Last month, Sony unceremoniously shut down the servers for Concord, its latest live service multiplayer shooter, and pulled it offline from PS5 and PC. There was some debate about whether or not it was outright cancelled at developer Firewalk Studios. According to new reports, there’s hope that it might return as the game is quietly being updated on Steam, leading to speculation that it’s about to go free-to-play.
To say Concord was one of the year’s most disastrous video game launches would be an understatement. Despite a big marketing push by Sony with a reported $100 million development budget, the live service shooter launched to abysmal player numbers, even lower than 2023’s worst game, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum. Two weeks after the game’s launch, Sony decided to shut the game’s servers down and pull it offline without giving players an indication of what might happen to the game and its studio.
Screenshots of Concord‘s Steam database (taken from SteamDB) are now being shared on Reddit, revealing that the game had been silently updated as soon as 8 October, well after the game had been pulled from the platform. This led many to speculate that Firewalk Studios are gearing up to re-launch Concord as a free-to-play title.
Concord initially launched with a $40 price tag which is considerably less than the industry standard $70 (and it was the same price tag that this year’s breakout hit, Helldivers 2, also launched at). Despite the lowered price, it didn’t convince players to pick up the game as many felt that the live service space was already competitive enough with hero shooters, while others thought it made no sense to even put a price tag on it to begin with.
If Concord really is getting a second chance as a free-to-play game, players are hopeful that it might be able to reach a wider audience and get the player numbers it needs to sustain itself in the long term. However, the game’s reputation has been smeared quite a bit, so it will be interesting to see if players will be able to look past that.
Source: Reddit
