PlayStation Stops Concord Sales as Game to Go Offline on September 6 - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 03 September 2024 / 6,287 Views
Publisher Sony Interactive Entertaiment and developer Firewalk Studios has provided an update on Concord and has decided to stop sales for the game immediately as the game will be going offline on September 6.
PlayStation will begin to offer full refunds for those who purchased the game on the PlayStation 5 or PC.
"Concord fans — we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar," said Firewalk Studios Game Director Ryan Ellis. "Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us.
"However, 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. Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players."
If you purchased the game from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct a refund will be issued back to the original payment method.
Those who purchased the game on Steam will get a refund in the coming days and will get a confirmation from Steam once the refund has been processed.
Those who purchased the game on Epic Games Store will get a refund over the coming days and each customer will be contacted directly to confirm the refund has been processed.
Anyone who purchased a physical copy of the game outside of PlayStation directly will have to refer to the refund process of the retailer it was purchased from.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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Wow, talk about a kick in the teeth. Feel sorry for the devs who worked hard on this.
Don't feel sorry for the devs, they proudly ignored all player feedback and gave players the finger who tried to help them get in the right direction. Close the studio, it's the only thing they deserve. Devs also called fans "talentless freaks" which is pretty ironic coming from talentless devs.
Yeah because the sound director and musicians, 3D modelers and animators or QA team have anything to do with certain aspects of the game that people complained about.
It's insane how much people are obsessed with one random dev that lashed out at the people harassing them and trying to make it out as some "arrogant devs don't respect audiences thing".
Insane? Really? So you actively give money to people who hate you. This is why devs should not be allowed in any shape or form to communicate on social media about their game. This devs comment went viral and turned a ton of people against the game and the studio. Even the upper management of the studio told the studio to "just ignore fan backlash, its just white noise", which no.... it wasn't, it was a warning to them and they ignored it. So yeah, arrogant devs do not respect audiences and again, don't give money to ppl who actively hate you.
Wasn't he a former dev? What are you asking Sony to do? Shutdown former employees right to speech?
not sure which company you work for but if you work for Ford, McDonad's or Adidas and one of their employees talked shit about customers, I hope these companies go bankrupt because...there was some guy who was an asshole and everyone deserves to lose their job now!
The reveal trailer was 3 months ago. The only thing they could do at that point was delay the game for seemingly several more years, which is going to be a tough decision for a game already 8 years in development.
Can I just say watching a line of GAAS games fail is just bloody glorious! Suicide squad / Redfall / Concord / babylon fall / foam star and soon xdefiant. Yet these companies keep pushing these games no one asked for down the consumers throat.
The trouble is the Industry looks at it as 1 big Gaas game can pays for a dozen failures , at least Sony's worldwide studios system of allocating a percentage of profits made from their best selling single player games into a pool to help broaden Sony's games library and genres saw an average of 7 extra games per each hit title made possible and the vast majority of those games according to Sony either made a profit or broke even .
But I wonder whether this is still happening, or has it fallen victim to the policy of pouring money into GAAS
Wow. Not even two weeks in. That’s brutal…
Eight years!
Unfortunate but GAAS games are the plague to video games industry in my humble opinion.
LMAO! more GAAS please keep wasting those millions on these rubbish no one asked for.
I mean HD2 was one of the top selling games this year. If you didn't like it fine but clearly people were fine with more GAAS as long as it's a good game. Do you bring this same energy anytime a SP game fails?
As much as I dislike GaaS, clearly there is demand, i.e. one might say that people did indeed ask for GaaS games - just not for Concord.
This has to be one of the biggest failures of all time.
Wow! This could go down as the biggest flop in the history of video games. (In fact, I don't think there's anything that even comes close).
A huge budget, ZERO revenue.
ETA: other good examples of huge flops have been presented. So definitely there are others that come close. However, with a couple of exceptions, at least those games didn't also embarrass the shit out of the developers and publisher, as they were canceled before release. So there are similar monetary losses, but less PR damage.
