Why Is Concord Going Offline Soon After Release?

The 2024 first-person hero shooter Concord is going offline just mere weeks after it was released in late August.

Concord’s Servers Go Offline on September 6

No videogame lasts forever and there always comes a time when older titles have their servers shit down for a multitude of reasons. However, most multiplayer games are usually active for at least a few years before their servers go down. This was not the case for Concord, the 2024 first-person hero shooter game developed by Firewalk Studios. On September 3, the game’s developers announced that Concord is going offline just a couple of weeks after it was released on August 23.

Set in a science fiction universe, Concord is a PvP first-person shooter in which players are assigned to two teams of five and compete in matches. The game includes an initial roster of 16 playable characters, called Freegunners, each having its own specific playstyle. If this sounds like Valorant of Overwatch 2, then you’d be correct, as Concord is of the same genre. However, unlike those other two shooters, it won’t be having a massive following worldwide.

“Concord fans — we’ve been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar,” the official announcement starts. However, the tone of the statement quickly turned sour as Firewalk Studios explained that the game’s servers would close on September 6.

According to the press release, sales of Concord will cease immediately. Furthermore, the company will offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If a player has purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to their original payment method.

Why Is Concord Going Offline?

It’s almost unheard of for a game of Concord’s caliber to go offline so soon after its release. However, it seems that several factors have combined, much to the chagrin of fans, for the title to go out mere weeks after it hit the market.

However, the main culprit may be the poor sales of the game. According to GamingBolt, Concord has struggled to attract players, with a peak of just 660 concurrent players on Steam, an extremely low number for a major release. There are barely 100 players at the time of writing of this article, according to Steam Charts. Interestingly, there were more players during the game’s beta phase.

Over the brief time it has been on the market, Concord sold around 25,000 units, with sales of 10,000 on Steam and 15,000 on PlayStation. Numbers like these could not even make a dent to pay the expenses for making a game of this caliber, let alone reach profitability.

The low sales numbers were not helped by the fact the game received a lot of “mixed or average” reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic. Meanwhile, Push Square rated Concord 7/10, and wrote: “Firewalk’s debut may not be out of this world, but it’s genuinely pretty good overall.” According to Video Games Chronicle, the game was 3/5 with the publication being critical of the $40 price tag, advising players to wait until the game was available on PlayStation Plus. British videogame journal Eurogamer also gave the game a 3/5, explaining the “muddled” character design is a big negative point. “The heroes seem to be visually either under or overdesigned”, the publication wrote.

What Else Contributed to Concord’s Quick Downfall?

While the mediocre and negative reviews may have impacted the sales of the game, they were not the sole reason for them. It seems that the whole game simply lacked a proper direction on the market. According to some publications, Concord struggled to differentiate itself in a heavily saturated market. This isn’t too difficult to see considering there are other already well-established hero shooters out there, such as Overwatch 2 and Valorant, which are free on top of everything.

Another factor that may have contributed to the game’s quick demise is the potentially sensitive topic of the gender and sexuality of some of the main cast. Many of the 16 playable characters are non-binary. Some players deemed that this is “too in the face” and blamed the game’s devs for putting too much “woke” agenda into Concord. Meanwhile, other players accused Firewalk Studios of using minorities as a marketing ploy.

The fact that the game also stayed in development for many years could also be a major factor in its downfall. Development began in 2018 with the founding of Firewalk Studios, which is a daughter company of ProbablyMonsters, a gaming company headed by former Bungie chairman, president, and chief executive officer Harold Ryan.

However, by that time, Overwatch was already well-established. In 2020, Valorant hit the market, further saturating the hero shooter genre. Concord was first revealed in April 2021, but it took another three years for it to be released, by which point it was quite late to the party.

Overall, it seems that the game’s devs have made many critical mistakes in the creation of Concord, and the fact they decided to count their losses and close its servers mere weeks after release is probably one of the few good decisions Firewalk Studios has made.