Earlier today, shortly after 1 PM Eastern, Concord's servers went offline. Ryan Ellis, game director at Concord developer Firewalk Studios, had announced the closure of the 5v5 hero shooter in an official PlayStation blog post published earlier this week on September 3, 2024—just 11 days after Concord's release.
Concord sold poorly on PC, drawing an all-time-peak of 660 simultaneous players on Steam. "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," Ellis wrote in the post announcing Concord's closure.
Rather than its $40 price tag or its cast of characters, Tyler Wilde wrote last week that Concord's real issue was its failure to sell "a fantasy or a narrative that's getting FPS players excited to play it in the first place—before they've even decided whether they like its guns, characters, and modes." Along the way, it became the target of widespread derision and a casualty in our unending culture war.
Despite its near-immediate downfall, Concord still had its supporters. Players were in matches until the last possible moment, and because some of them were streaming as the server plugs were pulled, we can see how it looked as Concord went offline—and how its fans reacted.
Streamer gwtmori was mid-sentence when he captured the moment Concord's server were shuttered, saying how it'd be "impressive if we got Lennox to level 69" before the game went offline. His search for a new match was interrupted by an error message about a "version mismatch," which quickly booted him back to Concord's launch screen. "Guys, what a huge fucking honor," gwtmori told his viewers as they commiserated over the game's closing.
Elsewhere, Japanese streamer Nog7_ had just started a new round when the server shutdown hit. Speaking on stream through chat text-to-speech, Nog expressed their alarm by repeating the character "あ". One of Nog's viewers, their messages also read on-stream, bid the game farewell by saying "さよならコンコード," or "Sayonara, Concord."
My favorite glimpse at Concord's kind of moments comes from streamer dgunz, and it's three kinds of poetic at once. As the servers went offline, dgunz was in the middle of a firefight; in the clip, as the screen goes black you can see the subtitles for characters calling out, through this void, that they're "badly damaged" and "need a hand." As the realization sets in, a wordless dgunz salutes the fallen videogame. An error popup appears from dgunz's PS5 with a poignant message: "Something went wrong."
I hadn't played any Concord during its short lifespan, but there's something touching about the streams of its last minutes online. These were people playing and sharing their time with a game for the simple reason that they enjoyed it, despite critical consensus, general opinion, and Sony's own execution order. I admire it.
In the blog post announcing Concord's closure, Ellis said Sony and Firewalk would "explore options" for the game "while we determine the best path ahead." We'll have to wait and see whether that best path means we'll be able to give Concord another shot in the future.
