We all knew it would happen given the launch day numbers, but the speed at which it did is still astonishing. Concord, Sony’s massive project and attempt at entering the hero shooter market was met with an acute lack of interest and now sports under 100 PC players.
The precise number of concurrent players on Steam is a well-rounded 90, according to Steam Charts. Concord‘s peak numbers weren’t all that great at launch, and it merely managed to cross the 600 mark on that faithful day. The player base then saw a rapid decline, falling below 100 concurrent Steam players today, Aug. 29, only six days following its release. Concord has averaged no more than 240 players in the past week, a figure that is also rapidly falling as the handful of people who held interest in the title continue to abandon it.
Remember Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League? That complete disaster of a title that reportedly cost Warner Bros. over $200 million? Well, that game launched to a grand audience of over 13,000 peak concurrent players (and even now is at least equal to Concord), while Concord, a hero shooter whose production budget has been rumored to be as high as $100 million, managed only five percent of that. While the exact figure that Sony spent on Concord‘s development isn’t known, the company is no stranger to massive and inflated budgets and has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on first-party titles before. Concord itself, despite everything, is a good-looking game overall, especially on the cinematic front, and that could not have been a cheap endeavor.
If anything, Concord is a wake-up call for an industry riddled with overly expensive live-service titles that fail to captivate audiences and arrive at the scene years too late, with little to no innovation or change to the formulas they employ. It’s probably the biggest AAA failure this year, but seeing as it’s not the only one, it’s clear the video game sphere needs a bit of a shake-up.
