Earlier right this moment, shortly after 1 PM Eastern, Concord’s servers went offline. Ryan Ellis, recreation director at Concord developer Firewalk Studios, had introduced the closure of the 5v5 hero shooter in an official PlayStation weblog submit revealed earlier this week on September 3, 2024—simply 11 days after Concord’s launch.
Concord offered poorly on PC, drawing an all-time-peak of 660 simultaneous gamers on Steam. “While many qualities of the expertise resonated with gamers, we additionally acknowledge that different features of the sport and our preliminary launch didn’t land the best way we’d meant,” Ellis wrote within the submit asserting Concord’s closure.
Rather than its $40 price ticket or its solid of characters, Tyler Wilde wrote final week that Concord’s actual problem was its failure to promote “a fantasy or a story that is getting FPS gamers excited to play it within the first place—earlier than they’ve even determined whether or not they like its weapons, characters, and modes.” Along the best way, it grew to become the goal of widespread derision and a casualty in our never-ending tradition conflict.
Despite its near-immediate downfall, Concord nonetheless had its supporters. Players have been in matches till the final doable second, and since a few of them have been streaming because the server plugs have been pulled, we are able to see the way it regarded as Concord went offline—and the way its followers reacted.
Streamer gwtmori was mid-sentence when he captured the second Concord’s server have been shuttered, saying the way it’d be “spectacular if we received Lennox to stage 69” earlier than the sport went offline. His seek for a brand new match was interrupted by an error message a few “model mismatch,” which shortly booted him again to Concord’s launch display screen. “Guys, what an enormous fucking honor,” gwtmori informed his viewers as they commiserated over the sport’s closing.
Elsewhere, Japanese streamer Nog7_ had simply began a brand new spherical when the server shutdown hit. Speaking on stream by chat text-to-speech, Nog expressed their alarm by repeating the character “あ”. One of Nog’s viewers, their messages additionally learn on-stream, bid the sport farewell by saying “さよならコンコード,” or “Sayonara, Concord.”
My favourite glimpse at Concord’s sort of moments comes from streamer dgunz, and it is three sorts of poetic directly. As the servers went offline, dgunz was in the midst of a firefight; within the clip, because the display screen goes black you may see the subtitles for characters calling out, by this void, that they are “badly broken” and “want a hand.” As the conclusion units in, a wordless dgunz salutes the fallen videogame. An error popup seems from dgunz’s PS5 with a poignant message: “Something went mistaken.”
I hadn’t performed any Concord throughout its quick lifespan, however there’s one thing touching concerning the streams of its final minutes on-line. These have been individuals enjoying and sharing their time with a recreation for the straightforward motive that they loved it, regardless of important consensus, common opinion, and Sony’s personal execution order. I like it.
In the weblog submit asserting Concord’s closure, Ellis stated Sony and Firewalk would “discover choices” for the sport “whereas we decide one of the best path forward.” We’ll have to attend and see whether or not that finest path means we’ll be capable to give Concord one other shot sooner or later.
