After ‘Redfall’ and ‘Suicide Squad’, the failure of ‘Concord’ has to be the final nail in the coffin of the failed live-service gold rush

Concord is dead. After eight years in some form of development, Sony’s first-person shooter survived just 11 days before announcing that It will be withdrawn from sale and those who purchased it will receive a refund. There’s potential for a comeback, but Concord remains the product of nearly a decade of work on behalf of the industry’s biggest company. It has almost nothing to show for it.

This should be an unprecedented disaster: a gaping black hole in Sony’s balance sheet for 2024, a complete abandonment of the company’s live services strategy, a failure to reach four-digit concurrent players on PC. But it’s not an unprecedented disaster, because we’ve seen this happen many times over the past 12 months.

In May 2023 Red Fall The game was released to very poor reception, with Steam player count peaking at 1,500 and then quickly dropping to double digits before sudden closure of developer Arkane AustinIn February this year, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League has fared much better, but it still struggles to maintain the player counts developer Rocksteady expects to keep a live-service game alive, leading to recent layoffs at the studio. Among them, Naughty Dog has pulled the plug on The Last of Us multiplayer having spent four years developing it, and not wanting to turn into a live-service studio, there were fears that would be necessary to keep the game alive.

The trend is obvious, but also easy to dismiss. Among these failed releases were two multiplayer games that reached truly stratospheric levels. Pal’s World temporarily became the second most played game in Steam history. Hell Divers 2 the game lost some of its popularity in the wake of its massive success, but it still attracted more players on random weekdays a few months after its release than Suicide Squad did immediately after its release.

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(Photo source: Rocksteady)

There’s no single reason for any of these games’ success or failure, but there are many contributing factors. Redfall reportedly struggled to retain employees who joined Arkane, wanting to work on the immersive simulators it was known for, and it shipped in pretty poor shape. Suicide Squad was the unfortunate victim of a weak initial reveal and general superhero fatigue. Concord’s bland character design drew plenty of flak for its poor reception, and Sony’s somewhat lackluster marketing campaign clearly didn’t excite players either. But there’s one overarching theme running through all of these big wins and losses.

The push for live service exists because big studio executives want the guaranteed revenue streams that come with big hits. Games like Fortnite, GTA Online, League of Legends, and a handful of other major multiplayer games are literally printing money for their owners, and major publishers want their piece of the pie—a game that players continue to invest in long after they’ve paid the $60 entry fee.

The problem is that this pie was cut years ago and now there are only a few bites left. If you’re a regular Fortnite, GTA Online or League of Legends player, you only have so many hours in the day to play something you’ve already invested in, and it takes something special to make you reinvest that sunk cost into a new game. Palworld and Helldivers was something special – unique enough not to step on the toes of the established franchise, cheap enough to entice investors to invest in the attention its unique twist has brought it, and lucky enough to gain massive support through word-of-mouth marketing.

Elsewhere, Deadlock proves that even in the same genre space as Concord, there’s room for something new. True, Valve’s new hero shooter hybrid has the pedigree of one of the best shooter studios in history and the benefits of a “worst kept secret” marketing campaign, but its MOBA pivot is proof that developers have to bring something new, especially if they’re not meeting audience expectations. There’s barely room for a game like Redfall or Kill the Justice League — and in the few slivers of space available, those studios’ appetite for making a game that isn’t a new Dishonored or Arkham title seems pretty limited.

The truth is that the live service boom of the mid-to-late 2010s has come to an end, and attempts to recapture that boom in the early 2020s have all but failed. Of the five games currently at the top of Twitch’s charts, only one—Valorant—came out this decade. The same is true of Steam’s biggest multiplayer games, with only Naraka: Bladepoint making it into the top five. Yet Sony and Microsoft continue to try to capture an audience that’s already been captured, and then, after years of developing games that don’t have a market, are shocked when their massive investments fail within weeks, if not days. Not long ago, Sony was thought to have 12 live service games in development. That number eventually dropped to six releases by 2026 as it became clear that there simply wasn’t enough interest. Several of those games still exist—most notably Bungie Marathon – I hope that the studios will have enough time to adapt their approach to something that will actually secure their future.

Perhaps it deserved something better – our Concord Review says it’s “by no means a disaster and has the potential to be a compelling hero shooter.”