Concord is a new multiplayer hero shooter akin to Overwatch or Valorant, and Sony greenlit it in an attempt to barge their way into that genre with an exclusive title. It was a bold idea, but not a well advised one. At the time of writing the game has been released on PS5 and PC, and essentially it’s wheels have fallen off on the runway becoming a commercial disaster. 

Its failure was predicted by almost all commentators in the industry, because it was astoundingly obvious this was doomed from the moment it became clear what kind of game this is. The game was in development for 8 years, an awfully long time even for the biggest video games. That means this game was likely first conceived to jump on the back of the wild success of Blizzard’s Overwatch in 2016. At the time, that was a great idea. An exclusive version of that game that could rival it with a more fleshed out story delivered in weekly cutscenes must’ve seemed like a guaranteed success. 

Concord asks you for a smaller fee than any other AAA game. It’s half the price of a full priced PS5 game sitting at just £34.99. On the face of it, a perfectly reasonable price point for a multiplayer only game which has top end graphics and a decent marketing campaign. The issue is that all of its competitors are free to play, and they all beat it to the market. 

I am pretty much their ideal target market. I am a casual gamer who loves the competitive shooter area. The last year or so I’ve been playing Overwatch and I’ve tried all the other hero shooters around. I even felt I was falling in love with Valorant for a brief period (more on that in another post). A new hero shooter with no game breaking “Ultimate” moves and a narrative element I can follow? That’s essentially my perfect game. Yet here we are. I am writing this about how its failure was obvious, instead of my thoughts on the actual game, because I simply don’t believe it makes sense to spend money on this game. 

As of writing the game is on track to be one of the biggest commercial flops in gaming history, selling an estimated 25,000 copies since launch. Overwatch’s original beta in 2015 had 9.7 million players, before the game was even released. It’s rare to see anything in any medium of entertainment blatantly fail like this. It’s not even like it’s being panned critically, it’s just a game with a satisfied audience and no room for more competition. 

It makes me think about how oversaturated the Superhero films have become in the last decade, and yet it has never reached the point where one of them has not made enough to at least break even. Only a few released in the midst of a global pandemic game threatened to lose their parent studios significant money. This is a genuinely unique situation with Concord, and one I think warrants analysis from major gaming publishers.

Jumping onto the latest craze in film or TV is one thing, you can feasibly produce something within nine months to a year if you’re a big enough name in your industry. In video games, the development time is only getting longer. Even a juggernaut like Fortnite only exists because the majority of the game and the engine were working in the original Fortnite game when they decided to essentially mod a battle royale mode into it through the back door. If Epic games had tried to make a PUBG clone from scratch, it wouldn’t have come out for at least 3 years, and by then we’d have all moved onto something else. Even huge video games with endless funding like Call of Duty took months to get their own version of a battle royale functioning.

Sony’s long term vision to have an exclusive hero shooter with the highest level of production makes sense in isolation. When overwatch was released, it was pretty much the first big hero shooter in the console world. A lack of awareness, or an unwillingness to pivot, has led to what will go down as one of the disasters of the gaming industry. 

Thoughts go out to the developers who spent so much of the last ten years working on this game. It’s been a horrendously mismanaged situation from the very top level. The people who did the legwork do not deserve the memes and jokes that will be on the internet right now. I dread to think of the much more serious consequences Concord’s failure might have on the studio’s future. With some studios closed after huge successes, a failure like this only seems to point one way in the games industry now. It’s very rare these things fall on the people in charge that are responsible. 

All that said, Concord may well still reach success. In recent years, gamers as consumers have shown a willingness to support good work and developer efforts. No Man’s Sky is the poster child for such stories, its initially disastrous release now a distant memory for the studio who now struggle to go a day without someone praising them for the turnaround they delivered with that game. 

So what I’m saying is… there is the smallest hope that Concord could become a success, but that only lasts as long as Sony is willing to back it. 

Written by ChAzJS