‘Concord’ May Be Coming Back To Life After All

Concord may be six feet underground, but given that it’s spooky season, it’s a perfect time to shoot a hand out of that grave and crawl out again.

This is far from confirmed at this point, but there is some evidence now that at least something is going on behind the scenes with the Steam version of Concord. As spotted by Insider Gaming, while Concord has gotten multiple updates on Steam the last few weeks, from October 6-10 alone it got 20 different updates by a few different users.

There is obviously no official word from Sony or Firewalk about any of this, otherwise we’d be talking about that, but the idea here has always been that the game could return to life as a free-to-play version, rather than the $40 up-front price it originally asked for when it launched on August 23. It shut down two weeks later.

It’s important to remember that the official word was that Concord was possibly going to return in some form. The blog post from Firewalk said the following:

“However, while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended. Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”

The “explore options” bit no doubt included the idea of going free-to-play, but the more common notion was that the game was just…dead.

After all, price did not seem to be the main issue here. The game had a completely free beta close to launch which peaked at just 2,300 players on Steam, a little less than triple what the game ended up launching with. The interest just wasn’t there at any price. So should this happen? You can see both cases, but I’d argue one is more compelling than the other:

1) Given how much Sony and Firewalk have invested in Concord, including years of development time and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, they may at least want to give it a second shot as a free-to-play title, in addition to whatever other tweaks to the game they think might encourage more players to return.

2) But how would it look to fail twice? And that seems to be the more likely possibility. Again, price was not the main issue, and you’re not going to redesign the entire roster and the concept of the game. This was also not say, Overwatch, eventually feeling the need to go free-to-play to compete after being an established success. Concord was a colossal failure, and it does not seem to be one of those games that can work really hard to turn things around like No Man’s Sky or Cyberpunk 2077, the latter of which launched to millions of players, not thousands.

Still, I think Sony may try here. That may be what these updates indicate, but if it’s just going free-to-play, that is unlikely to do much. Still, we know that additional, ongoing content for Concord had been in the works, and so has a multimedia expansion with an upcoming episode of Amazon’s Secret Level, which will now feel pretty bizarre.

As ever I really do feel for the Concord team here, but it’s hard to see any kind of resurrection working at all.

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