The Video-Game, "Concord," Flopped and it Flopped HARD

Sometimes a game comes out and it really struggles for a while. Eventually, with patches and fixes, it becomes a fantastic and beloved title (look at, "No Man's Sky," or, "Cyberpunk 2077," for two great examples). Other times, a game is pretty mediocre but is, "Too big to fail," or to be allowed to flounder due to live-service ambitions and it keep chugging along despite relative player disinterest ("Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League," is a recent incident of this). There are times a game does so poorly that a studio quits offering much support for it, but keeps it running to at least salvage some money ("Exoprimal," wasn't even bad but suffered this fate). For a relatively big (in terms of development team size and money invested) game to come out and be shut down after barely two weeks, however? That's not something you usually hear about, but it is what's happening with, "Concord."

"Concord," was a 5 vs 5 team-shooter/hero-shooter game that you either have never heard of or maybe saw people mocking when it was first unveiled some months ago because it looked kind of hokey. Everyone is doing these team-shooter games these days and if you don't have a good gameplay hook or even characters people like you're in trouble. "Concord," had basically nothing going for outside of only costing $40 to buy for your PlayStation 5 or PC as opposed to how most games are at least $60 and sometimes lately even $70. Worldwide, the number of players engaged with, "Concord," was usually between 100-300 people. Yes, in the entire World. 

"Concord," apparently made all of one million dollars off of an investment of maybe 100 million bucks when it comes to sales--and everyone who did buy a copy is getting refunded because they're shutting this down within 2 weeks of launch. Perhaps it will come back as a free-to-play game with little cosmetic upgrades you could buy to show off to the other dozen people playing the game? That could happen, but right now it looks like, "Concord," is just a catastrophic loss, more of a money pit for Sony than an actual game. I feel bad for the team that worked years on this title and hope some degree of retooling can save it from total failure and obscurity.