the hero-shooter craze that Concord was trying to capitalize on. That’s an entire console generation’s worth of time that saw hundreds of people work on the game. And to see all of that effort go completely to waste is sad. And its unceremonious end is an even bigger slap in the face to the developers who worked on it.
While we probably won’t know the exact reason why Sony decided to pull the plug on Concord after only two weeks for some time, there are some easy assumptions that we can make. Sony has been eager to try and get into the live-service business for a long time. It’s one of the reasons why they poached Bungie back in 2022. They wanted a deeper understanding of how to make a live-service game in order to make their own since they saw how profitable they were. Sony had at one point 12 live-service games in active development and it’s fair to assume that Concord was one of those twelve games. Yet because of that, Concord was in direct competition not only with every other live-service game on the market but the ones that Sony was developing. Sony was essentially throwing money at multiple different projects, hoping that one of them would be a billion-dollar money-making machine.
But not every game can make billions.
Major publishers and developers now have this mindset that in order for a game to succeed, it needs to make millions upon millions instantly or else it’s a failure. It’s rare to hear about how a game, through word of mouth and positive reviews, goes to sell over a million units despite limited marketing. Not impossible, but rare. Now, we mostly hear about how quickly a game sold millions of units in a few days and interpret that as the only metric of success. It doesn’t even matter if the game is good, like with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. As long as it made money quickly, that seems to be the only thing that matters to publishers now. So because Concord didn’t instantly win over players, instead of putting in the hard work and effort to try and turn it around, Sony is quick to just label it as a failure and move on.
Sony, in less than an hour, effectively scrubbed the game from existence. It’s delisted from PSN and the game’s site just doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s not Sony who’s going to be feeling the sting of Concord’s delisting. In their eyes, this was probably the best decision they could have made since now they aren’t pouring more money into development costs for a game that isn’t making the money it needs to sustain itself. They issue some refunds, apologize, swiftly forget this even happened, and go back to profiting off of Helldivers 2’s success. To Sony, games aren’t artistic achievements or fun experiences. They’re products meant to be sold for profit. And yes, games are, ultimately, products meant to be bought by consumers, but they weren’t even trying to pretend here that Concord was anything but a money-making opportunity that didn’t pan out.
No, the people who are going to feel the brunt of Concord’s passing will be Firewalk Studios. Sony did say that they’re going to “explore options” in how to bring the game back, but that’s almost certainly going to equate to layoffs and downsizing the company to make it cost-efficient. I mean, there’s a chance that everyone at Firewalk will keep their job and the game will come back better than ever, but that doesn’t seem likely. What seems pretty likely is that Sony is knocking around Firewalk’s offices right now like a loan shark looking for some way to get back their money. In a year where game industry publishers have laid off an unparalleled amount of people and numerous studios have closed due to what I can only describe as the failures of corporate management, Firewalk is next on the chopping block.
And even just by writing this, I’m just overwhelmed with a sense of exhaustion by all of this. No, I won’t defend Concord’s quality as a game – I never played it and even if I did it’s not the kind of game I usually like – but I will defend its right to exist as an experience. Eight years of work was flushed down the drain in two weeks. That has to be absolutely devastating for the people who worked on it for that time. And while Sony may try to bring it back, at this point would it even matter? It’s not going to be like Final Fantasy XIV or Cyberpunk 2077 and receive miraculous updates that make people forget its embarrassing launch. Sony would rather bury it and move on and it’ll be the people at Firewalk that will suffer the scorn and ridicule.
When I see people dunking on Concord, I can’t help but just feel depressed at just what the state of the industry is like now. A massive game has just died and it seems like after the shock of it all has worn off, people are quick to mock it and laugh at its untimely end. But instead of mocking Sony for their hubris at trying to make a dozen live-service games and showing empathy for the developers whose vision was just snuffed, there’s just derision for a game that never got the chance to tell the story it wanted to tell. People forget that actions have consequences and with the delisting of Concord, it’s only a matter of time until we see Firewalk staff get laid off or even the studio shuttering. Don’t believe that won’t happen? Microsoft killed Tango Gameworks, and they made a good game.
What will save Firewalk from Sony?
Published: Sep 4, 2024 05:00 pm