Things are looking grim for the new hero shooter.
Things weren't looking good for Sony's new hero shooter Concord back during its first open beta on Steam back in July. At the time, the game peaked at 1,124 concurrent players. It was a troubling sign for a title that has been in development for eight years and that Sony was hoping would become a cross-platform star not unlike genre leaders like Overwatch. Unfortunately, not only has Concord failed to make a splash at launch over this past weekend, it has also managed to draw in even less players than back in July.
660 players was the max number of concurrent players on Steam between 08.23 and 08.25.24. That is a frightening number, surely, for the execs at Sony and the devs over at Firewalk Studios. By comparison, even failures like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League (13,459) and Redfall (1,560) had better numbers around launch. There are a couple of caveats to consider when trying to understand Concord's poor reception, including the fact that this is the paid ($40) version of the game and that we don't know what the user metrics on PlayStation 5 have been.
That said, if players aren't willing to shell out 40 bucks for the game and aren't interested in playing it on the only other platform it's available on, Concord could have many times the number of users it has on Steam on PS5 and it would still be a problem for Sony. Although by all accounts Concord's gameplay is fine, a large point of contention for many gamers, at least on social media, has been the design of the characters. Many found the character designs to be pandering and, in some cases, simply ugly. For some, Concord has been the latest inflection point in the ongoing culture wars surrounding video games.
It's unclear if this is the main reason why Concord is failing, but the poor response, assuming things don't get better for the game, might mean doom for this fledgling franchise. It isn't uncommon for major publishers and studios to pull the plug quickly on multiplayer games that don't draw in a sizable audience. Will Concord be able to course correct and salvage itself before it's too late? We'll keep you all posted.
Source: Steam Charts
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