PlayStation’s Brand New Hero Shooter Concord is Being Shut Down After it Flopped

Concord, the PlayStation-developed new hero shooter released nearly two weeks ago on PlayStation 5 and PC is being shut down after it failed to gain any traction. The game is no longer available for purchase, and it will be taken offline on Friday, September 6. Sony will also offer refunds to people who purchased the $39.99 game on PlayStation 5, Steam, and the Epic Games Store.

This is quite unprecedented coming from such a big developer as PlayStation. Most gamers probably associate PlayStation’s first-party output with ambitious narrative titles such as The Last of Us or God of War, which received critical acclaim and sold millions of copies. In recent years, however, Sony has been chasing live service games like Fortnite, with varying success. Earlier this year, the co-op shooter Helldivers 2 was a surprise success for the company, partly due to its simultaneous launch on PS5 and PC. But Destiny developer Bungie, which Sony acquired back in 2022, announced last week that it was laying off 220 employees due to “rising costs of development and industry shifts.”

Concord has been developed by Firewalk Studios, which Sony acquired last year. The game is a hero shooter designed to compete with the likes of Blizzard’s Overwatch, which is free-to-play. However, with less than 1,000 concurrent players on Steam right after its release, it was pretty clear that Concord was off to a very bad start.

Here’s the message Ryan Ellis Game Director at Firewalk Studios wrote on the PlayStation blog today:

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. 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.

While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If you purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to your original payment method.

It’s not exactly clear yet if Concord is shutting down for good or if Firewalk Studios could bring it back after making some changes to the game. Concord could have had more players and momentum if it had been free-to-play from the start.

Still, it’s really hard to launch a brand new IP today, even for studios under the PlayStation Studios banner. And Microsoft didn’t have any more luck with some of its experiments in recent years. A good example is Bleeding Edge, the online brawler from Hellblade 2 developer Ninja Theory, which was abandoned less than a year after its launch on Xbox, PC, and Game Pass. More recently, Minecraft Legends had a similar fate despite launching on more platforms. However, Both games remain available for purchase and are still playable.