Sony’s shock announcement of Concord’s shutdown just two weeks after it went on sale has sent its remaining players into overdrive as they desperately try to secure its Platinum trophy before it’s too late.
PlayStation Studios’ ill-fated first-person hero shooter, which suffered a drastically low player count upon launch, goes dark on September 6, with all players set to receive a refund. Ryan Ellis, director at Sony-owned developer Firewalk, 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.”
Soon after that announcement, reports indicated that Concord players were throwing Rivalry matches in a bid to earn experience points as fast as possible. Rivalry mode sees two teams of five players battle for dominance across best-of-seven single-life rounds. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Now, players are starting a match and immediately running off a platform to their doom, resulting in a win for the opposing team and the end of the round.
Rivalry matches are the perfect choice for this tactic. Win or lose, it rewards players with more experience points than other game modes. And because it’s the best-of-seven single-life rounds, as long as the whole team gets in on the act and each round takes about 30 seconds, you can finish a match in just a few minutes — again, as long as all players follow suit and you lose or win four matches in a row.
Thus, this is the quickest way to earn experience points in Concord, and thus the quickest way to earn that Platinum trophy (you need to get to reputation level 100, which takes hundreds of thousands of XP), with just two days left before the game shuts down. But be warned: your win percentage will take a hit if you keep deliberately losing. Still, that might not be much of a concern given Concord’s impending doom.
This is literally every match of Rivalry in Concord rn because this is the fastest way to earn XP for the Platinum 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/BZ12OV7lc1
— Radec (@realradec) September 3, 2024
IGN has verified that Rivalry matches are currently being played out in this fashion. The race, it seems, is very much on.
Some Concord players are saying there’s not enough time to grind to the Platinum trophy, so it might escape them. Others are holding out hope that Concord returns in free-to-play form, although there’s no guarantee it will return at all. As a result, the Concord Platinum trophy may go down as one of the rarest in PlayStation history.
What’s clear is that Concord itself is one of the biggest flops in PlayStation history, a game one of its developers said was in the works for an incredible eight years. There is now concern for the fate of its developer, Firewalk, and Sony faces tough questions about its upcoming live service games, including Bungie’s Marathon and Haven’s Fairgame$, neither of which have a release date.
Concord’s launch was nothing short of disastrous, with analysts telling IGN it has likely sold as few as 25,000 units. It debuted to a tragic 697 peak concurrent players on Steam, a number that made the 12,786 players of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which was dubbed a disappointment by Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav and caused a $200 million hit to revenue, look like a titan.
Last year, Sony president Hiroki Totoki committed to launching just six of 12 live service games in development, and one based on The Last of Us has already been canceled.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.