Concord joins The Day Before in games delisted in less than two weeks after release.

[Stg-Flame]

The Day Before
TDB Steam Page

Concord
Concord Steam

I find it incredibly fascinating how these two games are almost miles apart, yet they both failed in the most impressive ways. The Day Before was created and published by small teams but had a massive marketing team that was all over the internet with trailers, AMAs, footage, screenshots, etc. whereas Concord was created by a small team but was published by Sony and had next to no marketing at all. TDB was also highly anticipated and received over 15,000 negative reviews within the first two days with just over 38,000 concurrent players on release, but within only two days, fell down to barely 9,000 players. On the other hand, Concord peaked at a staggering 660 players and no, that's not a typo. They never even crested 1,000 players for a brand new hero shooter. Concord managed to hold out for a whole 11 days before announcing the game will be taken offline and refunds issued whereas TDB made it an impressive four days before the developers announced the game had "failed financially" and that the studio had to shut down. There was plenty of controversy surrounding TDB developers "Fntastic" with many people claiming they were flipping assets and was just using the game for a quick payday with no intention of actually trying to release an actual game.

It's still up in the air for Concord to be re-released as a F2P but given the abysmal launch on Steam, I don't have high hopes for them to recoup their losses.

 

[KMFJD]

8 years of developmental hell and canned this quickly.....tbqh i barely heard about it, did they even advertise it?

https://twitter.com/x/status/1831005873868808344

 

[MoragaBlue]

I suspect at some point after their 2023 purchase of the Concord studio (Firewalk?), Sony probably internally realized the game was a dud.

Here's their conundrum. Per the old saying, if you make your way into a tunnel and the entrance collapses, what's the next best step? It's pointless to retrace and the only rational action remaining is just to go deeper and hope to find a way out. I'm sure within Sony Corp, not just their SIE subsidiary, there are debates on whether the exclusive bet on live service games is prudent. I'd imagine after 8 years of work and $200+ million usd, Sony brass in Tokyo probably felt this would be a necessary loss to prove their point. In other words, to the side who argue for live services modern audience goldmine, here's your chance to prove it. If they're right, great. If not, here's our chance to shut them down, make some changes, and reverse course.

I'd wager SIE had every intention to stick with this, but Sony Japan (this is something that would reach the CEO's office) just said enough. Who can blame them? The games target audience either didn't exist or they were unable or unwilling to buy the game. To what end would it make sense to allow it to possibly damage Sony's brand?

What's interesting to me are their next launches. Let's see how they perform.

 

[KMFJD]

i heard the game is ok, characters are tired though, which would be ok for a f2p game but not one charging $40

 

[quikah]

Why would anyone spend $40 to play this when they could play Overwatch 2 or Valorant for free? The characters are uninteresting with bland designs.

 

[DigDog]

did they even advertise it?

yes, in all the wrong ways.



Frankly i find this Concord situation, together with Dustoborn (another one worth reading about), to be almost exhilarating. You hire the very opposite of the type of person that would make a good game designer, you get what you deserve, and i'm happy these games failed the way that they did, so we can get rid of this plague.

 

[thestrangebrew1]

Not once did I hear of this game, but the genre isn't one that I pay attention to anyways so...Sad for the developers maybe, but damn 8 years? That's crazy!

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Not once did I hear of this game, but the genre isn't one that I pay attention to anyways so...Sad for the developers maybe, but damn 8 years? That's crazy!

Concord was the headliner of Sony's last State of Play maybe a month ago. Knew it would be a trash live service game the second the trailer started, but a lot of Playstation fans thought oh this is a cool Guardians of the Galaxy kind of knockoff for a couple of minutes until the trailer mentioned it was a MP game.

 

[MoragaBlue]

Frankly i find this Concord situation, together with Dustoborn (another one worth reading about), to be almost exhilarating. You hire the very opposite of the type of person that would make a good game designer, you get what you deserve, and i'm happy these games failed the way that they did, so we can get rid of this plague.

At one time, I'm sure SIE's top brass were all fully convinced this game would be not only a generational hit, a la Elden Ring, but also Sony's new flagship IP with the promised annuitized income of a live services game. Well, until they showed the trailer and received some, shall we say, less than enthusiastic response from gamers. Then, they had a free beta where hardly anyone played, compare this to Valve's invitation only one. At this point, someone at Sony Corp probably thought, "we're going to charge $40 for a game hardly anyone wanted to play for free." The only course of action remaining was to let it launch and see if these live service proponents were right.

When the inevitable failure occurs, sack them and move on. No blame, no bad PR and the usual journal hit pieces on downsizing. This game united the gamers world over, at least to the extent that none of us felt it was worth $40. For me, you can't even pay me enough to play or stream this. Sony, at least in Japan, is beginning to realize those who love the game, or said they did, never bothered to buy it.

It would be corp malpractice & potential breach of fiduciary duty to allow this to continue.

 

[Artorias]

Woke garbage.

Just look a the image below and tell me they were not ticking boxes for "inclusivity". Literally the woke version of DoomGuy.

 

[MoragaBlue]

Woke garbage.

Just look a the image below and tell me they were not ticking boxes for "inclusivity". Literally the woke version of DoomGuy.

LMAO...While this certainly doesn't resonate positively with me, and probably enough for me to skip a game altogether, they felt there would be enough who found this appealing to make this game sustainable.

Hogwarts Legacy on sale is probably the first western game I've bought in over 10 years? In my view, it's really a great time to be a gamer because there are so many fantastic games from which to choose. As for me, the next several years I'm looking forward to the games from the East, e.g., the next Myazaki game, Lies of P DLC, Dark Myth Wukong DLC & next series.

I hope they find a market for their "woke" games.