Concord, developed by Sony owned Firewalk Studios, is the newest live service hero shooter. This is a space-themed multiplayer first-person shooter with a range of characters, released on August 23rd for PC and PS5 with a price of $39.99. But this Guardians of Galaxy-esque shooter has not managed to find its audience even after a closed and the free open Beta, leading to one of the worst launches in live service history.
Concord debuted to a tragic 697 peak player count on Steam and this graph has ever been going down. As of the reporting of this on August 28th, barely 5 days after the launch of the game, the peak player count of the day, according to Steam DB, has been less than 250 at the highest, dropping to as low as 96 players. This is with an overall estimated population which is said to be at at 9k players.
It has been a mostly disastrous year for Sony with their Live service portfolio. Even after one the best rated games of the year so far, Bungie, who are the spearheads of the live service model, has seen massive layoffs within the studio. One of the rare saving grace has been Helldivers 2, another live service game from Sony which launched in February 2024, hit a peak concurrent player count of 155,926 during its opening weekend. But that is from a studio which is not fully owned by Sony Games.
Current Steam numbers
All this is as Sony has committed to more live service games in the future. Coming back to Concord, this low player count has led to players barely being able to find any matches to play even in its launch window. As a PC player reported “Just waited 8 min for matchmaking, and then it timed out. I love the game and want to play it. Unfortunately, I can’t wait 8min+ between games”. A few servers at this stage are not even able to matchmake anymore. With such a low population and a premium prize tag, the game seems to be on its way to a very early death like most live service games.
Concord Gameplay
There have been talks for the game to go F2P among the players as which is the norm with most multiplayer games now. But that would likely take a lot of backend work, and as a purely multiplayer game with planned content for the next few months, Concord seems to be stuck in this limbo where it is a Live service game which barely has any players left.
Stuck with a premium price as the work needed for the game to function with hosted servers likely will not happen due to the lack of interest in the game. All this is after Concord has received decent critical reviews. With this Concord is shaping up to be one more of the many examples of how volatile the live service games can be.
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- Preview Gameplay
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- Concord Game Preview
