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Concord, the PlayStation-published live-service shooter from Firewalk Studios drew a meager audience on PC over its debut weekend. While the player count for its lead PS5 platform isn’t available, all signs point to a grandiose flop for a first-person shooter in a saturated genre.
SteamDB shared the concurrent player count peaks from Friday to Monday, on PC, and the numbers aren’t impressive: 697 concurrents Friday, 607 Saturday, 420 on Sunday and, so far, 299 on Monday.
The game’s PlayStation Store listing on the PS5 dashboard gives it 8,000 user reviews, which is a player-count adjacent glimpse into the audience. So is the unimpressed 2.85 aggregate score they gave Concord, which launched after eight years in development.
Even embarrassing faceplants like January’s Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League drew far more concurrent players — 13, 459 in Suicide Squad’s case Concord currently shares the same part of the SteamDB list inhabited by games more than 20 years old, like Remedy Studio’s Max Payne (2001) and Relic Entertainment’s Dawn of War: Winter Assault (2006).
Why did Concord flop?
Firewalk has a lot to be concerned about as the opening gambit for gamers who picked up the shooter, as what looks like a free-to-play game to many comes in at $39.99. There’s also a $59.99 deluxe edition.
Media and advertising for the game have been active and as we reported, notable public betas were held to allow players a chance to feedback. Four map types were included in the beta, Freewater, Star Chamber, Water Hazard, and Shock Risk.
The beta also included 16 character types and three game modes Cargo Run, Clash Point, and Trophy Hunt. So the studio had ample time to tweak the feedback and the issues players had before the concrete launch of Concord.
But gameplay issues may not matter as much as the fact Concord is trying to butt into a crowded live-service, hero-shooter market with an offering that doesn’t do enough to overcome its derivative perception. Certainly not if it’s been in development for eight years, as a designer said on X last week.
Firewalk Studios has a mountain to climb to get players back into this FPS. Compared to Helldivers 2, which was Sony’s biggest-ever Steam launch, there is no contest.
Helldivers 2 hit an all-time peak of 458,000 11 days after its February launch, and is still drawing north of 20,000 concurrents six months later. It seems Concord is set to nosedive unless Firewalk or Sony do something drastic, like drop it to a true free-to-play model — which would no doubt alienate those who did pay for it.
Featured image via Sony.
