Concord: The Biggest Flop Game of 2024

Concord is a first-person live-service hero shooter published this year by Sony Interactive Entertainment and developed by Firewalk Studios. And after only two months into its release which was on 23rd August, the game was officially pulled from the market and the studio that developed it was shut down. So what has gone so wrong that the entire studio had to close? Let’s get deeper into this game and what it did wrong.

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How Did Concord Become Sony’s Biggest Flop?

There’s a good chance you probably forgot about Concord after hearing about its release… so let’s back up a little bit. Concord reportedly started development over eight years ago with Firewalk Studios based in Bellevue, Washington State. In April 2023, Sony bought the development studio Firewalk and invested millions of dollars into the game thinking that it had the potential to be one of the leading games in the genre. But they couldn’t be more wrong.

A month after the takeover, the game released its first trailer, and the majority of the audience was confused about what they would be getting as the trailer didn’t do anything to explain the game which wasn’t a known game that people knew what it was. Following this mixed reaction, Concord kept getting more and more negative responses from the audience. The gaming community didn’t like the idea of another generic hero shooter being fed to them. Sure the game had pretty good graphics and gameplay but the core game has nothing unique to its own.

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To make matters worse the other games of this genre are without a doubt more fun and well done than Concord. And to make matters worse, Concord had a price tag of 40$ when it was first released which pushed the gamers to be even more enraged with the game considering that the other games in the genre are free to play and are objectively better games than Concord.

Many players complained about the game having holes in the gameplay that kept the game from being fun. That seemed to be the main reason, the game was objectively anything but fun, at least according to the majority of players. There were gameplay functions that made the game less appealing, like if you won a game, the character you played with could not be picked again. Other than these, the character design for most of the characters also seemed bland. Simple things like this made the game more hated by the few gamers that played it.

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The game also had problems with attracting any kind of traffic to their servers from the start. The game didn’t sell a significant amount of copies with reportedly only 25,000 copies sold across Steam and PlayStation. To put things in perspective, Concord had fewer peak players than Redfall, Babylon’s Fall, and reportedly even Lord of the Rings: Gollum, all of which were massive failures and games you don’t want your game to be compared with. This led to Sony initially closing the live service game because they were losing a huge amount of money compared to what they invested. Fast forward to October, when Sony shut down the development studio Firewalk, and some other projects are being reconsidered for development.

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All of these factors played a massive role in the demise of this hugely funded game that shouldn’t even be released considering the current situation of first-person hero shooters and also live service games. In today’s day, people don’t want another big-budget expensive game just for the sake of earning money, with big-budget games failing in recent times, the last thing people needed was another generic first-person hero shooter game with no fun elements. and it seemed Concord was exactly that profile of a game, so people dunked on it together.