Oh there's plenty close, and all recent. SEGAs Hyenas was reportedly north of $100 million and scrapped entirely. Immortals of Aveum was $125 million peaked at 791 players on steam and slashed by 90% before the studio was gutted. It also wouldn't surprise me if NDs faction project was more expensive than all of them.
Edit: Rocksteady reportedly lost $200 million on SS, which is likely a lot more than the entire budget for this.
A huge amount of failures recently.
Common pattern in all of them. Gaming is seemingly more high risk high reward than ever at this moment. Big companies still want a piece of the GaaS pie and have to hit a niche not met by another audience already or stand out in a certain way.
Deadlock looks like it will succeed off the back of OW2's lost playerbase. Oddly, this game could have done the same but wasn't for various reasons.
I wonder if Sony might have rethought Concord after HD2 success but SS failure, if they had time. Sadly they had both being made at the same time so hard to rejig the entire format of Concord so late in development.
Well Deadlock is a MOBA first, so Valve seems to be trying to cater to their own niche while throwing in third person hero combat to try to appeal to that kind of playerbase. OW2 players won't have that great of a time because Deadlock has all the Dota 2/League of Legends kind of game systems of purchasing items mid-match to give your team an advantage, covering lanes, defeating creeps/AI encampments, etc.
It's a ton of fun though! Got a buddy to send me an invite and it's incredibly addicting. Even in early development. The biggest thing that Deadlock has going on for it is that it sticks out from the crowd.
Ah, Smite esq, didn't realise. So more like Battleborn. I guess in the end, yet it's another GaaS just as any other. People complain here but bet they won't there. Could Concord have been reformed as a Moba and it would have worked or would people complain just as they did here I wonder? All ifs and whats.
Guess it's more about what Sony is known for vs what they expect from them. They want adventures from Sony they expect it but big budget adventures (as the meme goes) can make as much as horse armour in a video game. ;-)
Not even Battleborn lasted this little. Damn.
Battleborn actually lasted a good while, they continued development on the game for 17 months after release, and the servers were open for nearly 5 years. It did have considerably more players than Concord though, 12,000 peak concurrent on PC at launch, compared to 697 peak for Concord, it took a year for Battleborn's player counts to fall as low as Concord had fallen less than a week after launch.
Hopefully this serves as a lesson to devs and publishers on what NOT to do when making a game.
That was really quick. Either it will change to a free-to-play model like its main competitors (Overwatch, etc) or I don't expect it to come back. Although even if it goes F2P, I don't think it has the charm to hook people into even trying it.
Absolute failure. Nobody was expecting it to die this fast.
That has to be some kind of record. Shut down after like 15 days...
I think we can all agree that, if nothing else, please let this be just another nail in the coffin for the 'live service game' genre.
By the way, now I'm interested to see if physical copies of PS5 Concord are going to become collection items. They are still available on many stores, but I bet they'll all disappear within the week.
Deserved. Unappealing in every way. Gaas shit. Money could have been used to revived good IPs and make a few new good SP IPs. As for the dev called anyone criticizing the game untalented freaks. Looks like Sony hired a studio full of untalented freaks. Eat shit. You're already dead.
Wow, did not expect this to happen so quick
I don’t like to wish failure on devs that are just trying to create something fun, but I am hoping this will be an industry wide shock to the system that puts to bed new attempts at the live service business model. The market is completely oversaturated with service games and there just isn’t any appetite for more of them.
Do we think it's gone forever or will it come back as a f2p with microtransactions?
It has to be the latter unless Sony can pull off a David Zaslav-level tax refund for sinking this.
I assume the latter, but they will need to make some sort of fundamental changes to the game itself as just no one was interested that you can only blame the business model so much on. This was a SPECTACULAR flop, and now with the game being completely shutdown, it will have a tainted legacy that not even F2P would be able to fix. I also feel like if Sony was going to make the game F2P, they would've just done that instead of shutting the game down completely. But still offer refunds for those that did purchase the game at full price.
