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Sony’s new live-service title Concord is having a rough launch

A sniper from Concord leaping in the air.
PlayStation

Sony’s live-service hero shooter Concord launched on PC and PlayStation 5 last week, and the early numbers are looking grim.

According to third-party data site SteamDBConcord peaked at a disappointing 697 concurrent players on PC on launch day. At the time of this writing, there are 252 players in the game. This is despite two beta periods, an early access period that began on August 20, and a public launch on August 23. In comparison, Helldivers 2, another PlayStation first-party, live-service game released simultaneously on PC and PlayStation 5, hit a concurrent players peak of 458,709 around launch. Six months in, it still rakes in tens of thousands of players.

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Concord is also on PlayStation 5, and while Sony hasn’t released its monthly top downloads report yet, things aren’t looking great there either. If you go to the PlayStation Store and sort the PS5 Games page by “bestselling,” Concord is ranked 38th at the time of publication. This doesn’t represent how many people are actually playing, but it’s a low placement for a game that just came out and was marketed heavily by PlayStation.

There is some Concord activity over on Twitch, with 505 viewers watching streams at the time of this writing. For comparison, Star Wars Outlaws, which also just launched, has 112,000 viewers on the site.

Concord is a 5v5 hero shooter developed by PlayStation Studios-owned Firewalk Studios as part of the larger company’s live-service push. It’s reportedly been in the works for “around eight years,” according to the lead character designer, and has been heavily marketed by Sony since it acquired Firewalk in 2023. Reviews, however, have been mixed. Digital Trends’ Giovanni Colantonio wrote that Concord has “fun hero-shooter bones,” but that the game “lacks original ideas that elevate that promising foundation.”

It’s unclear what the future looks like for Concord. On one hand, it could start drawing in players with a few updates. The developers have already committed to at least three seasons that should take the game to January 2025. It’s also just another release in the live-service shooter market, which is heavily saturated by long-running titles like Fortnite or Destiny 2, and is about to get the much more anticipated Marvel Rivals in December.

Carli Velocci
Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…
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