Pour one out for the people who worked on this game for like half a decade
In unrelated news, Sony corpos to give themselves a raise for job well done
Why did they react so massively, instead of dicking with patches? Completely missed this saga
The player count was below a thousand on opening weekend and Sony dropped it like a deadly scorpion. It’s kind of a meme now - all of the “limited edition” Concorde controllers are on eBay for like $200 last time I checked.
As I understand it, the game bombed beyond the point of being salvageable - tens of millions of dollars and around a decade in development, but it only peaked at a few hundred concurrent players, then fell off rapidly.
Why did they react so massively, instead of dicking with patches?
Its fundamental issues were really just two things: it was a $40 game competing in a stale genre dominated by well established F2P games, and literally nobody even knew it existed in the first place. It had nothing selling it, Sony didn’t do anything to manufacture any sort of enthusiasm, and the first time anyone heard about it was when there were a ton of “lmao you ever heard of Concord? No? Well get this, nobody’s playing it! This game you haven’t heard of, that nobody’s heard of? It’s dead, complete flop, what a joke amirite?” articles that sealed its fate because PvP games more than anything live on player confidence and investment (hence why F2P live service models have become basically mandatory for them, because anyone can “just try” those which helps keep the population numbers high enough that people keep playing).
It’s still kind of weird they didn’t shuffle it around and rerelease it as a F2P live service game, which it probably could have survived as, but honestly after getting the “dead game in the first 12 hours” rep it probably wasn’t ever going to draw in crowds because all anyone associated it with was it being dead and unpopular.
Through the darkness
Of futures past
The magician longs to see
One chants out
Between two worlds
Firewalk with me
edit: OOH OOH JOKE #2
Guess anything named concord is just plain cursed.
I remember when people were upset that Tencent closed down Kaiju studios before they even released their game. That’s the studio co-founded by former Halo 4 design director Scott Warner and Dice’s Rosi Zagorcheva that was working on a “AAA multiplayer game”, the whole team got reassigned to work on other tencent projects.
But after this concord stuff I’m thinking, what if that project was also a shitshow, and they just decided to pull the plug on it and get everyone working on other stuff before the hole got too deep, and how it might’ve been better if sony had done the same with concord and firewalk earlier on.