There is flopping, and there is flopping, and the release of PlayStation’s Concord, which has failed to break 700 concurrent players on Steam with maybe just a few thousand on PlayStation, is one of the worst major failures we’ve seen in the last generation or more.
Absolutely everyone saw this coming. From the moment the first real look at the game debuted just two months ago, the narrative formed that this was another hero shooter than no one actually wanted. And that has certainly been proven true now.
There are many, many reasons Concord failed, some more important than others, but it’s an extremely long list. So, let’s begin.
1. It’s $40 – This is easily the single biggest factor in why the game can’t even break quadruple digits on Steam, that in a market where every hero shooter is free-to-play Concord tried to push its luck with an up front cost with the promise of a bunch of free stuff and few microtransactions thereafter. It was not a deal fans wanted to make as this is a game that badly needs to be tested before purchase. However, given that the free beta of the game was that test a few weeks ago, and that only drew 2,300 players, there’s clearly a lot more going on here.
2. Hero Shooter Oversaturation – All you have to do now is say the phrase hero shooter now and it’s an instant turn-off for most players. While yes, hero shooters like Overwatch, Apex Legends and Valorant remain decently popular, new entries are almost instantly shunned and that’s exactly what happened to Concord here from the moment that aspect of the game was revealed.
3. It Took Eight Years To Make – While that may signify that Firewalk was working hard on the game for years, it’s also clearly indicative of the fact that this went into production right when Overwatch launched and for some reason, took nearly a decade to release and by this point it feels dated, like something that might have come out a year after Overwatch, not eight. Absolutely no games should take this long to make, none, and if one does, something has gone terribly wrong.
4. Extremely Poor Hero Design And Aesthetics – A core problem with the game is that it’s just…viscerally unappealing. The game attempts to channel ‘70s sci-fi, an era that existed 30-40 years before its target audience was born, and even then, it still just looks terrible. The main issue here is not character “diversity” as some have said, just that they look so bad. You can head over to Overwatch to see let’s say, not traditionally attractive characters like Junkrat, Roadhog and a damn gorilla and see how the aesthetic alone is the difference. So few of these designs are appealing and without solid heroes, a hero shooter cannot exist.
5. The Anti-Woke Crusade – Some are citing the game with its character design and pronouns in their bios as being the “woke” reason the game failed. That does somewhat link into the above, but not for “the characters aren’t hot enough” reasons, the real issue here is that yes, Concord did instantly launch with an internet hate campaign attached to it. That is not the reason the game failed, but it’s just another thing dragging it down, and now the loudest people on the internet are of course saying the game went woke and as such, went broke. While this is an industry that awarded 50 GOTY trophies to the hyper-woke Baldur’s Gate 3 last year, it has still remained an unavoidable, distracting part of Concord discussion since moment one.
6. No Marketing – Again, this is a game where the first official trailer for it came out just two months before launch. After that, there was painfully little marketing for it, almost as if Sony knew what was about to happen and they didn’t want to throw any more money that way. But it clearly cost them a lot of awareness as so many people I talk to had either never heard of the game or at the very least, had no clue it was out this weekend.
7. Focus On Mo-Cop Cinematics – Again, this seems like they were going for some sort of Overwatch-ish worldbuilding here, but it seems like a bizarre investment to sink money into high-quality mo-capped cutscenes in PvP hero shooter, with the promise of more all the time to further a story that cannot avoid feeling like a “we have Guardians of the Galaxy at home” set-up, and many won’t be able to get past that, if they pay attention at all. I cannot imagine how much this decision added to the cost of the game.
8. Gameplay Doesn’t Stand Out – Yes, we have gotten to #9 before even talking about how the game plays. The weirdest part of all this is that Concord is not a bad game. You could even call it a mechanically good, often fun shooter. But the problem is when you are entering a market like this, and at $40, you have to really stand out. And if you’re not doing that aesthetically, which they are clearly not, you have to do it with gameplay. And it simply does not do that. Not enough, in any case.
9. It’s Derivative – Of so many things. Again, the concept and characters feel like sub-par Guardians of the Galaxy. But gameplay feels like a mix of Overwatch, Valorant and Destiny 2. Especially Destiny 2 in a lot of ways with ex-Bungie designers having built it. That has resulted in a comical number of skills taken directly from Destiny from invisible Hunter dodges and exploding throwing knives, Titan barricades and seismic slams, Warlock floating and air dashing and solar grenades. It’s silly, and again, one other thing that makes it fail to stand out.
10. It’s Drowned Out – Not just by other hero shooters, but at this exact moment no one is paying attention to anything else except Wukong’s 2.2 million concurrent players and the fact that Valve officially announced Deadlock the same night Concord was released, which naturally got tens of thousands of players into that PvP game instantly.
I could probably even keep going, but it’s clear the concept and execution for Concord did almost everything possibly wrong from start to finish. And here we are. Free-to-play won’t save it either. It’s done. It’s very done.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
