Concord's disappearing act

I haven’t played Sony’s new 5v5 first-person shooter game, Concord. In spite (or, in fact, because) of this I feel qualified to say why the game failed.

On Tuesday, Sony announced that Concord would go offline on Sept. 6, just two weeks after the game launched. Players who purchased the game (which cost $40) would be refunded, Sony said.

“While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” wrote game director Ryan Ellis in Sony’s statement. The studio would shift to “[exploring] options, including those that will better reach our players,” Ellis added.

By some accounts, Concord played well enough — it just never found a player base. PC Gamer reported last week that PC players were having trouble queuing into matches, with some tallies putting the all-time peak concurrent players on Steam at 697. In light of this, it is excruciating to imagine the mood in the Firewalk Studios office in the days after release.¹

There have been some tendentious explanations of why Concord failed (worst among them that “wokeness” was responsible) but I think this is an instance in which the obvious answer is also correct: The game should not have cost $40. All of Concord’s other failures follow from there.

To wit: I did not play Concord because it was $40. My friends and I regularly² play video games together on Discord, and though we largely stick to a small handful of titles (mostly Valorant, but recently also Deadlock) we occasionally branch out to smaller free or inexpensive games, ranging from viral hits like Lethal Company and Chained Together to multiplayer shooters like The Finals. (I played Overcooked with this group just once. No prize for guessing why.)

Concord never even entered the discussion as a serious option. Or more honestly, it was discussed… as a joke. Nobody wanted to pay that much money for a game that was comparable to titles we already had free access to — even if, in the instance of Valorant, some of us have spent hundreds of dollars on in-game cosmetics. It would be beyond the pale to suggest paying $40 for an Overwatch analogue, especially when Overwatch 2 is free.

This is, of course, just one anecdote. But I imagine plenty of people, if they were even aware of Concord, were having — or not having (?) — similar conversations with their friends.

Social media is an instructive frame here. I play competitive shooters to hang out with my friends who play the same competitive shooters. These games are functionally social spaces. If everyone owns the same game, it’s easier to organize a hangout; it there’s a game that only one or two people own, that title is less enticing as an option. If you view games the same way I do, a title’s value increases with the number of your friends who also play, and to a lesser extent aligns with the ease with which you can get your friends into that game. (This is basically just a tailored version of the network effect, a term that describes when a platform’s value increases as the platform gains users).

Here’s a tortured analogy, if you’ll tolerate it: I do not like being on Twitter (Valorant). Whenever I use Twitter (Valorant), I allow freakish strangers to hijack my brain chemistry to make me a worse person. I should quit social media (online shooters) entirely, but I won’t. I would switch to Bluesky (Concord), but the costs are too high: I’d have to rebuild the list of people I’m following (my friends don’t play Concord) and I’d have fewer followers to begin with (I would need to grind to reach a brag-worthy rank), plus I’d need to get in the habit of typing in a new url instead of opening a new tab, writing “tw” and hitting enter (I would need to set new keybinds and learn new mechanics). Also, I’ve heard that Bluesky (Concord) is filled with annoying pedants (PlayStation fans). Unless it becomes apparent to me that all my friends are on Bluesky (playing Concord), I should just stick to the platforms (games) I already use (play).

Even still, Bluesky is free. I’d have to pay $40 for Concord.

Much has been made of Concord lacking a “hook,” or some kind of unique feature or mechanic. Respectfully, I don’t think this matters.³ For starters, I think the Sony brand is a hook. The name should, in theory, act as a mark of the game’s quality. But also, there are plenty of bad games with no discernible hook that tons of people play, and even more great games with cool hooks that never have their day in the sun. Further still, one person’s “great hook” is another person’s “annoying contrivance.”

Concord may be fixable, but salvation won’t come overnight. Free-to-play isn’t an outright solution; it’s a model that can succeed or fail on its own merits. And obviously, changing monetization models isn’t easy: it requires planning, the creation of new in-game items, a new storefront and user interface, new marketing for a relaunch, and so on. If the game’s premise used to be “pay $40 and you own everything,” now the pitch is tainted: “Spend money on a battle pass and cosmetics in a game that reeks of failure⁴ from our last launch.” Sony will have to weigh whether it wants to take that risk.⁵

I’ll close with this — an ironic twist on the “none of my friends are playing Concord” quandary: My former Launcher colleague, Gene Park, tweeted Tuesday that he had found and queued with a group of players who discovered that they would get more experience points by blazing through matches by killing themselves at the start of rounds. Under the looming threat of Concord’s closure, players have forged the bonds that would have otherwise kept them engaged and playing.

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1. I have a theory (this is not based on reporting or sources or interviews; I am just guessing lol) that for the past few years you could split the developers at Firewalk into three camps: 1) The people who were like “holy shit why are we launching a $40 Overwatch competitor this is obviously going to fail.” 2) The second and largest camp, who thought: “This is what we’ve been asked to deliver so this is what we’re working on” and 3) The people who sincerely believed they could sell Concord for $40. I would be very curious to learn who falls into this last category. It should be the higher-ups at Sony, the people who presumably made the decisions around how to publish the game. If so, they have some soul-searching to do. But if it’s not the higher-ups at Sony — if those folks believed they were shipping a dud and didn’t believe in the title — well, that also merits some soul-searching, obviously.⁶

2. The regular hangs are regularly becoming less regular. I can feel the fabric of the Discord thinning. People get busy; they get older. Priorities change. What used to be an each-day-and-each-night habit is turning into a thrice-weekly thing will turn into a once-a-month thing and then the games will end. It’s normal. It’s fine. This has happened before. It will happen to you. Maybe it already has.

3. But also, without being too mean about this, I’m not sure I unreservedly trust streamers’ and games journalists’ capacity to discern a game’s best and most interesting qualities in just a few weeks. Sometimes it takes a subreddit, two dueling wikis and multiple inscrutable spreadsheets to figure out a game’s quirks.

4. I think an under-discussed reason for the game’s failure is that there is an enormous content ecosystem — particularly on YouTube — that is self-referential and recursive. If one big account says “this game is flopping for X reason,” a hundred remora channels will produce identical videos parroting that message. I think this can give the false impression of consensus, and I would not begrudge a random viewer for mistakenly confusing “there are 100 videos saying this game is bad” with “this game is actually bad.”

5. My too-savvy, very “😎” take on this is that I am a player, not a business analyst nor a Sony shareholder, and thereby don’t care whether Concord — or Sony for that matter — succeeds or fails. Still, I feel for the developers, and really hope eight years of work aren’t lost like this. 

6. If you’re a Firewalk dev with some perspective on this, get in touch!