Concord Flopping And Being Killed In Weeks

Not every game gets to be a hit, but what happened to Concord is still wild to look back on. Sony put out a hero shooter for $40 in a crowded genre mostly occupied by free-to-play games, was surprised when it didn’t immediately grab an audience, and instead of pivoting it to free-to-play or anything else that could have worked in the game’s favor, it chose the nuclear option of pulling it from stores and closing down the studio that worked on it.

All of this happened within the span of two months. Concord launched on August 23, had the plug pulled two weeks later on September 6, and developer Firewalk Studios was shut down on October 9.

What happened to Concord is a speedrun demonstration of how the biggest companies in the industry view the games they put out and the people who make them. Sony made a series of bad calls, and the people who suffered for it were the ones who were doing exactly what they were told to do. It seems the people who make the bad calls are never the ones who have to answer for it. – Kenneth Shepard