"Concord" was a game developed by Firewalk Studios and published by Sony. It was designed to be hero shooter game. With an eight-year development cycle and backed with hundreds of millions of financial investments which range from costs between $200 million and $400 million. The reason for these costs of expenses was apparently due to renting and housing crisis that forced the dev team to require longer financial support to continue the game and another being outsourced coding from overseas dev teams. Just two years before the release of Concord the management team saw the coding was still heavily underperforming and buggy, so the company hired larger coding teams from oversea companies to help with the creation of the game which is an incredibly costly decision to make.

*Image:* Concord Logo (Source: Firewalk Studios)

The game being promised to be “the next major step in PlayStation gaming evolution” “the future of PlayStation” and was even quoted as “PlayStation’s Star Wars universe” creating a snowball effect of the game needing to meet expectations and forcing PlayStation to put more funding into.

All of which led to the day of release of Concord on August 2024 that would become so catastrophic that it became the record holder for the quickest product to earn the title of failure in Chicago mobs Hall of Shame Museum located in last Vegas and became the company's largest triple AAA flop of all time.

Although the game was completely polished with no bugs in gameplay or visuals the game still only lasted 11 days and was completely shelved and offline in less than 2 weeks. The reason for the games early death come from these five causes:

Lack of New content in an oversaturated market

Concord entered a market already saturated with popular hero shooters like "Overwatch", “Team Fortress”, “Battlefield” and "Apex Legends." The game failed to introduce anything new or to innovative to its gameplay mechanics or distinctive features to set it apart from its already successful rival titles. Generic character roster and boring map design further contributed to its inability to capture player interests.

High prices compared to Free-to-Play competitors

Unlike many of its competitors that adopted a free-to-play model, Concord was launched as a full-priced title with digital standard editions costing $39.99 / £34.99 / €39.99 undiscounted. This heavily deterred potential players who were willing to play the game where its free alternatives were readily available and with more content and ways to play.

Extended development cycle

The game's eight-year development cycle meant that by the time "Concord" was released, it felt outdated and couldn't keep up with current trends and player expectations that came from other games of the genre like:

Overwatch’s expanded character roster and abilities.

Apex Legends diverse landscapes and terrain movement.

Call of Duty’s interesting and nostalgic map design.

And none of the interesting or compelling character design of all games combined.

Poor Marketing

Concord suffered from insufficient marketing efforts resulting in their Beta barely reaching a 1200 player peak, resulting in little to no visibility among its target audience. Many potential players were unaware of the game's existence at launch and only found out about the game from its failure after the game was taken down.

Rapid Decline and Shutdown

Upon release Concord immediately faced an unimaginably low player engagement, with fewer than 700 concurrent players on Steam and approximately 1,300 on PlayStation. With the game being a PlayStation exclusive this meant no players on Xbox which more than halved the chances of the game meeting any successful quota.

In response to these disappointing figures, Sony announced on September 3, 2024, that the game would be taken offline, offering full refunds to purchasers and to have the game delisted from digital storefronts, and servers were shut down on September 6, 2024, making the game unable to buy physically from worldwide game stores.

The failure of "Concord" underscores the challenges faced by the gaming industry, particularly regarding the risks associated with lengthy development cycles, the importance of differentiation in crowded markets, and the necessity of effective marketing strategies.

How Concord got Conquered