Concord is the failure the PS5 needs to return to greatness - Reader’s Feature

As I write this, there are less than 500 people playing Concord on Steam and it has an all-time peak of just 660. That is shockingly bad for any major game, let alone Sony’s first live service title, that’s been over four years in development. By comparison, surprise hit Helldivers 2, which was published by Sony but not made by them, has around 25,000 people playing at the moment, despite a recent drop in interest, and an all-time peak of 458,208.

If you don’t know what Concord is, it’s a first person shooter that is very similar to Overwatch. I haven’t bought the full game, for obvious reasons, but I did play the beta the other month… which is the reason I didn’t pay for the game. It came out on Friday and while there are never any figures for PlayStation 5, we know exactly how well it’s done on Steam. Which is doubly more important in this case, because Helldivers 2 was most popular on PC.

Many will remember when Sony announced it was making 12, later downgraded to six, live service games, which was right around the time they stopped releasing new games or talking about their future plans in detail. Ever since, it’s seemed like live service games were taking over, but my hope is that Concord’s complete failure will nip that in the bud.

There’re already signs that Sony’s plans have fallen apart, starting from when The Last Of Us Online was cancelled and Naughty Dog said they were only making single-player games in the future. It sounded very much like Naughty Dog were rebelling against Sony and given PlayStation boss Jim Ryan left at around the same time it’s not hard to imagine what happened there.

But if there was any hope that that would lead to a public announcement, or at least new single-player game reveals, it didn’t happen. At least not yet. Sony got two people to replace Jim Ryan and they haven’t given any interview or made any public appearances that I am aware of.

Many PlayStation fans have spent the last two years or so imagining that the next State of Play will be the big one, but it never is. I’ve heard some people talking about how next year will be the important one for Sony, which sounds worryingly like the way Xbox fans have had to convince themselves that the good times are just around the corner.

For both sets of fans, the long imagined day never comes and it should be clear by now that it never will. Not until something changes, forcing PlayStation to change their plans. I am now hopeful that Concord’s failure will be that change. Especially if it’s backed up by an already existing backlash against live service games, amongst Sony developers and amongst fans.

I’ve seen some theories that all single-player game development was stopped to concentrate on live service, and now live service development has mostly stopped in favour of single-player. That would not only explain why the silence continues but also that it will go for another year or so at least. The end of the generation, in other words.

That is a lot of time to be wasting just turning the ship around, but the most important thing is that it happens and Sony doesn’t just double down and carry on with a clearly bad idea. Companies, like people, aren’t good at admitting they’ve made a mistake but it’s my hope that Concord is the point at which they accept the reality of the situation and start working towards making sure the PlayStation 6 doesn’t have any similar problems.

By reader Korey