by Frederica Allen
Sony’s new big budget hero-shooter, Concord, has failed spectacularly – so much so that some have compared it, mostly in the form of memes, to E.T. for the Atari 2600. Whilst not quite as disastrous as the game that nearly destroyed the Western video game industry, it is undeniable that the game is a massive flop for Sony. With eight years of development and a budget in the hundreds of millions, it sold less than 25,000 units sold, most of which were returned or refunded, and a staggering player count of exactly zero on Steam (at time of writing), Concord stands as the biggest failure in the industry since E.T.
A variety of reasons can explain the reason for its failure. One of the most prominent is how dated it feels in an over-saturated genre. Development began shortly after the success of Overwatch, yet only came out this August. In that time, the genre has seen many big hits, such as Apex Legends and Valorant, and even more mediocre entries. Concord falls into the latter of these categories, simply being a bland retro sci-fi reskin of the original Overwatch with nothing to inspire interest in players. Furthermore it came at a time when Black Myth: Wukong is dominating the stage and Valve, a veteran and acclaimed developer that has seemingly come out of hibernation, announced Deadlock the night Concord released. To top it all off, Sony put hardly any marketing into the game, the first official announcement of the game only appearing two-months before release, which flew under the radar of even most journalists.
The game’s failure seems to have also shifted Sony’s attention. Sony CFO Hiroki made the baffling statement that the company doesn’t have “that much IP that we fostered from the beginning.” This is all the more confusing considering the success of Astrobot, which references almost every Sony IP, from Rayman, which many players want to see return, to Bloodborne, a game so popular that Sony could probably make the money back from Concord’s failure if they remastered it or simply ported it to PC.
This all paints an unfortunate light for developers. Developing a game in 2024 is an arduous, expensive, and ultimately time-consuming endeavour. For big players, like Sony, board executives and shareholders are risk-averse when the cost of development is so high, yet what games like Concord need is something to draw attention; they can only be the next big thing if risks are taken. For smaller developers, the problem comes from that cost. Without the resources available to companies like Sony or Valve, indie devs are fairly limited in what they can achieve, which is why many of the big hits in the indie sphere are relatively low-budget, such as Undertale and Pizza Tower, both of which look awful when put side-by-side with other games and really only excel in writing or gameplay. Not to mention that for every Astrobot and Sea of Stars, there are a thousand more derivative titles that barely break surface; any deep dive into the Steam store page will reveal just how many anime visual novels there are, most of which are chasing the success of Doki-Doki Literature Club.
The modern games industry is in a crisis, squeezing the top of creativity and the bottom of resources. In its current state, the Western games industry is likely to collapse, although rather from a single game like E.T. tainting the entire image of the medium, it will collapse from a lack of creativity and innovation if big publishers are not willing to take risks and invest in their smaller dev teams, and if those smaller dev teams realise that simply chasing what is popular will not make them popular by proxy. For all the mockery of Concord being Sony’s failure, the company only purchased the studio in 2023, long after Concord began development.
Concord is a fire alarm in a blazing building, yet a fire alarm is only effective if the people inside the building pay it any heed.