Less than two weeks after its release, Concord was gone.
Sony announced this morning that it would take the game offline on September 6th, and said it would offer refunds to the small number of people who chose to buy it. The team-based shooter was one of PlayStation’s new first-party games scheduled for release this year. Sony released it on both PS5 and PC on August 23rd. As for the scale of this failure, the company doesn’t usually share detailed player numbers for its platforms. But Steam does. And the numbers there aren’t pretty.
While Steam player counts aren’t a perfect reflection of a game’s success, they are an important data point from which we can infer some hypotheses: Concord failed to surpass 700 concurrent Steam players in its first weekend after launch, a dismal figure for a relatively high-profile launch, especially from a major publisher.
Incidentally, Galaxy Burger, an indie cooking simulation game I’d never heard of, released on the same day, had more than four times as many concurrent players on Steam (469) as Concord (104) at one point on August 28. In terms of comparisons to this year’s biggest blockbusters, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League peaked at over 13,400 concurrent players on Steam. The cooperative game was a notorious flop, costing Warner Bros. Discovery $200 million.
Additionally, as of this writing, Concord has 766 reviews on Steam. Some analysts estimate that every Steam review generates 30-50 sales. At the midpoint of that scale, Concord would have generated roughly 30,000 sales on Steam. This seems like a generous estimate, considering that concurrent player counts never surpassed their dismal opening weekend numbers.
There’s still no clear indication of PlayStation’s sales numbers, but its rapid closure suggests things weren’t all that great. Either way, it’s clear that sales simply couldn’t cover the development and marketing costs of a game that Firewalk Studios (acquired by Sony last year) spent eight years making.
There are a number of reasons why Concord didn’t catch people’s attention. I played a few rounds in the open beta and thought it was just okay. The combat was decent, and some of the core ideas were interesting, like the cool, lore-filled maps, but it just felt like it lacked anything new.
The first wave of characters is mediocre, less than ideal for a hero shooter when Apex Legends and Overwatch 2 (far more popular free-to-play rival titles) offer dozens of unique and compelling characters that fans can identify with. For better or worse, the influence of Guardians of the Galaxy is felt too heavily, and it also seems like Firewalker and Sony are following a trend that was popular in 2016.
The biggest misstep seems to be the pricing: having to shell out $40 for Concord when players can access many similar games without paying a cent just isn’t an attractive proposition for the majority of PS5 and PC owners.
Perhaps the story isn’t over yet for Concorde, as Sony says it plans to “explore options, including those that can more effectively reach players,” much like the shift to free-to-play.
But Concord seems like the only real negative in what has been a quietly strong year so far for PlayStation overall.
According to industry analysts at Circana, Sony’s Helldivers 2 is the second best-selling game in the United States so far this year, outselling only College Football 25 in the U.S. In fact, Helldivers 2 is Sony’s best-selling game of all time, selling over 12 million copies in the 12 weeks since its release.
Analysts say the choice to release the game simultaneously on PS5 and PC worked well, with the majority of initial sales coming through Steam, but Steam player numbers have dropped significantly in recent months, in part due to the game’s controversial account-linking requirements.
Another game published by Sony from a third-party studio, Stellar Blade, has received mostly positive reviews from critics and performed well commercially: developer Shift Up estimated that it had sold over one million copies in the first two months, and announced in June that it was considering a PC port as a result.
Sony’s strategy of porting major exclusive titles to PC years after the PlayStation debut has paid off in the past few years. This year they released two somewhat older games on Steam: Horizon Forbidden West and Ghost of Tsushima. Both are excellent, faithful ports that run well on my high-end PC and Steam Deck. They’ve also been a sales success, with the former making it into the top 10 best-selling games in the US in its first week of release. According to Circana, Ghost just topped the US game sales charts in May, following the same feat as Stellar Blade in April.
Sony has at least two more blockbuster PC ports planned for this year. God of War: Ragnarok will be released on the platform on September 19th. According to an Insomniac leak, the first game had sold over 2.5 million copies on PC as of February last year, so the sequel is likely to do well. The Until Dawn remake will be released on PC and PS5 just two weeks later.
And then there’s the small matter of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, which came to PS5 earlier this year with a fantastic new roguelike mode. A release date for the PC version has yet to be announced, but with TLOU Day (Naughty Dog’s annual celebration of the series on September 26th) fast approaching, it seems like the perfect time to make an announcement ahead of the HBO version’s second season, which debuts in 2025.
A cautious approach seems wise for part 2. Sony wants to ensure the PC version doesn’t suffer from any of the technical issues that occurred when part 1 arrived on PC, so giving developers as much time as they need to polish it is key.
Sony has several more first-party games lined up for the second half of the year. You might not have to wait long to wash away the Concord stench, when the long-awaited and utterly adorable platformer Astro Bot comes to PS5 on September 6. Lego Horizon Adventures, a more family-friendly take on the Horizon series, is coming to PS5, PC, and Nintendo Switch in a notable multiplatform debut this holiday season.
And then there’s the hardware side of things: Sony sold just under 7 million PS5s in the first half of this year, down from the 9.3 million it sold in the same period in 2023, though declines are to be expected at this point in the system’s lifecycle.
How the PS5 stacks up against the competition tells a bigger story. Microsoft has long been quiet about Xbox unit sales, but earlier this year some analysts pegged the PS5 vs. Xbox Series X/S unit sales ratio at more than 5:1. Wow. Given Sony’s large install base, it’s no wonder Microsoft is becoming increasingly eager to bring its own first-party games to PlayStation.
Meanwhile, at first glance, PlayStation Portal looked like a specialized peripheral for enthusiasts, one that would simply let you play games remotely from your PS5 without supporting Sony’s cloud gaming service.
But Portal has been a surprise hit. Sony says the device, which has often been sold out for months, has exceeded expectations. Circana says it’s the best-selling gaming accessory so far this year, measured by value. And rumors are flying around that Sony is “paying very close attention to the current handheld gaming market,” perhaps suggesting the company is finally ready to develop a successor to the Vita/PSP. Here’s hoping.
Even the struggling PS VR2 seems to have turned things around thanks to recent sales and the launch of a dongle that lets you play virtual reality games on PC. One report claims that the price drop has suddenly caused sales to skyrocket by 2,350 percent. According to The Shortcut, Sony may have sold more units in a single day (July 28) than it had in the previous seven months combined. While reports suggest that PS VR2 sales have been disappointing for Sony, such a sharp increase (or anything close to it) is surprising. In addition to the discounts, the added convenience of being able to use the headset for PC gaming has undoubtedly helped, as the actual PS VR2 game library is still pretty small.
There’s one more piece of hardware that could make 2024 even more exciting for Sony: the widely rumored PS5 Pro. For months, leaks have suggested that a mid-generation refresh is coming this holiday season. Rumors suggest that the PS5 Pro could offer faster game rendering, improved graphics, better ray tracing performance, and an 8K performance mode. Considering that Microsoft’s new Xbox variant will add more internal storage, change the color of the box, and remove the disc drive, the PS5 Pro may become an even more attractive option for users who are sticking with the current generation.
Update, Sept. 3, 3:15 p.m. ET: This article was originally published on Aug. 28, six days before Sony announced it was taking Concord offline. It has been updated and republished to reflect that news.
