Concord
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 "Just because you can make a hero shooter, doesn't mean that you should."
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Concord was a 2024 first-person hero shooter game developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment. The game was initially developed in 2016 and released for PlayStation 5 and Windows on August 23, 2024. It received mixed reviews from critics and became a sales flop. With extremely dismal sales figures and a reported budget of US$400 million, it is one of the worst commercial failures in video gaming history.
Concord was intended to be a Star Wars-like project for Sony, believing it would expand to a franchise given its reported budget.[1]
The servers for the game were taken offline on September 6, 2024, making it impossible to go past the title screen. On October 29, 2024, it was announced that Concord's developer, Firewalk Studios, closed its doors, and the game shut down permanently.
Plot
The game took place in the far future, where interstellar mercenaries known as "Freegunners" venture across the galaxy in search of "high-stakes jobs" in competition with each other.
Bad Qualities
- Troubled Production: Similar to Action 52, It was stated by Firewalk developers that while the game was being developed, higherups forced the team into a "toxic positivity" workplace, where any doubt cast on the game was immediately shot down. This led to all of the problems discussed below.
- It was developed for over 8 years and released way too late in 2024 when the hero shooter genre reached a peak of saturation and perfected design along with games like Valorant and Overwatch that were still popular at the time. Yet despite all these long years, this game had not adapted to the current environment of the genre not having enough innovative features to stand out against the games that were released during those years, feeling like an outdated game that could've been released in 2016 (which would line up with features like the inspired style of Guardians of the Galaxy that was popular back then and the paid access model).
- Oversaturation: It was yet another generic hero shooter reliant on cosmetics, multiplayer matches, and characters acting extremely quirky but lacking humor. This is the same problem with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but this one was worse as discussed below.
- Similar to Battleborn and LawBreakers, the gameplay was incredibly generic and does very little to stand out from other hero shooters like Overwatch.
- The guns felt incredibly generic, and like with LawBreakers and Kill the Justice League, felt no different from other shooters you've played before.
- Non-existent story. It makes it even worse when the cutscenes try way too hard to be like the MCU or DCEU but feels like a rip-off of that.
- Even more baffling is that the developers intend to make a franchise with this, as they signed an agreement to have this game be adapted on Amazon Prime's Secret Level anthology series.
- Incredibly bland maps. At least with Kill the Justice League, the traversal there was admittedly fun.
- To apply a certain buff to a character, you had to be killed by another player and then switch to that character. While it's a good idea on paper, it doesn't work in execution as it clashes with the teamwork aspect of the genre: encouraging players to seek out kills themselves instead of working together, snowballing and missing out on pivotal heroes for your team from the constant swapping, not to mention being unaware of hidden and random advantage the opponent has the players cannot counter right away.
- No single player content whatsoever, just like LawBreakers and Anthem.
- You also could not play as the same character another one has selected. You have to choose a different character. And when you die, you are jarringly taken to the character selection menu.
- Speaking of the characters, except for 1-0ff, they all have unappealing character designs that look like Guardians of the Galaxy rejects.
- It isn't helped by the fact that they are all so bland that you would forget their names once you log out of the game.
- Not to mention many character models look incredibly ugly and look like they belong in Power Rangers, especially Daw, Emari, and Lark.
- Even without the character designs, they all fail to portray what the character specifically does. Would you expect Daw to be a healer with a big blue jacket and swimming goggles?
- Getting into a match with very few players playing this game was ludicrously hard.
- Even if you have a high-end PC, the game ran with poor optimization, with its frame rate constantly switching from 150 FPS to 45 FPS.
- Overpriced: This game was too expensive for a $40 price tag and very little content. Even Overwatch had better content than this!
- Just like the Saints Row reboot and Dustborn, one of the devs proved that they can't handle criticism, by calling the gaming community "talentless freaks".
- Overall, this game proved that "player-vs-player" live-service games are pretty much a dead horse due to oversaturation and with all of the failures out there like the aforementioned Anthem, Babylon's Fall, and Marvel's Avengers.
- What's more is that the game's servers were taken offline on September 6, 2024, two weeks after the game's launch. This game has to be the quickest death of any online game since the infamous The Culling 2, which shut down after eight days, if mobile gacha games are excluded. Even the scam game The Day Before lasted longer, being able to stay online for a month after being delisted.
- On September 10, 2024, Concord was removed from all PlayStation Network (PSN) accounts, making the game unplayable and turning any copy into a collector item.
- Speaking of which, just like Battleborn, the PS5 version has a physical edition, which Sony is still selling. However, the discs are now e-waste due to the game no longer being playable.
- This game killed Firewalk Studios. Both the studio and the game were shut down permanently by Sony on October 29, 2024. This has to be the most recent and biggest example of a Triple-A game gone wrong, which will end up serving as a lesson to future game developers on how not to set your expectations too high, or it might end up crashing and burning faster than this game.
Freegunner Qualities
- The gunplay and controls were solid.
- The graphics were great with breathtaking cinematics.
- Unlike Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, the characters played differently from one another.
- Like with South Park: Snow Day!, there were no microtransactions, and new content was intended to be added across seasons free of charge.
- It had a great soundtrack, scored by Daniel Pemberton.
- The game has a good concept for the first PlayStation hero shooter multiplayer game, but the execution is pretty bad.
Reception
Concord received mixed reviews from critics and mixed to negative from players. It did worse when it came to players with fewer than 700 at its peak. Sales of Concord ceased on September 3, 2024, and the game's servers went offline three days later, at 17:25 UTC. Players who bought the game would be refunded.
Kyle Orland of Ars Technica reported that "no one wanted these PS5 Concord discs until Sony stopped making them". On September 8, 2024, the median price of a Concord physical PS5 disc for sales made on eBay was US$110, nearly three times the listed retail price of US$40.[2]
Despite its failure, Concord-themed merchandise was made available for purchase on the PlayStation Gear website after the game itself had shut down.[3]
The product is featured in the Museum of Failure.[4]
Videos
Reviews
Company Shutdown
References
Comments
- 2020s media
- 2020s games
- Delayed games
- PlayStation 5 games
- Games made in the United States
- PC games
- Boring games
- Games that require Internet connection
- Cash grabs
- Commercial failures
- Delisted games
- Discontinued games and hardware
- LGBTQ+ games
- Average games
- Mediocre media
- Rip-offs
- Overpriced
- First-person shooter games
- Covered by NerdSlayer
- Covered by YongYea
- Games that killed their studios
- Development hell
- One and only games by developers