Well, I didn’t see that one coming. Actually, that’s a lie—I absolutely did, and so did pretty much everyone else who spent more than twenty minutes with Concord. But still, Sony pulling the plug on a major first-party release after just two weeks? That’s the kind of industry earthquake that wakes you up at 3 AM with push notifications blowing up your phone. Which is exactly what happened to me last Tuesday, causing me to knock over a glass of water onto my ancient cat Dennis, who hasn’t forgiven me since.
I’ve been playing video games since Reagan was president, and I’ve seen my share of failures. E.T. for Atari? Owned it. Superman 64? Suffered through it. Anthem? Pre-ordered the Legion of Dawn edition like a sucker. But Concord’s spectacular demise hits different. This wasn’t some rushed licensed tie-in or ambitious indie project that bit off more than it could chew. This was Sony—SONY—a platform holder with seemingly endless resources and one of the most consistently successful track records in gaming.
Let me back up for those who somehow missed this slow-motion car crash. Concord was Sony’s big swing at the hero shooter market, developed by Firewalk Studios (a team Sony acquired specifically for their multiplayer expertise). Five years in development, $120 million budget (if the rumors are true), massive marketing push, the works. Two weeks after launch, player count dropped to double digits—yes, you read that right, DOUBLE DIGITS across all regions—and Sony yanked it faster than my parents used to pull the Nintendo power cord when dinner was ready.
I spent about 15 hours with Concord before the shutdown announcement. Not because I particularly enjoyed it (I didn’t), but because I’m the kind of stubborn idiot who keeps hoping games will get better if I just give them “a little more time.” It’s the same mentality that kept me in my first serious relationship two years longer than I should have been. Sometimes, things just don’t improve, lessons I apparently refuse to learn.
The gameplay issues were apparent from minute one. The shooting felt… off. There’s this intangible quality to good shooters, a perfect marriage of sound design, visual feedback, and controller response that Concord completely missed. Guns felt like water pistols—no impact, no satisfaction. My buddy Ryan described it perfectly after our third match: “It’s like I’m describing shooting to the game rather than actually shooting.” We laughed, then realized we weren’t having fun, then logged off to replay Overwatch 2 instead, despite its own massive problems.
The heroes—sorry, “Freegunners”—were simultaneously generic and bizarre. You had your standard tank/support/damage trifecta, but wrapped in character designs that felt like they’d been focus-grouped to death. The edgy one, the cute one, the robot one, the mysterious one… I couldn’t tell you a single character’s name without looking them up, and I just played the damn game last week. Compare that to how immediately iconic Overwatch’s original cast was, or how Apex Legends’ characters oozed personality from day one. Concord’s roster felt like AI-generated approximations of what focus groups think Gen Z wants.
The maps suffered a similar identity crisis. Visually stunning, I’ll give them that—Firewalk’s environmental artists clearly gave it their all. But playing them? Confusing layouts with weird choke points that either funneled everyone into meat-grinder confrontations or scattered players so widely you’d spend minutes looking for enemies. I got lost twice on the ice planet map, somehow ending up underneath the main battlefield in what I think was supposed to be an alternate route but functioned more like a dead-end penalty box.
But gameplay can be fixed. Balance can be adjusted. What killed Concord wasn’t just that it was mediocre—plenty of mediocre games survive and even thrive. What killed it was the absolute perfect storm of terrible decisions and market conditions that would make a Harvard Business School case study weep.
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: the $40 price tag. In what universe did Sony think launching a multiplayer-only hero shooter at $40 made sense in 2025? The market has spoken loudly and repeatedly—this genre either needs to be free-to-play or bundled with substantial single-player content. Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, Valorant—all free-to-play. Even Call of Duty Warzone recognized this reality.
I remember sitting in my living room, having this exact conversation with my gaming group over Discord the night before launch. “They’re charging forty bucks for this?” said Mark, incredulous. “It’ll be free-to-play by Christmas,” predicted Jen. We were all wrong—it didn’t even make it to Labor Day.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Launching between a major Destiny 2 expansion and the Black Ops 6 beta? With Elden Ring DLC looming on the horizon? That’s like opening a new restaurant between two established popular spots during restaurant week. The player count numbers tell the tragic story: peak concurrent players on Steam reportedly hit around a thousand at launch, then plummeted faster than my retirement account in 2008.
