Sony has closed the studio behind Concord, the $400m hero shooter it shut down mere days after its release in August – again highlighting the risks of live-service games.
Update 30th October 2024: Since the post below was written on the 3rd September, publisher Sony has withdrawn physical copies of Concord from sale. “Our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” the company wrote in a statement. Then, on the 29th October, Sony announced that the studio behind Concord, Firewalk, is to be closed. It’s thought that $400m was spent on Concord’s development. We’ve updated the story below accordingly.
Our original story follows…
Less than a year since bosses at Warner Bros and Sony doubled down on their commitment to live-service gaming, the struggles of hero shooter Concord highlight just how risky the sector can be.
In development for several years at Firewalk Studios, first-person shooter Concord was released on the 23rd August, and it’s fair to say that it hasn’t taken off in terms of player interest. According to one recent estimate, published by IGN, the game may have sold as few as 25,000 copies – 10,000 of them on PC via Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation 5.
The number of people actually playing the game on PC makes for grim reading: in September, there were just 54 people shooting their way through Concord according to Steamcharts, while its peak player count amounts to just 660. To provide some sort of context, rival shooter Apex Legends – which is now over five years old – currently had over 90,000 concurrent players at the time.
Given that Firewalk reportedly spent as long as eight years making Concord (that’s according to its lead character designer), and Sony likely spent millions on funding and promoting it, only makes those figures look more dismal. (A more recent report suggests that Concord’s budget was as much as $400m.)
Then, on the 3rd September, less than two weeks after Concord’s launch, Sony made the startling announcement that Concord was to be shut down; it was to be withdrawn from sale, and those who’d purchased the game would receive refunds.
So what happened? One analyst quoted by Eurogamer pointed to its $40/£34.99 price point, arguing that players simply weren’t willing to give the game a chance when there are so many free-to-play competitors to choose from.
“Concord should have launched free-to-play – or at least as part of the PlayStation Plus subscription – to have a fighting chance in its overcrowded genre,” said Rhys Elliott, an analyst at Midia Research. “It is not too late for this to happen, of course, but the damage might have already been done. First impressions matter.”
Reviews were also mixed, and while there’s said to be much to like in Concord, it also struggles to distinguish itself from existing titles like Overwatch 2 and Valorant.
What Concord again proves, however, is that live-service games – which promise their customers a rolling diet of seasonal ‘content’ – are a gamble that only the industry’s biggest companies can afford to dabble in. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League, much like Concord, was in development for years at Rocksteady, but its release in February was a disappointment.
Publisher Warner Bros Interactive admitted that the superhero action game had “fallen short” of expectations, but that soon sounded like an understatement; in August, the company revealed that its failure contributed to a $200m hole in its finances.
Even setting aside the financial risks, there’s also the creative side of the equation. Rocksteady, a previously respected developer that garnered huge acclaim for its Arkham series of single-player Batman games, spent about seven years working on Suicide Squad and a genre in which it was less experienced. (Since this piece was first posted, news has emerged that numerous jobs are to go at Rocksteady, with its development team being cut almost in half.)
Similarly, Arkane Austin, which previously developed such acclaimed single-player games as Dishonored and Prey, was brought low by the 2023 release of vampiric looter shooter Redfall. When that game failed to do as expected, Arkane Austin was shut down by its owner Microsoft in May 2024, resulting in almost 100 job losses and the destruction of a studio with 25 years of experience behind it.
Then, on the 29th October, Sony made the sad yet inevitable announcement that Firewalk Studios, the studio behind Concord, is to be shut down.
There are signs that at least some of the industry’s biggest players have begun to realise how risky live-service games can be. Sony said in late 2023 that it plans to launch six games of that type by the end of 2025’s financial year – previously the company planned to release 12 live-service titles. Developer Naughty Dog has also taken the harsh step of cancelling its online game based on The Last Of Us. In a December 2023 statement, it wrote, “We had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.”
Other major companies still see gold in those live-service hills, however. Warner Bros, seemingly overlooking the sting of Suicide Squad, said in March 2024 that it wants to make a “live-service [game] where people can live and work.”
Disney, meanwhile, announced in February that it was investing $1.5bn in Epic Games, and showed off plans to create an “entertainment universe” with “opportunities for consumers to play, watch, shop and engage with content, characters and stories from Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Avatar and more.”
The games industry’s biggest firms are still chasing the dream of having their own equivalent of Fortnite – a viral hit that will keep players coming back, and pumping in cash, for years on end. But with players’ time, money and attention spans at a premium, there are only so many of these titles the market can take – which means that, for every hit like Apex Legends or Rocket League, there are numerous more games that fail to find the hundreds of thousands of users they need to survive.
