Concord Canceled By Sony

Video Games

Sony appears to be folding and walking away from the table. Their new first-person shooter, Concord, has been a bust since its launch on July 23, reaching only 697 peak concurrent players on Steam – an even lower number than that of its beta test, suggesting many gamers didn’t come back for the actual game. Sony and their in-house studio, Firewalk Studios, got desperate enough to remove the LGBT tags from Concord’s store page on Steam, which was funny considering how big a ballyhoo was made over Concord’s diversity and inclusion. But it appears not to have helped, and this morning, Sony dropped a big bomb when they announced that they will take Concord offline on September 6, which is this Friday, exactly two weeks since its release. Concord will no longer be sold, and anyone who has already bought it will be issued a refund. Sony’s statement can be read below, courtesy of Dexerto:

Concord is officially shutting down on September 6th, offering full refunds to all players pic.twitter.com/8mJ6FDC56t

— Dexerto (@Dexerto) September 3, 2024

It’s really gone; the links to Concord’s pages on the PlayStation site lead to error messages. This is a huge black eye for Sony, which is why it’s surprising that they’re actually taking it down. Concord was the first game developed by Firewalk, and it was the centerpiece of Sony’s PlayStation State of Play this year; sure, it got a pretty negative response from gamers, but Sony made a big deal about it. They also spent six to eight years developing it through Firewalk, and it cost somewhere around $150 million to make. The numbers Concord is pulling must be abysmally bad for Sony to have canceled the game this quickly instead of letting it play out for a while; the only explanation is that it’s more expensive to host and maintain Concord than simply to scrap it, and making any kind of profit is a pipe dream.

To be fair, Sony did try to fix it when they removed the LGBT tag from Concord’s Steam store page. This is a game that was marketed on diversity and inclusion, with its body positivity characters, pronoun-infused bios, and concentrated lack of white male leads. That last example probably wouldn’t have been much of an issue if not for the rest of the narrative and the fact that the game’s lead character designer went on social media and railed against white privilege, which was the tip-off that the absence of white characters was not an accident and was definitely done to make a sociopolitical point. Shockingly, people didn’t want that in what should have been a fun shooter, and removing the LGBT tag happened too late to change the narrative. Everyone knew what this game was, and nobody wanted to play it.

Even ignoring the woke nonsense that most of society appears to have decided is worse than having your legs broken every time you power up your video game console (or your computer, depending on how you like your drinks mixed), Concord didn’t look like the epic game Sony clearly wanted people to think it was. The graphics are fine for what they are, but they’re very goofy and cartoony, making Concord look like it was for little kids rather than the more mature gamers they were trying to hook. It’s a great example of ignoring your customer base to appeal to those who won’t buy your product. Losing the LGBT tag is bad enough, an admission that Sony and Firewalk got this one wrong and were trying to reverse their own marketing. But throwing in the towel like this is a disaster for them, and I heavily suspect that line about fixing it and bringing it back is just to save face and hope people forget about it. But they won’t; Concord left Sony with enough egg on their face to start a whole chicken coup. It would be nice if game studios learned from this, but I think we can count the seconds until the next choose-your-own-pronoun game.

Let us know what you make of Sony canceling Concord in the comments!