Multiplayer hero shooter Concord is possibly the biggest entertainment failure, ever. Not just in gaming, but all of entertainment, across all of time. A $400 million project that reportedly sold fewer than 25,000 copies, and never saw more than 700 people playing at once on Steam, pulled from sale and deleted from PS5s two weeks after its disastrous launch. So, it’s kinda weird that it’s still receiving updates.
To get an idea of how Concord’s release went for Sony, try to imagine a plane carrying faulty nuclear bombs crashing into a highway gridlocked with people taking their cute puppies to the vet.
Pulling a game in development for eight years, costing hundreds of millions of dollars, within days of its launch is just implausible. It was pulled so damn hard that Sony wiped it from their web pages and literally deleted it from the scant few customers’ accounts, as if trying to salt the earth from which it had once grown. It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before.
So why, according to SteamDB, is Concord still regularly being updated, most recently on October 10?
The game is no longer available on Steam, and with the servers shut down, it’s not possible for anyone who did buy a copy to play any more. Not that this really interrupted many people’s schedules, given the multiplayer shooter somehow never managed more than a miniscule 697 playing at the same time. For context, at the time of writing, Dune Awakening, a game that isn’t out until next year, saw a peak of 696 people playing in the last 24 hours, while 2013’s barely-known racing sim rFactor 2 saw 698. Concord was a AAA first-party Sony game released alongside an international advertising campaign. It’s bemusing.
Someone, somewhere, is still playing Concord
Yet, someone, somewhere is still tweaking at its code. In fact, some people are still playing it. Admittedly only two of them in the last 24 hours, but five people were playing at once on October 5. They, logic dictates, can only be people from within Firewalk Studios, the in-house Sony development team who made the game.
Does this confirm Sony’s vague allusion toward one day reviving the game? It’s not impossible, obviously, and you can bet your teeth there are people at Sony in very expensive suits asking other people in very expensive suits how they can possible claw back some of the better part of half a billion dollars. PC Gamer certainly seems to be more optimistic about this possibility.
My take is slightly different. I think there’s an office inside Firewalk’s Bellevue, Washington headquarters that’s been abandoned since the closure of the game. There’s still paperwork on various desks, a few small plushies hanging from the side of a monitor yet to be reclaimed, and a collection of old coffee mugs now growing mould. The lights haven’t been switched on for weeks, and there’s one ceiling tile hanging loose that no one’s pushed back into place. But if you were to walk past the glass doors of that room at 2 a.m., you would see the faint, blue light of a single monitor, casting its gloom on a hunched individual, a hoodie pulled up over their head, tapping away at the keyboard between furtive glances toward the door.
That’s Dave. Dave cannot let Concord go, no matter what is bosses have told him. Dave is going to save his game, you’ll see.
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