Concord was decidedly not great. So not great that Sony took the virtually unprecedented step of pulling the plug on the whole thing just a couple weeks after it launched. Sony said at the time that it wanted to "explore options ... to better reach our players," leaving open the possibility that some sort of comeback, maybe as a free-to-play game, might be in the cards. I was dubious, to put it gently, but recent events have me thinking that maybe it's actually going to happen.
Concord was taken offline on September 6, but a large number of updates have been applied to the game on Steam over the past two weeks. Visible on SteamDB, the updates began on September 30 and continued with reasonable regularity at a pace of a half-dozen or so per day until October 10.
They're pretty much incomprehensible to non-programmers such as myself, but the presence of words like "playtest," "pmtest," and "sonyqae," speculatively a reference to "Sony quality assurance engineer," certainly seem to suggest that something was cooking.
The updates stopped until today, October 16, making a change to "legal lines" and adding a health warning: "If you have a history of epilepsy or seizures, consult a doctor before use. Certain patterns may trigger seizures with no prior history. Before using and for more details, see important health and safety warnings."
A virtually identical update was made at the same time to other Sony games including Helldivers 2, God of War, and God of War Ragnarok, and it's possible that Concord simply got caught up in a blanket update of all Sony games on Steam. But that doesn't explain all the previous updates, which collectively represent quite a lot of effort for a game that's effectively dead—unless, as the man once said, the report of that death was an exaggeration.
Sony didn't respond to an inquiry I sent last week about what all these updates mean, which for now leaves us hanging. But I have to wonder, why would Sony be horsing around like this if it didn't have plans for something? A free-to-play relaunch seems entirely reasonable: Concord is literally a complete, finished, and released game that cost a presumably-not-insubstantial amount of money to make—Sony bought the entire development studio in 2023, after all—and while people may have balked at its $40 price tag, curiosity might be enough to draw players in if Sony is literally just giving it away.
Of course, even if Concord comes back, there's no guarantee of success. Firewalk Studios would still have the job of tuning it up into a good shooter—even free mediocrity isn't going to keep people coming back for long, and reworking Concord so that players actually like it would be a major task unto itself. And there's no guarantee it will even get that far. All of these updates could just be bits of automated housekeeping, the sort of thing that goes on unseen in the background of Steam every day.
But my feeling is that we haven't seen the last of Concord yet: What comes out the other end remains to be seen, but I'm pretty confident it will be seen, sooner or later. The bottom line, quite bluntly, is that there's not a hell of a lot to lose at this point: The money's spent and the work is done, so they might as well grab another handful and gun it at the wall to see if it sticks this time.
