Did Concord ever have a real shot at making a comeback?
What would it have taken for Firewalk's shooter to find its feet again?
My guest for this issue of Multiplier is my friend and the award winning editor of Reviews.org AU, Brodie Fogg. You can find his work on Reviews.org Australia, but you can’t follow him via social media platforms because he is brave enough to live a life free of them and there is rarely a week that passes where I am not envious of that choice.
Our chat about Concord began back in September 2024 and ended in December. Naturally, the situation around the game changed more than once over that period of time. As a result, some of the earlier parts of our exchange are a little out-of-date. However, I think that the authentic arc of the conversation is worth the journey and I hope you do do.
Fergus: One of the biggest trends in gaming in 2024 has been the growing backlash to live service, from Suicide Squad to the decline of Destiny 2. In that context, the recent conversations and controversies around Concord aren’t so much an anomaly as the latest victim. After a reported eight years in development, Firewalk Studio’s hero shooter lasted only a few weeks before Sony pulled the plug.
I will fully cop to the fact that I had basically zero interest in this game and, sans a world where all my friends got into it, was probably never going to play it. However, at the same time, I’m sympathetic to those who did only to have their time cut so short. It used to be that a multiplayer game could come out and even if it bombed, it was still something you could break out with a few friends at a LAN party and something that more dedicated and DIY fan bases could make their own.
With the shift towards always-online server infrastructure, that has become rarer and rarer. Still, if there’s any silver lining to live service gaming it’s that a game can recover from a bad first impression. From No Man’s Sky to Fallout 76, everyone loves a good redemption story. Could Concord be next?
Brodie: Ferg, as you know I was one of the few people who paid full price for a physical copy of Concord at launch. I’m also part of the even smaller group of people who were enjoying it over the few short weeks that I spent with it. I thought it was a competent and extremely polished hero shooter that made me nostalgic for early 2016 when Overwatch first launched. My only major criticisms of Concord could have been applied to Overwatch in its early days: the lack of map and mode variety and in-game purchases didn't feel fair for a full-price game (even if Concord retailed at roughly half the cost at launch.)
But overall, I was enjoying my time with Concord and always looking forward to jumping in for a quick match at the end of the night during its devastatingly brief lifespan. I’d even found my main in Haymar, a long-range, high-damage crossbow wielder with a few arcane tricks up her sleeve. Given my track record, Haymar probably would have suffered the same reputation Hanzo did in the early days of Overwatch if Concord’s meta had even been given enough time to develop.
I’ll confess to having a bias for the underdog, and while it’s hard to consider Firewalk Studios or by extension Sony Interactive Entertainment “the underdog,” the masses had made up their mind about Concord long before release. Part of that, I think, was in bad faith; reactionary dickheads who bemoaned the inclusion of preferred pronouns at the character select screen.
There was just something in the air in the lead-up to Concord’s release, something that only fuelled my desire to experience it for myself.
We can get into why Concord failed to launch but whether it has a future or not is a tougher nut to crack. The examples you gave, No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76, despite their disastrous launches, had bigger things going for them. NMS had enormous ambition. It didn’t live up to the hype at launch but it still delivered a taste of what was promised. Those who stuck around have been rewarded in kind multiple times over. Fallout 76 felt like a no-brainer on paper. Marrying the MMO genre with one of the world’s most beloved sci-fi roleplaying games seemed like a sure thing– it just turned out that fans weren’t as willing to accept an “early access” version of that game from a studio as big as Bethesda, particularly when it was marketed as a 1.0 release. Concord never had either of those things. Even PlayStation fans, a blindly loyal and forgiving bunch, disregarded Concord before launch.
If there’s any hope left for Concord, it’s as a free game for PlayStation Plus subscribers as it should have been all along. But even that doesn’t guarantee its future and that’s just a tragic and unjust truth about the current state of big-budget video game development.
Fergus: In the time since we started exchanging words on this topic, the prognosis for Concord and the studio behind the game has not improved. The franchise seems set to make a bizarre appearance in Amazon Prime’s upcoming Secret Level anthology series but past that the odds seem pretty slim when it comes to the current incarnation of Sony’s hero shooter making a meaningful comeback.
