PlayStation’s latest live-action shooter, Concord, has been released, and it’s had a pretty poor launch so far.
When it comes to concurrent player numbers, numbers don’t always mean that much, especially for single-player games, but the same can be said for live service games. Valve’s new hero shooter Deadlock officially launched last week, and according to SteamDB, it peaked at 89,000 concurrent players just yesterday, which is a very impressive number for a game that hasn’t even been released yet. However, while the game has been playable by invite only for a while, another live service hero shooter, Concord, did launch this weekend. Its Steam numbers weren’t great, though, with just 697 concurrent players on launch day.
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The numbers got worse on the weekends, when you’d expect more players to log in, but that wasn’t the case, with Saturday being worse than Friday, and Sunday being worse than Saturday. Friday’s launch numbers were also dismal for another reason: They were lower than last year’s Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which peaked at 758 players (a number the game reached at launch and never surpassed).
This is clearly a major, unintentional indictment of Concord, a paid live service game in an age when such games are often free. This obviously doesn’t take into account PlayStation player numbers, which should be higher considering this is a PlayStation-published game, but it’s still not a good sign. So where does this leave Sony?
As Sherif wrote in January, 2024 is the year PlayStation delivers on its live service promise, but he questions whether anyone will care. They do care, because Hellraiser 2 was a hit, and while that game certainly got a boost through word of mouth, Concord likely won’t get that, no matter how good it is.
There’s a problem here too, as Fran gave the game 3/5 stars in his review, calling it pretty much a “shooter designed by committee”, which isn’t reassuring at all.
It doesn’t help that Concord took eight years to develop (what game came out eight years ago? Overwatch), so overall this just highlights how risky live services are. Now we’ll just have to wa it and see if PlayStation retreats from live services further – something it already did last year, as it delayed six live services, and one of the arguably biggest live services was canceled outright at the end of 2023. If you ask me, it’s time for PlayStation to get back on the big first-party single-player train with some new IP. Maybe we should pour a glass to Concord in the meantime.
