If Sony’s Not Doing Anything With It, Why Can’t Others?

I’m sure by now most of you reading this site have at least heard of Concord (and no, I’m not talking about the jet or the grapes). Released in 2024 after much hype by Sony and Firewalk Studios, and then pulled from sale not two weeks later, with the company immediately giving refunds to just about everyone that bought the title, Concord was hyped as the next big thing in “live service shooters”. Think Overwatch, but with a different cast of characters and maybe some slightly different play modes. Sony bet big on the project, spending a reported $400 Mil to see it to completion, only to then effectively burn all that money on a balance sheet when they shut the game, and Firewalk Studios, down shortly after.

This isn’t just about the game, but it’s useful to get the commentary about the game out of the way first. Most of us didn’t get a chance to play the game. I certainly didn’t. By the time I realized the game was already out it had been pulled from stores and was gone again. And looking at the trailer for the game (as well as any remaining footage of it you can find online), it’s easy to see why: there was nothing special about the game, and even those with their fingers on the pulse of gaming news were underwhelmed by what they saw of Concord.

A big issue with Concord is that it doesn’t do anything better than the competitors. Hell, the very fact that there are competitors in the same space as Concord was a massive issue. Activision Blizzard has Overwatch 2 which, by all measures, is the most successful live-service shooter around right now (even if the company is doing everything they can to fuck it up). If you’re going to launch into Blizzard’s space you have to have something special, and that wasn’t Concord. If anything, Sony’s game was painfully generic in all forms.

Looking at the trailer, the general consensus was that Sony and Firewalk wanted to make something that would instantly appeal to customers. That sounds great on paper but what it really meant was that the studios were chasing trends instead of innovating. The character designs were painfully bad, often feeling like they were stolen from superhero movies (like, as many pointed out, Guardians of the Galaxy). Meanwhile, the gameplay didn’t do anything that all the other games weren’t already doing. Hell, by most accounts it was inferior in even its gameplay loop, feeling dull and tedious.

This was all feedback to their videos and postings. You would think Sony and Firewalk knew fans weren’t happy with Concord even before its release, and they knew what fans were unhappy about. But when you’ve spent $400 Mil on a title, you have to at least release it and then hope, after the fact, that you can fix it in post. Except the game did so poorly, with such bad sales and even worse audience numbers on the servers, that two weeks later it was killed. There was no post-launch window to fix things in. The game was dead. No one wanted it and so it was buried.

The story could end there, and if it had I wouldn’t have even bothered writing an article about it. Hell, I didn’t cover the game when it came out, even to note its spectacular failure. But recently it seemed like the game might come back. Not from the studios themselves (especially since Firewalk is no more) but from the fans. A recent effort was made by some fans to resurrect the game, backwards engineering the game to run as its own server so that anyone that had a copy of the game could play it. That’s a nice way to keep a game that currently no one can currently play alive for those that still had it.

Unfortunately (but not unexpectedly) Sony has started issuing cease and desist orders about the game. This is not just for videos that are posted online, but the team developing the mod has also noted that they’ve gotten “worrying legal action”. One has to assume that the lawyers at Sony saw that the company’s property was being used by anyone other than Sony and decided to get ahead of this fact as soon as they could. “Letting fans do what they want with our assets, even though we’re clearly not using them? Never!”

Now it’s entirely possible that this was the work of a few lawyers at Sony and once the social media team sees it and raises it to higher-ups in the company then words will come along to knock it off and let the fans play their game. Some studios are like that. Everyone knows that Capcom, for example, is pretty cool with fan works of their games, especially those that aren’t being actively worked on anymore. Concord is a dead game, and if it were in the hands of Capcom one would assume they’d say, “sure, have fun, nerds,” and that would be that.

But Sony is different. They’re a market leader in the video game industry, and arguably one of only two or three that can make a case as still being top dog (Nintendo being another). The likelihood is that this wasn’t a mistake and Sony really doesn’t want the fans to play around with Concord even though Sony isn’t doing anything with Concord. Their goal was to bury the game and keep it buried and if anyone, in the long run, is going to develop anything for the game, it would be Sony.

Is that likely to happen? No. Sony lost $400 Mil on the game and got nothing for it but egg on their face. Even with a tiny fan community showing interest in resurrecting the game to play on their own, Sony isn’t going to see that and think, “yeah, let’s bring it back.” The game was a massive failure and all the studio wants is to put it behind them. But at the same time it’s still their property and they can’t just let that stand. If someone takes Concord and does something with it then Sony can’t monetize Concord later. This, despite the fact they weren’t anyway.

And that’s really the issue here. Sony clearly has no interest in resurrecting the title. If they did then they wouldn’t have killed it before. They could have stood up a couple of servers, let Bob the Intern handle the servers just to keep the lights on, and players would have been allowed to keep playing their game for a couple of years. They didn’t do that. They want it gone. But IP is still IP and Sony clearly has a position of, “if we can’t do anything with it, no one can.” Fans don’t get to play with their toys. No one gets to play with their toys.

As I said, it’s a totally expected position and I’m unsurprised this happened. But, seriously, if you aren’t going to do anything with Concord, Sony, at least let the players have fun playing it on their own setup. Don’t just shut it down for everyone. And if you want to try and make money on it after all, put it back in shops for people to buy and play. I’m sure that’s all the fans want, a chance to enjoy this shitty, shitty game.

But if they do, or if the fans are allowed to bring it back after all of this, one thing is for sure: I won’t play it. Like, seriously, Concord looked awful. Who would want to play that crap?