Concord peaks at only 697 CCU on Steam, casting shadow over Sony's live service strategy and ambitions

Concord, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, has gotten off to a poor start in terms of player numbers. Let’s take a closer look at Sony’s latest foray into the live service field.

Launched globally on August 23, Concord is PlayStation’s attempt to enter the already oversaturated hero shooter genre. It has received mixed reviews from critics, with an average Metascore of 66/100, and player reception has also been far from universal acclaim.

The game currently has a 2.87/5 rating on the PS Store (from 8.1k users) and a 72% (“Mostly Positive”) score on Steam based on just 379 reviews. The main criticism is aimed at its uninspired character and level design, as well as the fact that Concord is a $40 title in the genre dominated by successful free-to-play projects.

“Honestly, I’m not sure who this product is meant for,” one Steam user wrote. “It seems the developers were inspired by games like Overwatch and Destiny, but it doesn’t quite capture the essence of either. It feels like a mix that doesn’t come together well.”

Concord’s user score on Steam (left) and PS Store (right)

According to SteamDB, Concord peaked at just 697 concurrent players on Valve’s platform. Some might argue that most of its audience is on PlayStation, for which we have no publicly available data. However, a multiplatform release didn’t stop the $40 Helldivers 2, made by independent developer Arrowhead and published by Sony, from achieving worldwide success earlier this year and selling over 12 million units in 12 weeks. Not to mention that Steam accounted for 60% of HD2’s launch sales in the US.

We can’t ultimately judge Concord’s success without other data, but such a low player count is a bad start for a multiplayer game aimed at long-term support. This at least indicates very low initial interest from players.

Concord is not even in the top 50 titles with the Hero Shooter tag on Steam in terms of peak CCU, and there is no sign of it climbing that list anytime soon (especially given its premium business model and overall lack of appeal).

When looking at PlayStation’s other PC releases by that metric (both first-party and third-party titles), Concord ranks third from last — ahead of only Sackboy: A Big Adventure (610 CCU) and The Chinese Room’s adventure game Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (191 CCU).

As we wrote in our previous article on Concord, “We’ll be glad to be wrong, but Concord, which tries to appeal to everybody in its belated pursuit of industry trends, has every chance to become a game that appeals to nobody.” Unfortunately, this is exactly what is happening right now.

Firewalk’s game is unlikely to survive in a highly competitive area where players’ time is already divided between giants like Fortnite, Apex Legends, Valorant, Overwatch 2… the list goes on and on. And then along comes Valve, officially announcing its upcoming shooter Deadlock on the same day Concord launched. Although its early playtest is limited to friend invites for now, the game instantly peaked at over 89k concurrent players over the weekend (via SteamDB).

Sony signed a publishing deal with Firewalk in 2021 and acquired the studio last year. There are no official details on the deal’s financial terms and how much money PlayStation has invested in Concord, but lead character designer Jon Weisnewski recently noted that the game has been in development for “around 8 years” (despite Firewalk only being founded in 2018).

Needless to say, the entire market landscape can change several times during such an extremely long production cycle. In addition to its unappealing design and lack of any fresh gameplay ideas, Concord had a really weird and barely noticeable marketing campaign. Maybe it was too late to cancel or change the game following Sony’s portfolio reviews, but its poor launch is certainly a worrying sign for PlayStation’s live service pipeline.