Concord Is Estimated to Have Sold Only 25,000 Units. Here’s Why Analysts Think It’s Failing

ign.com:

For the last week, there’s been a lot of online discussion on Sony’s newly-launched multiplayer shooter, Concord. But it’s not because everyone’s playing it – it’s because seemingly no one is.

Plenty of games don’t sell well at launch, but observers have latched onto Concord’s dramatic failure due to its high-profile nature as a Sony first-party game, and its shockingly low Steam concurrent player numbers at launch. Upon its August 23 debut, Concord only had 697 Steam concurrent players, and it hasn’t risen any higher since. At the time I’m writing this, 130 entire people are playing Sony’s brand new, first-party game on Steam. That’s real, real low, even for a game with middling critical reviews (we gave it a 7/10, which at IGN means it’s “good”).

So, what happened? Why did a big Sony first-party game get sent out to die immediately? Is it actually selling badly, or are we just reading the numbers wrong? As usual when questions of this nature crop up, I asked a bunch of professional industry analysts to explain it to me.

Unfortunately for Sony…yeah.

While historically low numbers like the ones being experienced by Concord have a tendency to be used to drive narratives that don’t always paint a full picture, that’s not what’s happening here. Liam Deane, principal analyst at Omdia, said, “The Steam numbers are so bad that even without the exact data on the PS5 side we can be pretty certain that the game is doing very badly.”

Other analysts were able to share a bit of insight on the PlayStation side with me. Per Circana analyst Mat Piscatella citing Circana’s Player Engagement Tracker, on Monday August 26, “Concord ranked 147th in US PS5 daily active players across all titles, with fewer than 0.2% of Monday's active PS5 players playing the game.” And analyst Simon Carless, who authors the GameDiscover.co newsletter, estimated that Concord’s total sales are sitting around 10,000 units on Steam, and around 15,000 on PlayStation (he responded to my email Wednesday, August 28,