I can’t help but think back to Bioware’s Anthem and EA’s later-aborted plan to rework and relaunch it after a rocky launch, though in retrospect the uphill battles faced by that game seem almost quaint compared to Concord’s challenges.
I think you’re onto something with that you need a certain amount of ambition to fuel your redemption arc though. If the best possible version of Concord is just another hero shooter, I don’t know if that vision is big enough to make the money math work. Gaming genres go in and out of fashion all the time and while I do think that the core audience for this style of shooter will show up for a good one of those, I don’t know if that audience is big enough to sustain Concord let alone work off the $400 million that went into the game.
There was once a time where studios made real-time strategy games with big budgets. I think live service gaming isn’t going anywhere anytime soon but could we be looking at the last gasp of the hero shooters sub-genre instead?
Brodie: Ferg, despite Concord's infamously short existence, it seems the world isn't ready to stop talking about it. Since our last exchange, Sony shut down Firewalk Studios, Amazon released a posthumous Concord-centric television episode, and Netease launched an insanely successful hero shooter with Marvel Rivals.
Was Concord the last gasp of the hero shooter subgenre? Marvel Rivals’ success would suggest not but its franchise power makes it impossible to say for sure. On one hand, the Marvel license doesn’t guarantee a successful game (see 2021’s Guardians of the Galaxy) but on the other hand, what is Marvel Rivals without its IP other than an Overwatch clone?
It’s been a while since our last email, but one thing I’ve kept going back to is your point about Bioware and EA’s arrested development of Anthem. The difference between Anthem and Concord, in my opinion, was the initial pitch. Anthem’s promise was Destiny by way of Mass Effect—what a dream, by the way. Even if you had never played a Bioware game, you could still hope for an open-world Iron Man simulator. Concord? Concord’s promise was Overwatch with Reject Shop Guardians of the Galaxy squeezed through Sony’s Blockbuster AAA filter.
Anthem was a game that people really wanted, and rightfully so, just not in the package it arrived in. I’d argue that, if done right, Anthem’s initial promise is still a game people want.
Ever since Concord was pulled offline, there’s been an itch at the back of my brain: where have I seen this before? Not just at a commercial level, but the pitch. Piggybacking off a lucrative multiplayer trend, promising the world in terms of characters and world-building etc. Then it hit me. Battleborn. Gearbox’s first-person shooter pledged to mix Borderlands’ randomised loot with the competitive MOBA elements of games like DOTA 2. But it wasn't to be.
Gearbox and 2K truly believed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Battleborn would become an overnight success. Not just that, but a cultural icon.
Don’t believe me? Then why did multiple Battleborn characters appear in Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Ready Player One? A movie set in 2045, released in 2018 posited that the characters from a struggling FPS shooter that went free-to-play in 2017 out of sheer desperation, would still be selling cosmetics in the metaverse nearly 30 years later. The confidence. What’s another big-budget multiplayer shooter that received a posthumous mixed-media tie-in?
Concord is Sony’s Battleborn.The difference is that Battleborn was given a chance to live the free-to-play life before the servers were shut down forever.
Where did Concord go so wrong that it had to be ejected out of the airlock just a few weeks after release? I have my own criticisms of Concord: there was no Play of the Game recap and nothing noteworthy to spend your hard-earned (or purchased) in-game currencies on. But none of that signals an outright failure-to-launch. Some games have endured much rockier releases and survived to tell the tale. This all reeks to me as some sort of convoluted corporate reshuffling. Cutting loose nearly a decade of dev work to temporarily appease the shareholders is far from the most sinister behaviour we’ve seen from the likes of Sony and corporations like it. Maybe Sony just really needed the cash to buy up FromSoftware, as the rumours suggest.
Either way, I will forever believe that Concord’s criticisms were mostly an overreaction to its similarities to Overwatch and the fact that Firewalk was given less than a month to prove itself in the live-service game should be more closely investigated. My heart goes out to everyone who worked on it. I would like to see Concord live on in some incarnation, but more than that I’d be interested to see where the talented folks from Firewalk end up and what they do next.