When they learned that Concord would be shutting down in as little as 72 hours, some of its biggest fans rushed to immortalize their time with the embattled Sony exclusive in a way only PlayStation players can: by earning a Platinum Trophy. The rare achievement would attest to their mastery of the short-lived hero shooter, as well as their fanatical devotion to a game so many others spent weeks dunking on.
For some it was already too late, with no mathematical way for them to obtain all the necessary trophies in the time left, even operating at monotonous peak efficiency with no sleep. For everyone else, there were private lobbies where they could load up the game’s Rivalry mode, select the smallest map, and suicide off the edge at the beginning of every round in order to complete matches every few minutes and level up about once every hour.
“It’s finally done,” wrote a player who goes by SultanPSN at 1:00 a.m. on the day of the shutdown. “The worst pain I have ever endured. From the tip of my toes to a bitching migraine. 60 hours of no sleep and constant pain and torture and misery finally over with 12 hours left and the reward feels so satisfying.” Concord’s Platinum trophy, called “Living Legend,” was theirs, the 194th in their collection.
There are always bad games that get panned at launch and quickly turn into memes. In 2021 it was Balan Wonderworld. In 2022 it was Bablylon’s Fall. Last year it was Gollum. But Firewalk Studios’ Concord wasn’t a bad game. The visuals were high-end, the gunplay felt good, and many who actually played it had fun, even if it was missing the standout heroes or gameplay hook to keep people coming back.
Many didn’t actually play it, though. The biggest story around Concord wasn’t that it was mediocre, but that it was a ghost town. Instead of being pilloried with montages of glitches showing how busted it was, the albatross around its neck was a steady deathmarch of screenshots showing anemic and dwindling concurrent player numbers on Steam, and the absence of Concord in the most-played section on PS5.
“I was very surprised it was pulled so quickly and suddenly, though I am not necessarily surprised this is the outcome,” Twitch streamer DGunz, who spent weeks playing it for viewers, told Kotaku. “The game has been misrepresented so poorly in just about every way from various perspectives that it felt inevitable.”
It became easier to armchair analyze why Concord was failing than to engage with what it actually was. The colorful rotating cast of misfit sci-fi mercenaries inspired unflattering comparisons to Overwatch’s heroes, while the $US40 price tag became an easy punching bag for those who considered any competitive shooter that wasn’t free-to-play dead on arrival. Then there was the brigade of online “anti-woke” culture warriors who simply attacked the game for having a diverse roster. The user review section of Concord’s Metacritic page is still a graveyard of reactionary gamer spam.
“The amount of negativity and hatred towards the game, myself, anyone who supports it, Firewalk, and PlayStation are all concerning for various reasons,” DGunz said. “It feels like it’s more popular to hate on things you don’t like than to show support for things you do like nowadays.”
Outside of this corrosive bubble, however, a small but tight-knit community of fellow Concord lovers managed to find one another on Discord, the game’s subreddit, and in various group DMs and livestream chats. “I met so many awesome people through the Concord Discord server and just from playing the game in general,” a YouTuber who goes by Jad on Discord told Kotaku. “The community that plays Concord is genuinely one of the best I’ve ever been a part of, mostly because there’s little to no toxicity within the community.”
The game came at the perfect time for Jad, and like a small group of others managed to hit a Goldilocks sweet spot of things they liked from other PVP shooters but couldn’t previously find all in one place. “I couldn’t get into either OW1 or OW2, and Valorant was too sweaty for me, then in came Concord, a hero shooter with an aesthetic I was almost immediately on board with,” said Jad, whose previous mainstay, Rogue Company, had been on the decline. “The gameplay, aesthetic, characters, mechanics and story are all so perfectly mixed for me. Concord is the kind of game I’d been craving.”
Fans geeked out about the skyboxes, ship designs, and world building. They liked seeing the weekly cutscenes and watching the characters spread their wings beyond canned battle cries in multiplayer. They loved the feel of the shooting, which is weighty but snappy, and the lack of free-to-play microtransactions. On the Discord, fans gingerly talked about the game’s strengths and weaknesses and tried to hype one another up like they were helping to incubate a tiny bird under a heat lamp for a school project. On the subreddit, there was a common refrain from newly converted fans.
“But if someone actually approaches this game objectively, it’s actually… good?” wrote Significant-Duck-811 on Reddit. “Like i don’t know why i’m surprised because Sony has an eye for good games and support devs actually make good games. I get the genre may be ‘late’ and people arent looking for hero shooters anymore…but for what it is…this is a fucking good game lol.”
It wasn’t until the bad news kept pouring in after launch about low player counts and radio silence from the development team that discussions turned not to whether the game still had a shot at a bright future but whether it had a future at all. “Speaking as a Lawbreakers, Gigantic, Loadout, Moonbreaker enjoyer: what happens now is sadness,” responded one player who’d seen this movie before.
“I enjoyed the game, the threat of shut down and declining player base has always been looming over my head, and that cast a shadow on the overall enjoyment of the game,” MNKYJamJam, who loved Concord’s Robot Ruins and Trouble maps, told Kotaku. “Also seeing the same players over and over made me truly aware of how low the player-base was match after match.”
Live-service games have a hundred hurdles to overcome in order to be successful, not least of all the desire among players to be where the action is, and the self-fulfilling prophecy that comes along with that. Momentum and hype beget more attention, while apathy breeds a downward spiral. “Even those that saw through all of that were simply left wondering if they were going to be wasting their money buying the game because everyone said it was going to die,” said DGunz. “Well, I guess they were right.”
Since the game went offline, some players rushed to try and get physical copies of it that stores were no longer supposed to be selling, while others snatched limited-edition Concord DualSense controllers which are now sold out and go for hundreds on eBay. Firewalk’s message about the shutdown was noncommittal on whether the game would ever come back. The most recent tweet from the Concord account reads less like a temporary parting than a final goodbye.
“Sadly, I think if we were ever to see Concord again it would be as a F2P title and I think that would take away so much of the proposition that the community fell in love with,” said MNKYJamJam. “The more realistic outcome I think is that we will see another game born from the ashes of Concord, re-using a lot of the assets and combat models etc. but called something else. I think Sony will feel that the name ‘Concord’ has too much negative connotation surrounding it now. Personally, though I know this is entirely unrealistic, I would like them to give Concord another shot after the Secret Level series airs, with a full blown marketing campaign to really sell the game to players.”
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