Wow.
The game will only have been available for exactly 2 weeks........that has to be some kind of a record. What a terrible feeling the devs must be having to have 8 years of work go down the drain. With the developers exploring other options, hopefully they're able to make another game out of this considering they have all the assets already to retool them to make something else.
To think Sony went on a high on their live service ambitions with Helldivers 2 to this......all within a matter of months.
Wow, I was going to ask if it even lasted a month. Guess not. What a fucking disaster lmao
I really hate it how everyone keeps talking about the 8 years thing. It's impossible for the game to have been in full development for 8 years when the studio didn't exist 8 years ago. It was probablyu even only fully greenlit and went full scale when the sony partnership was established in 2021.
I didn't say the game was in full development for 8 years, but there are developers that have worked on this game for up to 8 years. Which there's no getting around that. How many developers, we don't know. We just know the game was in active development in some capacity for that length of time.
The lead dev outright said that the game was basically only developed for the past 4 years. it was only in the napkin sketch stage 8 years aggo as a what if concept. that's not development and no one was funding it or getting paid for that.
Now then, about that Bloodborne port, Sony...
Sony did the right thing - pulling the game and taking it away to work on and tweak is clearly the right thing to do. What they should do is perhaps give the game a promo week on ps+ or make it f2p for 4hrs for everyone as a taster and if they like then let them unlock it for the fee.
Damn. I know GaaS & Hero games are flooding the market, but at least there was something about the initial promise of simply buying the game once with no MTX on the backend.
That has to be a record, but honestly seems like a shame even if the game wasn't very good, a few reviewers gave it a 7 or higher. I feel like they could have given refunds, made the game free and then kept the servers running with a small team at least for a while to see if some players liked it.
if u go woke .. u go broke ..
Massive flop.
Don't think it deserved nearly as much hate, but had zero interest on it too.
It will rerelease as a free to play,
Nobody is asking for gaas and single player games are here to stay!
Sony is trying to get in the multiplayer market but so far they haven't been lucky,
Well Helldivers 2 was great but they need that big massive multiplayer hit game like cod
Won't help it. Hyena's a canceled game has a higher player count on steam for a beta than Concord. Which was free to play.
It's sad for the team and the studio that will probably be closed by Sony. It's important to note that some people don't represent the entire team's thinking, so I hope the entire team isn't fired.
As for GaaS, in my opinion there's room for these games, but don't try to completely imitate an already established game, don't try to implement a WOKE culture (in my opinion, inclusion doesn't come in this format).
When developing a product or service, you should do market research, listen to your customers' feedback and not try to impose what you think they'll like. This game failed because it ignored its objective, its goal (customers).
Stay invested in this shit sony, I just looked at steam the game has 20 people playing in the whole world that gives a total of 4 games kkkkkk. Fuck you sony, astrobot will show what the players want
At least try convert it to Free to Play and get some money back.
All they need to do is redesign all the characters , that's it..
With a name change of some sort. The name is now part of the book of memes. Once it enters it never leaves.
If anything Sony is getting the hard truth about what actually gains traction. Hell Divers 2? Traction. Concord? What woke crap doesn’t appeal to anyone after all? Fairgame$? Will probably do better based on concept of game in the first place.
GET WOKE GO MEGABROKE
YOU TELL EM LUKAS!! WOKE = MEGABROKE
One of the most disastrous and humiliating failures in gaming history. Sony should be ashamed.
The major issue for this game is the horrendous character design. 99% of gamers don’t want anything to do with atrocious looking characters that are literally the opposite of what they want a hero game to look like.
Who in the right mind would want to play as DEI cult abominations.
DEI is 100% a good thing, but in the right way. DEI is now it’s being dominated by grossly hypocritical lying cultists… & that faction is trying to force their cult down everyone’s throats in the most hideous authoritarian way, and everyone should reject it.
