Has there been a more competitive time to release a video game? Possibly. Without resorting to blunt totting-ups of metascores and sales figures and some kind of dividing-by-gap-between-release-dates, it’s not really something you can measure. One particularly rectangular section of my brain was tempted, mind, in the same kind of doomed endeavour as Civilization 7 designer Ed Beach trying to mathematically quantify whether his team was sticking to Sid Meier’s rule of thirds. After a physicist who helped launch the Hubble telescope told me he couldn’t make that work, I thought better of it.
Instead, then, we must go by vibes, and the vibe right now is it is a very competitive time to release a video game. Or maybe more specifically, a live service video game. This has been one of many big headscratchers for the people at the top of the games industry recently. At the risk of re-treading some already over-trodden ground, big publishers, as we all know, want big profits. Specifically, they want the kind of smash-hit, hobby-grade, zeitgeist-defining golden goose profits you get from a Grand Theft Auto or a Pokémon Go, or a League of Legends, a Fortnite, a Warzone, a Counter Strike or even just a good old Wordle. The catch is these hits more often than not are live service games, and live service games require not only vast amounts of players but now also vast amounts of those players’ attention. They require time – time to be made, yes, but also time to be played – and as any painfully over-stretched modern human will have noticed, there is only so much time in a day.
This is why, I suspect, games have had so much trouble with their attempts to “grow”. They’ve shifted from being a part of the entertainment economy – “Do I spend my spare £40 on a new video game, or on a couple of new albums?” – to a part of the engagement economy – “Do I tick off some daily objectives in FC24 while listening to Spotify and talking with friends on Discord, or watch another episode of Star Wars while scrolling through Tiktok with intermittent breaks for Twitter/X, and my partner’s voice note about what I’m cooking for dinner?”
All of this is painfully self-evident, to the point where it almost feels superfluous to say it out loud. And yet, at the same time, it seems weirdly unacknowledged that this is our reality now, that we all know it’s entirely unsustainable but that nobody can seem to stop.
More than anything else, it’s a kind-spirited game, developed by a group of people who earnestly believe in what they’ve made.
Now enter poor, eight-years-in-development, PlayStation first party exclusive, multiplayer shooter Concord, which somehow arrives in the market during the August of an infamously fallow year for video games feeling like an underdog. (I know it’s not a fallow year for good video games – quite the opposite really, which only adds to the problem – but it is a fallow year for big, triple-A tentpole ones by all our usual standards.)
Concord is perfectly alright. We’ve a full review coming soon which will hopefully be a bit more forensic than that – and which may well argue otherwise – but from the few hours I spent with it for a preview earlier this summer, and a few more hours with it after its servers went live this week, I think it’s perfectly fine. There are new ideas here, despite early, trailer-based dismissals of Concord as a kind of derivative Guardians of the Galaxy clone. The stacking crew bonus mechanic, for instance, which sees you acquire a unique buff for each character class you switch between throughout rounds, is an interesting twist on the sense of in-game progression that developers at Firewalk took from their experience with games like League of Legends. It encourages thoughtful planning of how you might switch through the roster as games progress, as much as adaptation on the fly.
It’s also rather stylish, with sleek, simple menus and lovely synths and just about still on trend 70s retro-futurism. It has a dedicated bucket of lore to rifle through for those interested. It has wonderfully pretty skyboxes, of lurid Hulk greens and thunderous reds. Multiplayer rounds are quick and snappy, with the rhythmic momentum of Destiny’s Crucible at times. Some guns pack a nice enough punch, and there’s a lovely emphasis on friendliness for beginners in Concord’s breadth of character design, with some a little mechanically simpler and with varying forms of homing missiles or bullets to ease you in, while others like the obligatory revolver-slinger or sniper requiring real skill. And there’s no battle pass, no loot boxes, no free-to-play trappings to worry about. You buy it up front like the good old days.
Ironically, however, that may also be Concord’s downfall. In a developer Q&A after that summer preview the immediate questions Firewalk fielded were all about how they expect to keep people playing the game, without the artificial juicing-up of engagement that comes from periodically unlocking “surprise mechanics”, or progressing through a pass. The answer, to Firewalk’s credit and again perhaps to their undoing, was that they’d made a game they hoped would be good enough for people to simply want to play it.
And all this slightly glum and definitely premature eulogising said, Concord’s only officially out today. It could surprise the naysayers and be another hit. It could bang, despite publisher Sony rather limply wafting it out into the world during Gamescom, at the same time as the gargantuan (and also PlayStation console exclusive) Black Myth: Wukong, and an open world Star Wars.
I genuinely hope it does bang. More than anything else, it’s a kind-spirited game, developed by, at least from one brief impression, a group of people who earnestly believe in what they’ve made. But like so many other nice young games with bright intentions, and all matter of other, rival forms of “content”, it’s now Concord’s turn to go dutifully over the top. Out of the trenches of development and into no man’s land it goes, clutching its weapon and its special ability, hoping for the best and bracing for what is, probably, the inevitable, while the forever war for our attention rumbles on.