The launch of Sony’s online shooter “Concorde” turned into a disaster: apparently due to disastrous sales figures, Sony wants to shut down the game just two weeks after its launch on the market. The company announced this in a blog entry. “We are also aware that aspects of the game and the launch did not turn out as we had imagined. Therefore, we have decided to take the game offline starting September 6, 2024,” Sony writes in it.
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This is what Sony wants According to the blog entry “Looking into options that can better reach our players” – a hint that the shooter could return as a Free2Play title. Anyone who bought “Concord” digitally should get their money back. This applies to users of the PlayStation Store as well as Steam and the Epic Games Store. You can no longer buy “Concord.”
extent of failure
This is an almost unprecedented way to shut down a newly released online shooter just two weeks after its release. It’s also notable that this is happening to Sony, one of the world’s largest gaming companies. The drastic approach shows the extent of the failure of “Concorde”. A look at the unofficial Steam database SteamDB shows that no more than 607,000 people are playing “Concorde” at the same time on the platform – a value so poor it’s almost unbelievable. For comparison: Valve’s competitive game “Deadlock” was played by more than 18,000 people when it wasn’t even announced and you needed an invitation to start the game.
Unlike “Deadlock”, “Concorde” is also available on other PC platforms and PlayStation. But “Concorde” does not seem to be doing much better here. Sony apparently does not report official sales figures, According to an analyst The Concorde was only sold 25,000 times.
Well-known contestants
“Concord” is a so-called “hero shooter”, a mix of traditional online shooters and popular MOBA games. You choose a character with special abilities and use it to compete in team battles. “Concord” competes with Blizzard’s “Overwatch” and Riot’s “Valorant”, among others, but Valve’s new “Deadlock” is also a hero shooter. As a rule, such games are financed through microtransactions and can usually be played for free.
The case of “Concord” is somewhat reminiscent of Amazon’s failed online shooter “Crucible”, which wanted a piece of the “Fortnite” cake a few years ago. The game similarly failed spectacularly and was sent back to beta a few months after launch. A little while later, “Crucible” was scrapped altogether.
In addition to the future of “Concorde”, the future of development studio Firewalk also seems open. Sony bought the studio only last year, when “Concorde” had already been in development for years. Many developers are now showing solidarity with Firewalk on social media,
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