Concord
While I said everyone was bracing for impact regarding Concord’s inevitable weak launch, even I didn’t expect to see what I’m seeing now. I’ve seen a lot of rough releases in my time and I can’t think of anything that compares to what’s going on with Concord here.
PlayStation’s Concord, a game that has reportedly been in the works for eight years (since the launch of Overwatch, which is no coincidence), has launched with less than 700 concurrent players on Steam. It’s such a low number that I’m really trying to figure out if there’s something technically wrong with the numbers here, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The whole situation is strange. Monitoring the game’s performance on launch day, I saw it peak at 697 players a few hours after launch. While I didn’t think it would pick up positively after the US went back to work and school in their time zones, it should have picked up to some degree. It actually went DOWN. As of 10pm as I write this late Friday night, it’s at 615 players. It has been hovering between 550 and 650 all day.
steam
There’s a chorus that this won’t be primarily a Steam game, but even being extremely generous and ignoring that to say, Sony’s Helldivers 2 is played more on Steam than on PlayStation at this point, Concord’s numbers could be 10x higher on the PlayStation and it would still be a terrible launch.
Again, I’ve never seen this before. Not to this extent. The $200 million disaster Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched with 13,000 concurrent players. Weak at the time, but 20 times what we’re seeing from Concord here, plus it was #1 on the PlayStation Most Played list for a while. Redfall launched with 6,000 players when it came to Steam. Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones currently has the most players at the moment. Last year’s disastrous Gollum game started with more players. I can’t find anything here that is even remotely a point of comparison. And the strangest thing is that it is not even one bad game, it all depends on how unattractive it was. However, this is incredible.
If there’s one thing to indicate yes, this is really happening, it would be to remember that the open beta numbers for Concord hit 2,300 a few weeks ago. This was one free beta, where Concord is now paying $40 to play. So yes, that kind of downscaling from the original numbers seems likely, and there was never any indication that those numbers were wrong.
If this continues, this will be one of the worst major game launches … ever. No exaggeration, especially when you compare it to the time spent on the game (eight years) and the cost (no firm report on this, but then again, eight years, plus this is a game that uses expensive mo-cap technology for many scenes of details). Whatever positivity the wildly successful launch of Helldivers 2 bought Sony for their live streaming plans, this is the polar opposite to the most extreme degree possible.
Concord
You know what happens now. Or soon. Most likely very soon. Concord will ripcord and play for free or add to PS Plus. But this comes with the complication of not having an actual revenue model as a selling point was that BECAUSE it cost money, it wouldn’t sell standard stuff like characters or battle passes. So what do you do?
Concord has a lot more content planned from here, a full roadmap, everything you’d expect from any live service launch. But it’s unclear how much investment will be made here if the game has a few hundred players on Steam and, at best, a few thousand on PlayStation. Further development would clearly generate even more money.
There’s a whole separate article to be written about all the reasons why this didn’t work, but it comes down to the main point which is again, what plagued Suicide Squad, this is a game that nobody wanted and shouldn’t have been made . An ill-conceived concept in search of an audience that didn’t find it. But on a worse scale than I’ve ever seen.
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