PlayStation’s Concord is a fine shooter, but there’s little faith it can compete

polygon.com:

Sony and Firewalk Studios’ Concord launches on PlayStation 5 and PC later this month, and faces an uphill battle to success. The team-based hero shooter is, unlike much of its competition, a “premium” paid title — meaning it’s not free to play like rival shooters Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Tom Clancy’s XDefiant.

Concord will also soon have more competition on that front; on PC, there’s hero shooter FragPunk, an upcoming free-to-play game from NetEase. Then there’s the launch of Riot Games’ Valorant (now live on consoles as of Friday) and the upcoming NetEase’s Marvel Rivals (now in a closed beta test).

The latter two free-to-play games have the kind of built-in fan bases that Firewalk would probably love to have. Valorant will launch as a mature product, with four years’ worth of content and refinement, and fans of Riot’s games know that the studio will continue to support their shooter for years to come; League of Legends will celebrate its 15th birthday later this year. About 6 million people play Valorant daily, according to Tracker Network. And then there’s Marvel Rivals, which will star more than 20 playable Marvel superheroes and villains with decades of history behind them. Marvel Rivals’ beta boasts about 40,000 peak players on Steam alone, according to SteamCharts.

So far, Concord hasn’t established a strong enough identity to compete with those powerhouses. Player numbers during Concord’s beta weekends were worryingly low. The game has been widely dismissed by a portion of its potential audience as lifting heavily from Blizzard’s Overwatch and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy characters. What does make Concord stand out from the competition is its price; it’s a $39.99 multiplayer game in a field of free-to-play rivals. It feels like a product of a time now past; Firewalk started working on its multiplayer game years ago, when the Guardians of the Galaxy were still hot, and Blizzard was charging money for the original Overwatch.

Firewalk is positioning