Concord: The Cosmic Disappointment of 2024
Concord launched late August 2024, and, to this day, it's still one of the most wild and disastrous launches we’ve probably ever seen. After spending eight years (!) in development, and with Sony clearly betting big on it as their next big multiplayer hit, the game was completely shut down just two weeks later. That’s... not exactly what Sony expected, but everyone else saw the writing on the wall long before the game launched.
Sales were super low (somewhere around 25,000 copies), and at its peak, it barely broke 700 players on Steam. For a game with that kind of budget and support, those numbers were disastrous.
There were a lot of questions flying around about what went wrong: poor marketing, a crowded multiplayer market, maybe even just launching too soon. Whatever the case, it clearly didn’t click with players. Sony ended up pulling the plug really quickly, and Firewalk’s game director even admitted that while some things worked, a lot didn’t. In an attempt to keep goodwill intact, Sony offered refunds to everyone who bought the game.
Concord showed us how brutal the video game industry currently is. It’s not enough to just have a good idea for a video game anymore: you've got to nail the execution, get the timing right, and really connect with your audience. Hopefully, studios and executives will learn from this crash and take a step back, because if they don't listen to their audience, they end up risking becoming the next Concord.
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