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Discussion Concord sales ceasing immediately, game will be taken offline on September 6th, all customers getting refunded

Lugia667

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Concord fans — we've been listening closely to your feedback since the launch of Concord on PlayStation 5 and PC and want to thank everyone who has joined the journey aboard the Northstar. Your support and the passionate community that has grown around the game has meant the world to us.

However, while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn't land the way we'd intended. Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.

While we determine the best path ahead, Concord sales will cease immediately and we will begin to offer a full refund for all gamers who have purchased the game for PS5 or PC. If you purchased the game for PlayStation 5 from the PlayStation Store or PlayStation Direct, a refund will be issued back to your original payment method.

Customers who purchased from other digital storefronts will also be refunded. More information about refunds from Steam and Epic can be found below:

Steam Store – Steam Store will refund players who bought the game over the coming days. Steam will send confirmation of the refund once it has been processed.

Epic Games Store – Epic Games Store will refund players who bought the game over the coming days and will contact each customer directly to confirm that the refund has been processed.

Other retailer refunds – For customers who have purchased a physical copy at a retailer location outside of PlayStation directly, please refer to the refund process of the retailer you purchased it from to obtain your refund.

Once refunded, players will no longer have access to the game.

uhhhhh holy shit that's bad
 
Chris Dring on his podcast suggested that he had seen sales numbers for Concord the 25k sales estimated by IGN were within the ball park.

Feel bad for the devs who put so many years into the game. Hopefully, their jobs are safe but that might be optimistic.

Also that Secret Levels episode with Concord is going to be super awkward, if it even premieres at all.
 
"Exploring options" is a lightweight way of saying "The game is dead". This is a level of sales and PR disaster that I just can't see Concord recover from.

Eight years of dev work on a game that bombed this hard has to hurt. I feel for the dev team.
 
"Exploring options" is a lightweight way of saying "The game is dead". This is a level of sales and PR disaster that I just can't see Concord recover from.

Eight years of dev work on a game that bombed this hard has to hurt. I feel for the dev team.

Pretty much. The perception of Concord is tainted at this point, nothing can be done to turn this around.

That reminds me, Concord is dead but there's still seemingly one episode of the Secret Level anthology by Amazon that is dedicated to the game.
That's uh... Awkward to say the least.
 
PlayStation is generally tightfisted when it comes to refunds. It must have sold insanely low if execs decided that just giving everyone their money back was worth avoiding the PR nightmare if they chose not to refund
 
It may not be for me, but I’m not about to dance on this things grave. My heart goes out to all the devs who will be affected by this, and have essentially waisted 8 years of their life. This is the cost of trend chasing
 
Been keeping out of discussions on this but this is actually quite sad. Eight years of dev time to all end in a matter of weeks. Can't imagine what the dev team must be going through right now.

A flop of this scale is going to reverberate throughout gaming and I wonder just what conclusions the industry bigwigs are going to draw from it. Sony aren't blameless here as I think their marketing for the game was just bad. But even so for a game of this scope to just outright fail is just...well unbelievable.
 
That is insane. I don't think I have ever heard of a live service game ending that fast. This is not good, at all.

I know that it had horrible sales, like really really bad, but it's till insane to me
 
Well... they could relaunch it as free to play... right?

The discourse surrounding the game is so toxic that a F2P relaunch would be ill-advised.
Not only that but what was the most negatively talked about feature of the game?
The character designs(yes I'm aware that some of the discourse on the matter is quite cursed).

Where do shooter games make most of their MTX and entice people to buy their Battlepass? Gun and Costume skins.
It won't work at all.

what the hell did they even see in that studio to buy them? I hope Firewalk gets put onto another game, just to get their money's worth

Imagine an alternative timeline where Concord was cancelled in the April 2023 during the yearly SIE reviews and they got the team to work on Factions as to partially unburden Naughty Dog and not cancel Factions outright.

I'm sure SIE would love to have TLoU Online on track right now to put those workers to work on something, anything.
 
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Not my type of game so would never have played it but feel's so bad for the developers. 8 years to spend on a game that you have put your time into, effort, all for it to release like a damp squib. I really hope this isn't the case at all but it feels like layoffs are going to happen :/
 
Eleven days online. Eight years of development. There has been similar failures before, but to this extent might just be an industry first.
 
I think the most concerning thing is the game itself wasn’t even bad from what I gathered. It seems the people playing it were having a decent enough time. Which makes me skeptical of a F2P relaunch, because it’s not like they need to fix the game. It just flat out did not have a viable market appeal and the resources needed to sustain it as a GaaS might just not be there even as a free game.
 
GWkO_MVWUAQHqme
 
Well... they could relaunch it as free to play... right?
The cost of keeping the services up (server cost, support, Bugfixes, even if it's just a handful of people...) for months is probably higher then refunding everybody, meaning if they don't have a huge rebranding plan (and a different game) ...nah. that ship sailed.

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Damn. Just watched the launch trailer:

A overwatch/valorant/Fortnite variant, about 5-8 years late, no focus on the characters at all...
I'm not at all surprised, it missed the boat by a lot and from receptions did not bring much novel with it as an excuse...
 
Codename Steam maybe? Though that was a single player at least
Codename Steam didn't get anywhere near the attention this did, and probably had like 2% of the budget.

I've seen people comparing it to ye olde Atari E.T debacle, and while the after effects of this flop won't be so cataclysmic for gaming as a whole, it does feel like a similarly sized bomb. Certainly can't think of anything else in my time gaming.
 
I think they saw a studio that had a lot of ex-Bungie devs and a fair bit of former Raven and Respawn folks and thought "surely they know what they're doing and we'll be getting in on the ground floor for the next big online shooter"
Exactly correct
 
Codename Steam didn't get anywhere near the attention this did, and probably had like 2% of the budget.

I've seen people comparing it to ye olde Atari E.T debacle, and while the after effects of this flop won't be so cataclysmic for gaming as a whole, it does feel like a similarly sized bomb. Certainly can't think of anything else in my time gaming.
Slight tangent, but ET itself while undoubtedly a failure, is kind of unfairly the poster child of the early video game industry collapse, and there were way bigger issues with Atari and the other players at the time.
 
That 25K sales was probably true. This is an insane flop that should be impossible from a first party publisher.
 
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