Sony's failed shooter Concord has been updated dozens of times on Steam in October, and I'm starting to feel a comeback
Concord was decidedly not great. So not great that Sony took the virtually unprecedented step of pulling the plug on the whole thing just a couple weeks after it launched. Sony said at the time that it wanted to «explore options… to better reach our players,» leaving open the possibility that some sort of comeback, maybe as a free-to-play game, might be in the cards. I was dubious, to put it gently, but recent events have me thinking that maybe it's actually going to happen.
Concord was taken offline on September 6, but a large number of updates have been applied to the game on Steam over the past two weeks. Visible on SteamDB, the updates began on September 30 and continued with reasonable regularity at a pace of a half-dozen or so per day until October 10.
They're pretty much incomprehensible to non-programmers such as myself, but the presence of words like «playtest,» «pmtest,» and «sonyqae,» speculatively a reference to «Sony quality assurance engineer,» certainly seem to suggest that something was cooking.
The updates stopped until today, October 16, making a change to «legal lines» and adding a health warning: «If you have a history of epilepsy or seizures, consult a doctor before use. Certain patterns may trigger seizures with no prior history. Before using and for more details, see important health and safety warnings.»
A virtually identical update was made at the same time to other Sony games including Helldivers 2, God of War, and God of War Ragnarok, and it's possible that Concord simply got caught up in a blanket update of all Sony games on Steam. But that doesn't explain all the previous updates, which collectively represent quite a lot of effort for a game that's effectively dead—unless, as the man once said, the report of that death was an exaggeration.
Sony didn't respond to an inquiry I sent last week about what all these updates mean, which for now leaves us hanging. But I have to wonder, why would Sony be horsing around like this if it didn't
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