Concord‘s Director, Ryan Ellis, has stepped down following the game’s dire launch last month which ultimately resulted in Sony pulling it from sale and refunding everyone who purchased a copy.Since being taken offline, there has been no communication as to what comes next for Concord or, more importantly, the staff at Firewalk Studios impacted by its failure to sell copies.
According to Kotaku, who has spoken to sources within the development team, Ellis (who formerly worked at Bungie as Destiny 2‘s Creative Director) still remains at the company but will now adopt a supporting role.While there are no doubt critical discussions being had in regards to the future of Firewalk and its flagship title, Sony’s radio silence has opened the door to rampant speculation.
Having invested millions of dollars and years of development time into creating Concord, it seems unlikely that it would be completely abandoned, especially when you consider how fun the core game is.
Despite the circumstances surrounding the game’s launch, it played really well with fun, frenetic first person shooting and interesting character loadouts.
In our Concord review we scored it an 8/10 and were admittedly saddened to see the axe fall so soon, casting doubt over its promising future.Although it was refreshing to see a multiplayer game eschew the heavily-monetised free-to-play model, it’s evident that fans of the genre weren’t willing to pay a one-time fee of £34.99 for a PvP-only video game.