Concord’s servers officially went offline last Friday on September 6. The always-online hero shooter, which launched on August 23, became unplayable at that point, but Sony didn’t stop there. The company has since taken the unprecedented step of also removing the game entirely from players’ PlayStation accounts.
“Thank you for being a valued PlayStation customer,” a notification last night read. “Live services for Concord went offline 9/6/24. The game is not playable and as a result, we have removed this content from your account.”
I checked my account this morning, and while the review copy of Concord provided by Sony remains installed on my SSD, the icon now shows as “locked” on the home screen media bar, with an error that reads “can’t find what you’re looking for” if you try to view the original product.
This type of drastic measure was alluded to in Concord’s original shutdown announcement. “While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC,” game director Ryan Ellis wrote last week. “Once refunded, players will no longer have access to the game.”
With refunds being automatic, there seems to have been no real way for players to retain access to the sci-fi multiplayer game if they owned it digitally. It’s not surprising that Sony is re-evaluating the game and its future after it struggled to find an audience at launch, with some reports estimating the first-party Sony game sold as little as 25,000 copies. But attempting to remove the game entirely and effectively “un-release” it goes even further than just removing online matchmaking support.
Games increasingly get delisted from digital storefronts all the time as license agreements expire or newer versions are released, but even in those cases players usually still have the ability to download and open the game they originally bought.
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