By JIM RASBERRY/Staff Writer
Sony faces a historic failure as its new hero shooter is pulled from stores.
In possibly a major setback for the gaming industry, the new hero shooter Concord was pulled from stores and refunded only two weeks after release. The game was developed by Firewalk Studios. This was the studio’s first game developed after Sony Interactive Entertainment acquired them in April 2023.
Concord was purported to be a large-scale and long-lasting project from Sony. The game would act as a flagship title which they would develop over time with new characters and media. However, after poor reception, Sony was forced to cancel the project altogether.
Some of the most common complaints about the game were its characters’ poor design.
“The heroes seem to be visually either under or overdesigned,” says a Eurogamer reviewer.
Nova Smith, from PC Gamer, calls the video game “underbaked, overpriced, and dated.”
While researching the title, I found that the loudest critique was the character’s slow movement and uninspired design.
The biggest factor in Concord’s failure is the game’s lack of inspiration. The game failed to compete with its contemporaries such as Overwatch 2 and Valorant, which are free-to-play. Concord had generic characters, and the map design received poor reception. One can only hope that this serves as a lesson to developers that they can’t simply put out any hero shooter and expect massive success.
Upon release, the game was a commercial failure. It only reached around 700 concurrent players on Steam during its short run. This is an immense failure for any video game by a major publisher such as Sony. Typically, such a video game would need to reach hundreds of thousands to cover costs and be considered a success. The low sales and player count cost Sony around 200 million dollars in loss; thus, eight years of development went to waste.
Increasingly, large companies are trying to adopt the same formula as their successful competitors and expecting great success. You need to look no further than Concord and other failed hero shooters to see the failure of such projects.
For success in the genre and the entirety of the gaming industry, these large companies have to adapt and continue pushing the genre forward. They must be doing something different instead of doing the exact same and slapping on a new price tag. I hope Sony and other developers can learn from this experience instead of repeating the same mistake.
However, fans of the game should not worry. In August 2024, Amazon Prime revealed that the game would take part in the new anthology series “Secret Level.” Despite the game’s shutdown, its episode will remain in the series.
