PlayStation’s ‘Concord’ Appears To Have Made One Million Dollars

Now in week two of Concord’s release, the dust is settling on the PlayStation multiplayer title, and as you might expect, things continue to be…very bad.

Concord has possibly just 25,000 sales in total, according to industry analysts, based on an extensive report from IGN’s Rebekah Valentine. It’s tied to the game’s exceptionally low playercount, which peaked under 700 on Steam and was the 147th most-played game on PlayStation during its launch week.

You can also see those sales in…the actual sales charts, albeit without specific numbers attached. On Steam, where at the time of this writing Concord has 38 concurrent players, is listed as being the 3,983rd best-selling game on the platform. On PlayStation, after a whole lot of scrolling, you can see that it’s the 154th best-selling game on the platform, which again, this is 12 days after its release, and the game is $40, not $60-$70 like much of its competition.

So, you can see where those 25,000 units estimates are coming from, and multiplied by $40, well, that’s just one million dollars in revenue. If you want to compare that to say, an actual PlayStation hit like Spider-Man 2, that game sold 11 million units by last count, and that would be about $770 million in revenue.

The issue is that Concord is not some small indie project, but one that took Firewalk reportedly 6-8 years to develop. The exact budget is unknown. Estimates are around the $100 million mark, but there’s no firm sourcing at that. Even half of that would be a $49 million loss, currently, with essentially no current room for improvement.

How low these sales are will likely accelerate the timeline for the game to go free-to-play. Other games might be given a chance to find an audience, but this is a five-alarm fire and Sony desperately needs to try get players on board in any possible way, and the most obvious lever to pull is going free-to-play. It should do this even without a monetization plan in place, because monetization means absolutely nothing with 100 nightly players on Steam and being the 150th most-played PlayStation game, and falling. No, the game is not remotely designed for a flip to free-to-play given that the whole point was a bunch of free, earned stuff in exchange for the $40 price point, but right now that doesn’t matter. It needs players. Fast.

I am 99.9% sure this won’t work anyway. These numbers are just too low, the game’s reputation is just too damaged, even if the occasional creator or gaming outlet says “actually, it’s not bad.” But it needs to at least try, and there really is no other option available here other than complete and total abandonment and loss-cutting.

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