Concord

» see playstation.com/concord as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i missed concord. wrong platform, wrong genre, wrong moment for me. by 2024 i was on edge-ai work in ankara and not paying attention to ps5 first-party launches, and even if i had been, this is not the kind of game my mid-forties self has time for. the only reason it lives in memory is that it died in fourteen days, which makes it a sony case study rather than a game.

the facts of the launch are public. firewalk studios, a seattle-area studio sony acquired in 2023, had been working on concord since around 2016. the project was reported as a $50 million budget in 2019 with one disputed claim of $400 million by the end. it launched on 23 august 2024 on ps5 and pc at $40. the hero shooter genre at that price was already a hard sell against overwatch 2 and apex legends, both free to play.

the early reviews were polite about the production values and skeptical about the moment. steam concurrents peaked around 700. total first-week sales sat around 25,000 copies across ps5 and pc combined. that was not a slow start, that was a dead one.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the rise is mostly a marketing one because the game never had a meaningful player base to grow. sony bought firewalk in april 2023 specifically to make concord a tentpole first-party live-service title. it was previewed at state of play in may 2024, with a roster of sixteen characters described in cinematic trailers as the freegunners. the visual identity drew comparisons to guardians of the galaxy. the gameplay reveal landed in the same window as the destiny 2 player count collapse, which set the stage poorly.

the steam beta in july 2024 already showed the problem. concurrents were in the low thousands at peak, which is fatal for a multiplayer game's launch curve. the launch trailers and tv spots could not move the needle.

~ the unraveling ~

the cracks were the launch itself. on day one, twitch viewer numbers were lower than the steam concurrents. on day three, sony was already running an internal review. the genre was crowded, the price was wrong against free-to-play competitors, the character design read as derivative, and the eight-year development cycle had produced a game that felt designed for a 2017 market.

sony announced refunds on 3 september. the cleanly-dead moment was not the bad sales, it was the company deciding that pulling the product and giving customers their money back was a better option than running it at a loss.

~ how it actually ended ~

the servers went off on 6 september 2024, fourteen days after launch. every ps5 and pc copy was refunded. the digital storefronts removed the game. on 29 october 2024 sony announced firewalk studios would close. the studio that had been building concord for the better part of a decade ended in the same calendar quarter the game shipped.

concord sits at the top of a short list of post-2020 sony cancellations next to deviation games and london studio. its place in industry memory is as the cleanest evidence yet that a triple-a publisher will pull a live service before the first quarter is over if the numbers are bad enough. fourteen days is the new floor.

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