Sony’s latest first-party title, Concord, got off to a rough start, at least on PC, failing to attract even 1,000 concurrent players on launch day.
Typically, a game’s release date is its biggest day in terms of players, so it’s probably at least a little concerning for developer Firewalk and publisher Sony that Concord is posting such low numbers. According to SteamDB, Concord reached its peak concurrent player count of 697.
That’s considerably lower than what the game’s own beta managed a few weeks ago. In fact, to give you some perspective, even Redfall, which was considered a huge flop, attracted over 6,000 players when it launched last year. And that was while it was available on Game Pass, which gave people even less of a reason to pay full price on Steam. Redfall was also considerably cheaper than Concord, which retails for £34.99.
It’s also a far cry from the massive success of Sony’s other live service games earlier this year: Helldivers 2 was a huge success for the company, and still manages to attract 20,000 to 30,000 concurrent players per day.
Of course, these numbers don’t take into account how many people will be playing on PS5 – there will be thousands playing on Sony’s machines, but I think the Steam numbers are generally a decent indicator of how poorly Concord is performing.
That’s a big deal, because Concord seems to have been in development for a very long time. A few days ago, Lead Character Designer Jon Weisnewski revealed that Concord has actually been in development for a whopping eight years. Of those eight years, Weisnewski has been working on the game for five.
Now, to be fair, that could mean a couple of things. The game could have been in the concept stage for years before going into full-scale development. Or, if we take his statement at face value, Concord has actually been in the works for eight years.
It makes sense when you think about it. The game has been compared to Overwatch and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, both of which were hugely successful when Concord launched.
But critically, it performs well. It has a Metacritic score of 68, which is a bit low considering that the code was released late and only a few reviews were filtered out because the media wanted to test its real-world performance.
Steam reviews for the game are currently “generally positive” based on hundreds of user ratings.
The criticism went to @anim_xander, a former animator on Firewalk who did the first-person animations for the game’s Freegunners, specifically Daw, Duchess, and Kyps. I spoke to another user on X who said that it was a shame that Concord was @anim_xander’s first game because of its low player count. @anim_zander responded, “Well, I don’t care. It’s an awesome game made with a ton of hard work by a bunch of talented people. Why would I care if some untalented weirdo hates it?”
Needless to say, the now-deleted response wasn’t very well-received, as people rightly pointed out that calling people who hate games “talentless monsters” is an immature way to deal with criticism.
It’s unclear who exactly the former developer was referring to with his comment. I suspect it was intended as a response to criticism that Discord is heavily influenced by DEI ideals. However, it could also be a response to another major criticism I’ve seen online: the character design being ugly. Many of the positive Steam reviews also mention this.
No matter what group the previous developer targeted, the result was the same. It’s not a good look for a game that needs all the good publicity it can get right now. Concord can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat here, as other games have done with positive word-of-mouth and gradual trust-building. After all, Sony and Firewalk have already promised at least a few seasons of content.
But the reality is that Concord is a massive flop right now, especially for Sony, who acquired Firewalk Studios in 2023. Perhaps because they thought Concord would be a hit and a perfect next step into the live services market. Will the game be free or available to PS Plus Extra members due to its low player count? Or will Sony hold out?
