Concord Review: Firewalk's Hero-Shooter Didn't Deserve to Die, but Sony Dug Its Grave

gadgets.ndtv.com:

It's unfortunate but inevitable that reviewing Concord right now feels like writing its eulogy. Eight years in the making at a reported development cost of over $100 million, the first-person hero-shooter from Sony's Firewalk Studios arrived on PlayStation 5 and PC on August 23. Two weeks later, Concord is dead. A live-service title, that was promising a roadmap of post-launch content updates over multiple seasons, didn't even make it past summer. After the game's calamitous launch, with an estimated 25,000 copies sold across PS5 and PC and an all-time peak player count of less than 700 on Steam, Sony seems to have decided to cut its losses and put the game out of its misery. Firewalk announced Wednesday that it would take Concord offline on September 6, cease all sales of the game and refund players who'd already purchased it.

In its announcement, the developer said it would “explore options, including those that will better reach our players,” which suggests Concord, a multiplayer-only title that launched at a baffling $40 price tag, might return in a free-to-play form at some point. Whatever the fate of the game may be, Concord is now one of the biggest flops in the history of the medium. And while no one quite predicted such a premature demise for the game, everyone saw the wreck it was going to be from a mile away.

But is Concord so bad a game that it should have to pack it up in two weeks, like the blink-and-miss theatrical run of a film that should have been direct-to-digital? Is it really so terrible that 33 people — thirty-three! — are playing it right now on Steam, just a day before the game is taken down. No, it certainly is not. In fact, it's a serviceable first-person hero-shooter, very much in the vein of Overwatch, even though it doesn't distinguish itself in any meaningful way. But the blame of its demise doesn't lie at the feet of developers as much as it does with the people who mandated the financial strategy of its launch, who presided over its