The latest live-action shooter from PlayStation, Concord, is finally here, and the launch stats aren’t looking great so far.
When it comes to concurrent player count, numbers don’t always matter, especially for single-player games, but live-service titles are a different story. Valve’s up-to-date hero shooter Deadlock, which the company finally officially revealed last week, had a peak concurrent player count of 89,000 yesterday, according to SteamDB Databasea very impressive number for a game that hasn’t even come out yet. However, while it’s been playable for a while now, as long as you have an invite, this weekend saw the real premiere of another live-action hero shooter, Concord. Except that Steam Numbers aren’t doing too well – on release day, only 697 players played the game.
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The numbers simply got worse over the weekend, when you’d expect more players to log in to check it out, but nope, Saturday was worse than Friday, and Sunday was worse than Saturday. That Friday launch number is also pretty concerning for another reason: it’s lower than last year’s absolute disaster and studio-ruining game The Lord of the Rings: Gollum , which peaked at 758 players (which came upon launch and has never been surpassed).
This is obviously a huge, unintended indictment of Concord, a premium live-service title released in an era where such games are so commonly free-to-play. Of course, this doesn’t take into account PlayStation’s player count, which is likely higher given that it’s a PlayStation-published title, but it’s still not a good sign. So where does this leave Sony?
As Sherif wrote in January, 2024 is finally the year PlayStation delivers on its live service promise, but he wonders if anyone will care. They certainly did with the wildly successful Helldivers 2, though it definitely got a boost from word-of-mouth marketing that Concord likely won’t get, no matter how good it is.
There’s a problem here, too, as Fran gave the game 3/5 stars in his review, stating that it’s basically a “shooter designed by committee,” which doesn’t inspire the slightest bit of confidence.
It doesn’t support that Concord had development time eight years (What game came out eight years ago? Overwatch), so overall, this just underscores how much of a risk the live service is. Now we’ll just have to wait and see if PlayStation pulls back even further from the live service — it already did so last year, considering it delayed six of them, and one of its arguably biggest was just canceled outright at the end of 2023. If you ask me, it’s time for PlayStation to get back on the massive, first-person, single-player train with some fresh IP. Maybe we should just pour one out for Concord in the meantime.
