How many players does a game like Concord need to survive?
Last night's news that Sony is pulling the plug, perhaps temporarily, on its new live service hero shooter Concord will not have come as a big surprise to many.
Within days of the game's launch, reports emerged that it had sold an estimated 25,000 copies – 10,000 on Steam, 15,000 on PlayStation – and player counts were low. According to SteamDB, Concord peaked at 697 concurrent users on August 24, the day after launch, and dropped sharply after that.
Even as we recorded this week's GI Microcast on Monday morning, discussing the myriad reasons behind Concord's struggles, just 39 people were playing.
No company takes the decision to shut down an online game lightly, especially when live services are a big part of your ongoing strategy. Canning Concord will have been based on many, many factors, but it's a safe bet that sales and active player count will be chief among them for Sony. After all, multiplayer games are expensive to operate and doing so to only service a small number of people is not cost effective – particularly in such financially turbulent times as these.
So how many players does an online game need to warrant its continued development and support? The answer will of course vary for each title depending on the developer's size, situation, and its financial and creative objectives. Fortunately, we asked analysts and development veterans to help shed light into the process behind these game-killing decisions ahead of our live Q&A podcast during Devcom 2024.
"Is this a trick question?" laughs Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games research at Ampere Analysis. "There are so many variables in play here that it’s not really possible to answer this. For one game it might be 200,000 monthly active users, for another two million."
He lists of a variety of factors that affect whether a game lives or dies: R&D investment (both before and after launch), salaries and other staffing costs, marketing spend, infrastructure and service delivery costs, the game's business model
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