Sony’s Latest Big Game, Concord, Is Flopping

Sony’s latest big video game, Concord, launched last week on PS5 and PC. And while the online shooter is fun and looks very expensive, it seems very few people are playing it based on some truly abysmal numbers and stats.

Concord was officially announced last year with a small teaser, then formally revealed in May via a CG trailer everybody hated and a gameplay video that looked more promising. The sci-fi PVP online-only FPS isn’t free-to-play, instead costing $40. When I played the game’s beta in July, I was concerned that the price tag would make it a hard sell in a crowded market. And now, looking at the numbers available, it seems like Concord might be one of the biggest flops of 2024.

Concord, like fellow PlayStation-published co-op shooter Helldivers 2, launched on PC via Steam as well as PS5. So, we can pop over to Steam.db (a third-party website that tracks and logs player numbers) to see how well Concord is doing. And folks, the numbers are very bad.

Barely anyone is playing Sony’s new FPS on Steam

As of August 26, Concord has yet to crack 1,000 concurrent players on Steam. Since launching on Steam last week, the highest recorded amount of players all enjoying Concord at once is currently sitting at 697. In comparison, Helldivers 2 averages around 18k active players on any given day and its peak number is 450k. Meanwhile, Valve’s not-even-released or finished shooter, Deadlock, has over 80k people playing it.

Now a lot of people online incorrectly assume a high player count is the only metric for success for all games, which isn’t accurate. But when we’re talking about an online-only multiplayer shooter built around playing with other people, yeah, the numbers do matter.

Over on PS5, data is harder to come by as Sony doesn’t publicly share how many people are playing a game. But we can look at the list of best-sellers on PlayStation’s official website to get a sense of what people are buying and not buying. And Concord is currently the 37th best-selling game on PSN.

If this was a random third-party online shooter from a smaller publisher, that wouldn’t be so bad. However, this is the latest exclusive game from PlayStation. Concord is just not connecting with people the way most Sony first-party games do, like God of War and The Last of Us.

So now what happens? I’m not sure. I think we’ll likely see some free weekends for Concord in the near future, in an effort to get the shooter in more people’s hands. But I also think that Sony is going to have to admit the $40 price tag was a mistake for this game and either relaunch it as a free-to-play title or give it away to all PS Plus subscribers for a month.

Otherwise, it’s likely that in a few weeks, nobody but the most diehard superfans will still be playing Concord on any platform.

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