On Tuesday September 3rd, Firewalk Studios announced that Concord will be going offline after only 2 weeks on the market and that every player will be able to get a full refund. In a post featured in the Playstation Blog, Concords game director, Ryan Ellis said: “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”.
Concord is a 5v5 first person shooter which features 6 different modes in which the team must complete objectives to win the match. When Concord released it was criticized for its long wait time in between games due to the low player count, which at its peak was only 697 players on Steam.
In April of 2023 it was announced that Sony would acquire Firewalk Studios and would publish the studios first game which was going to be a AAA multiplayer game. The game was showcased 3 months ago during a State of Play and while the game showed promise, I was a bit skeptical of how the game would distinguish itself in a market flooded with team based first person shooters, and to make matters worse the game was also released at $40, which is honestly a fair price, but that price point becomes a negative when most of its competitors are free to play.
Firwalk Studios has allegedly been working on Concord since 2018, and the online multiplayer shooter landscape has changed alot since then. As I stated earlier, most online multiplayer games have opted for a free to play model, since its more sustainable and its easier to attract players to buy cosmetics and in game items at $5 compared to buying a full priced game at $40. But several new IPs have launched trying to become the new “Fortnite” and have failed to retain a player base. First person shooter fans are willing to give new games a shot when they release, but those games need to have a standout feature or wow them in some way, and if the game fails to achieve those goals then the players are just gonna go back to their FPS of choice.
My heart goes out to the employees at Firewalk Studios and I wish that they can bounce back from this and either bring Concord back in a reworked state or come out with a new game that will find an audience.
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