PS5 exclusive Concord shuts down today – here's why it may be gone for good

Sony is taking Concord offline after it failed to find an audience

(Credit: Sony)

• 💀 Concord officially shuts down today after it launched on August 23, 2024

• 🤔 Sony has said it will explore options that will “better resonate with our players”

• 👋 However, there’s a good chance Concord will never return

• 🤖 Concord shutting down is juxtaposed by Astro Bot’s positive reception

Sony has shut down Concord today after its disastrous launch. The game failed to find a meaningful audience despite being a PS5 exclusive, reaching less than 700 players on Steam on launch day and reportedly sold around 25,000 copies combined on PS5 and PC.

The game achieved a fairly mediocre Metacritic score of 65 in our Concord review roundup, suggesting that there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with the title’s graphics or core gameplay. But the game’s divisive characters, hero shooter make-up, $40 price tag, and live service-style deployment left players cold.

Sony made the shock announcement it was shutting down Concord on the PlayStation Blog on September 3 (just two weeks after the game was released) with Firewalk Studios’ game director Ryan Ellis saying:

“Concord fans – we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar. Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us.

“However, while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended. Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”

You won’t find Concord on Sony’s website. (Credit: The Shortcut)

Sony even went as far as to offer refunds for digital and physical copies and has scrubbed any existence of the game from its storefront and websites. The game is also gone in the truest sense of the word and is no longer playable.

Why didn’t Concord go free-to-play?

Concord’s character designs have been widely criticized. (Credit: Firewalk Studios)

Many have questioned why Sony didn’t just make Concord free-to-play, especially as the game’s $40 price tag was criticized. The main reason Sony killed Concord is that – unlike other live service multiplayer games – there’s currently no way to monetize active players.

The developer chose not to implement a battle pass or offer any character skins for sale, meaning making it free-to-play would only cost Sony money to keep the servers running. And it’s hard to see how Concord can make a grand return either.

Again, the game wasn’t largely ignored due to its gameplay or visual style, but something that’s fundamentally harder to fix: its characters. Hero shooters live and die by the characters you get to play as – look at Overwatch and Marvel Rivals – and Concord’s generic and strangely grounded designs didn’t resonate with anyone.

Concord is also beyond late to the hero shooter market, which isn’t nearly as popular as it used to be. Even if Sony refashions the game into something that players who enjoy these types of experiences are used to, with daily missions, a battle pass, and more, it’s hard to see how it will make any difference to the game’s fate.

Will Concord ever come back?

Astro Bot’s release has spared Sony’s blushes. (Credit: Sony)

Sony may also want to cut its losses and hope Concord’s humiliating launch becomes a distant memory. It probably shouldn’t have released a special PS5 controller color to celebrate the game, but the release of Astro Bot has already managed to change the mood around PlayStation dramatically. Maybe the decision to close Concord today was more deliberate than many initially thought.

So is Concord dead forever? Honestly, I think so. Sony rarely gets it wrong with its first-party games, but it missed the mark so spectacularly with Concord that it’ll have certainly learned an important lesson: you can’t take anything for granted in this industry. Gamers will always decide which games succeed and which games fail.

• Up next: Astro Bot review: the game PS5 has been crying out for

Adam Vjestica is The Shortcut’s Senior Editor. Formerly TechRadar’s Gaming Hardware Editor, Adam has also worked at Nintendo of Europe as a Content Marketing Editor, where he helped launch the Nintendo Switch. Follow him on X @ItsMrProducts.