After just a week on the market, Sony has decided to remove Concord from sale and will take the game’s servers offline. The move comes after the game failed to find an audience, with a reported 25,000 sales and very low player numbers. [Update: As of September 6, Concord servers are officially offline. As reported below, it’s unclear if or when the game might return and again be playable.]
Game director Ryan Ellis said, “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.”
Concord is no longer available to buy and the servers will go offline on September 6. Ellis said the team will “explore options” for how to “better reach our players,” which sounds like the game could return in some form down the road.
Sony is refunding people who bought Concord. Those who bought the game on PS5 will get an automatic refund to their payment method. People who bought Concord on Steam and the Epic Games Store will get refunds, too, and players should look for email messages from those providers.
Anyone who bought a physical copy of Concord can get a refund from the store they bought it from.
This is a shocking turn of events, as few could have predicted Sony would end sales and shut the servers down for Concord so quickly, even though the player numbers and sales figures were low.
As Ellis alluded to in the statement, it sounds like Sony and Firewalk could be revamping Concord with a plan to bring it back in a different way. One possibility is it returns as a free-to-play title, which is what many expected it to be at launch to give it the best chance to find an audience.
Prior to this dramatic announcement, Firewalk planned to launch Concord Season 1: The Tempest in October, adding a new character, new map, new variants, and additional cosmetics and rewards. Season 2 was scheduled for January, with Season 3 expected in April, though these timelines have surely now changed.
Keep checking back with GameSpot for more on Concord.
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