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The latest PlayStation-published live-service shooter Concord is here, and launch numbers are looking pretty bad so far.
When it comes to concurrent player counts, numbers don’t always matter, particularly for single-player games, but live-service titles are a different story. Valve’s new hero shooter Deadlock, which it finally officially revealed last week, had a concurrent player count peak of 89,000 just yesterday, according to SteamDB, a very impressive figure for a game that isn’t even out yet. However, while it’s been playable for a little while now, as long as you’ve got an invite, this weekend did have an actual launch for another live-service hero shooter, Concord. Except, its Steam numbers are not doing so good, amassing only 697 players at one time on the game’s launch day.
Numbers just got worse over the weekend, when you’d expect more players to login to check it out, but nope, Saturday was worse than Friday, and Sunday worse than Saturday. That Friday launch figure is also pretty upsetting for another reason: it’s smaller than last year’s absolute trainwreck, and studio ruining, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which has a peak of 758 players (which it received when it launched and subsequently never topped).
That’s obviously a big, inadvertent indictment of Concord, a premium live-service title releasing in an era when that type of game is so commonly free. This obviously doesn’t account for PlayStation’s player count, which is presumably higher considering this is a PlayStation-published title, but it’s still not a good sign. So where does this leave Sony?
As Sherif wrote about back in January, 2024 is finally the year that PlayStation is delivering on its live-service promise, but questioned whether anyone will care. They certainly did with the massively successful Helldivers 2, although that definitely received a boost through word of mouth, something Concord likely won’t get, no matter how good it might be.
There’s a problem there too, as Fran gave the game 3/5 stars in his review, saying it’s pretty much “shooter design by committee”, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the slightest.
It doesn’t help that Concord had a development time of eight years (what game came out eight years ago? Overwatch), so overall this just highlights how much of a risk live-service is. Now we just have to wait and see if PlayStation pulls back even further from live-service – it already did last year, given that it delayed six of them, and one of its possible biggest was just outright cancelled at the end of 2023 too. If you ask me, it’s time for PlayStation to get back on the big, first-party, single-player train with some fresh IP. Maybe we should just pour one out for Concord in the meantime.