Now, I’ve got some industry contacts (sounds fancy, but it really just means I’ve been going to PAX for a decade and occasionally buy drinks for developers), and the whispers about Concord’s troubled development had been circulating for months. The game reportedly underwent several major revisions, shifting from a more unique premise toward the safer hero shooter formula as budgets ballooned. Firewalk Studios, despite their pedigree with Bungie veterans, apparently struggled with the Sony corporate structure and expectations.
One developer who shall remain nameless (because they still want jobs in this industry) told me over beers last month that the final eighteen months were a “five-alarm fire drill” with constant revisions and pivots based on changing market trends. “We’d implement something, playtest it, decide it didn’t work, scrap it completely, then three months later circle back to a version of the same idea.” That’s not game development; that’s a hamster wheel from hell.
The hero shooter market saturation is a killer. We’re long past peak Overwatch—the genre’s heyday was 2016-2019—yet publishers keep chasing that dragon as if there’s room for ten successful hero shooters in the ecosystem. There isn’t. Players have already formed their allegiances, sunk their time (and money) into progression systems, and built communities around the established games. Breaking into that requires something truly revolutionary, not just competent.
I’ve been playing Overwatch since launch day. My Mercy has a golden staff, for God’s sake. My friends and I have our established roles and strategies honed over literally thousands of hours. What exactly was Concord offering that would make us abandon all that investment? Slightly prettier explosions? A forgettable sci-fi backdrop? The privilege of starting over from scratch for forty dollars? Hard pass.
The refund policy announcement was the final admission of defeat. Sony rarely issues blanket refunds—the Cyberpunk 2077 situation being the notable exception. When a platform holder refunds every single purchase no questions asked, that’s not customer service; that’s damage control. Someone in Sony headquarters did the math and realized that the ongoing server costs plus the PR nightmare of shutting down a game people had paid for made automatic refunds the cheaper option. Business decisions don’t get more brutal than that.
The actual server closure announcement read like it was written by legal teams and PR departments fighting a three-front war. “We have made the difficult decision to discontinue development on Concord and begin the process of shutting the game down.” Translation: “This thing is hemorrhaging money, and we’re cutting our losses.” I read that statement at my desk during lunch break and actually said “Ouch” out loud, prompting concerned looks from my coworkers.
The fallout for Firewalk Studios remains to be seen, but it doesn’t look good. Sony invested heavily in acquiring this team specifically for their multiplayer expertise. For their flagship project to fail this spectacularly raises serious questions about the studio’s future. The developers themselves don’t deserve blame—game development is complex, and individual contributors rarely make the catastrophic strategic decisions—but that’s cold comfort when restructuring and layoffs inevitably follow these failures.
Concord will join the growing graveyard of failed live service games, sharing plot space with Anthem, Babylon’s Fall, Hyper Scape, and Battleborn. That last one feels particularly relevant—another hero shooter that had some good ideas but launched into a saturated market against entrenched competition. The difference is that Battleborn at least managed to stay online for a few years. Concord’s two-week lifespan sets a new, grim record for big-budget failures.
What’s perhaps most frustrating as both a gamer and industry observer is that this was all so predictable. The warning signs were there in every closed beta report, in the muted media previews, in the conspicuous lack of pre-release hype. I played the beta for three hours and immediately messaged my Discord group: “This is DOA.” Not because I’m some gaming Nostradamus—I’m still the idiot who thought the Wii U would outsell the PS4—but because the issues were that obvious.
Sony’s wider push into live service games now faces serious questions. With ten live service titles reportedly in development, is the company rethinking its strategy? They should be. The PlayStation brand was built on premium single-player experiences—God of War, The Last of Us, Horizon, Spider-Man. Those are their heavy hitters, the system-sellers. Chasing multiplayer trends has historically not been their strong suit (remember PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale? No? Exactly my point).
As I sit here in my home office, surrounded by gaming memorabilia from decades of playing and collecting, I feel a weird mix of vindication and sadness about Concord’s demise. Vindication because the market rejected a cynical, focus-tested product that lacked soul. Sadness because real people poured years of their professional lives into this project, only to see it erased from existence before their first post-launch update could even deploy.
My copy of Concord is still installed on my PS5, a digital ghost that can no longer connect to non-existent servers. I’ll probably delete it this weekend to free up space for whatever new disappointment the industry has in store for us next month. But for now, it sits there as a reminder that even the biggest companies with the deepest pockets can’t force players to enjoy something that’s missing that indefinable spark that makes games worth playing.
And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go apologize to my cat with some premium treats. Poor Dennis didn’t deserve to be collateral damage in Sony’s failed hero shooter wake-up call.
