If you’ve heard of a video game called Concord, it’s likely not for good reasons. It had one of the most disastrous video game releases in a long time, and that’s saying something, considering the video game industry has seen some spectacularly disastrous releases of late. Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League comes to mind. But Concord’s failure might take the cake. It’s getting pulled from storefronts, and Sony is issuing refunds.
Concord was a multiplayer hero shooter published by Sony. Its initial trailer was met with a resounding “meh,” and its release on August 23 was met with an even more emphatic “meh.” It sold only 25,000 copies. In online multiplayer gaming, where a game’s success is often measured by the number of the peak concurrent players on Steam, its peak concurrent player count of 697 is unbelievably low. The aforementioned Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League peaked with nearly 13,000 players. As I’m writing this, about 1.5 million people are playing Fortnite.
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Online hate merchants who can only thinly veil their racism and misogyny attribute Concord’s failure to the game’s multicultural cast of characters and the diverse group of game developers who made it. Back in reality, Concord’s initial trailer left a bad taste in people’s mouths as it was quite simply filled with all of the worst comedic instincts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Worse, it was released with a $40 price point in a genre dominated by free-to-play games like Valorant and Destiny 2.
A $40 barrier for entry meant Concord needed to be especially good from the get-go, and it simply wasn’t. But for such a flop, it’s worth noting that critics didn’t even hate Concord. The consensus among critics is that it was fine. Not bad, not good, just another in a long line of games exactly like it—which are free with optional microtransactions. The fact that it was just OK was a death sentence.
As one Reddit comment put it, charitably, “It being yet another hero-based multiplayer game involving a group of wacky energetic nonchalant characters with a somewhat comical tone in a bright colourful sci-fi setting is something that feels a little over-done at this point.”
Sony is now pulling Concord from digital storefronts and is issuing refunds to anyone who bought it. Anyone who bought a physical copy is encouraged to return it for a refund.
One little detail makes the story even stranger and a little awkward: Amazon recently announced a TV show from the creators of the popular Netflix animated anthology series Love, Death, and Robots. It’s called Secret Level, and each episode is based on a different video game property. One of those properties was Concord. The show is set to release worldwide on December 10, 2024, and one of its scheduled episodes will be based on a game that had such a disastrous launch that it basically doesn’t even exist anymore.
It’s a rough time for game devs nowadays and my heart goes out to the people who spent several years of their lives making Concord only for it to get pulled two weeks after release. That’s a level of professional heartbreak I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
