Concord
While I said everyone was bracing for impact regarding Concord’s inevitably poor launch, even I did not expect to see what I’m seeing now. I’ve seen many rough releases in my time, and I cannot think of anything that compares to what’s happening with Concord here.
PlayStation’s Concord, a game reportedly in the works for eight years (since Overwatch launched, which is no coincidence), has launched with under 700 concurrent players on Steam. It’s such a low figure I’m genuinely trying to figure out if something is technically wrong with the numbers here, but that does not seem to be the case.
The entire situation is bizarre. Monitoring the game’s performance on launch day, I saw it peak at 697 players a couple hours after launch. While I didn’t think it would positively skyrocket after the US got home from work and school across its timezones, it should have gone up to some extent. It actually went down. At 10 PM as I’m writing this late on Friday night, it’s at 615 players. It’s been veering between 550 and 650 all day.
Steam
There is the refrain that this is not mainly going to be a Steam game, but even being extremely generous and ignoring that say, Sony’s Helldivers 2 is played more on Steam than PlayStation at this point, Concord’s numbers could be 10x higher on PlayStation and that would still be a horrific launch.
Again, I have never seen this before. Not to this extent. The $200 million-losing disaster, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, launched with 13,000 concurrent players. Poor at the time, but 20x more than what we’re seeing from Concord here, plus it was #1 on PlayStation’s most-played list for a time. Redfall launched with 6,000 players when it came to Steam. Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones currently has more players right now. Last year’s disastrous Gollum game launched with more players. I cannot come up with anything here that’s even a remotely close comparison point. And the strangest thing is it’s not even a bad game, this entire thing comes down to how unappealing it was. Even still, this is incredible.
If there’s one thing to indicate yes, this is really happening, it would be remembering that the open beta figures for Concord peaks at 2,300 a few weeks ago. That was a free beta, where now, Concord is charging $40 to play. So yes, that sort of downscaling from the original figure seems possible, and there was never any indication to say those numbers were wrong.
If this continues, this will be one of the worst major game launches…ever. No exaggeration, especially when you compare it to time spent on the game (eight years) and cost (no firm reports on this, but again, eight years, plus this is a game using pricey mo-cap tech for lots of detailed cutscenes). Whatever positivity Helldivers 2’s surprisingly successful launch bought Sony for their live service plans, this is the polar opposite to the most extreme degree possible.
Concord
You know what happens now. Or soon. Likely very soon. Concord will pull the ripcord and go free-to-play or be added to PS Plus. But that comes with the complication that it does not have an actual revenue model given that a selling point was that because it cost money, it wouldn’t sell standard things like characters or battle passes. So what do you do?
Concord has much more content planned from here, a full roadmap, all of that which you’d expect from any live service launch. But it’s unclear just how much investment will be made here if the game has a few hundred players on Steam and at best, a few thousand on PlayStation. Further development would clearly be torching even more cash.
There is an entirely separate article to be written on all the reasons why this didn’t work, but it comes down to the main point being again, what plagued Suicide Squad, this is a game no one wanted or needed to be made. An ill-conceived concept in search of an audience it did not find. But to a worse degree than I’ve ever seen.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.