Sony's brand new first-person competitive hero shooter, Concord, did not have a spectacular launch day on PC. According to SteamDB, Sony's latest only managed to pull in 697 peak concurrent players on its official release day. To compare, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum saw a peak of 758 players at launch.
While I'm sure many people out there expected some degree of underperformance from Concord, I don't think anybody anticipated this level of failure. This is assuming you ignore the weirdos that complain about "DEI" or "woke" that haven't seen a non-2D woman in their lives.
Concord has spent about eight years in development at Firewalk Studios. Firewalk was initially creating the game in collaboration with ProbablyMonsters before the development studio was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment in mid-2023. Concord was first announced during the May 2023 PlayStation Showcase via a stylish CGI trailer.
As Paul Tassi points out, the numbers for Concord could be ten times higher on PlayStation 5 and "that would still be a horrific launch." I would almost argue that the game could have launched with 50 or even 100 times the number of players and still be seen as a failure. Helldivers 2, another Sony published title, launched earlier this year and hit a peak player count of over 64,000 on its launch day. It ultimately went on to hit nearly 459,000 peak players. The possibility for Concord to skyrocket in popularity as Helldivers 2 did is certainly there, but it's very unlikely to happen.
The recent beta for Concord saw a Steam peak of about 2,300 players just a couple of weeks back. Even those numbers, for a free beta, are abysmal. Now, Sony is charging $40 for the full Concord experience. The obvious next step would be to turn the game into a free-to-play experience to pull in players, but that would require a substantial amount of work. The point of having a base cost of $40 is to eliminate GAAS staples such as Season Passes and excessive microtransactions, neither of which are present in Concord.
A pivot to a free-to-play model would not only take a fair bit of time but also a fair bit of money. For a game that has already been in development for so long and with so few players, it would just result in Sony burning up even more cash on the game. Whether or not a move to free-to-play happens, I can't say I'm entirely optimistic about the future of Firewalk Studios. Sony recently made substantial cuts to their studios which have released far better performing titles. I hope to be wrong in this assumption, but if things don't turn around fast for Concord it's not out of the realm of possibilities that Firewalk suffers layoffs or even a closure in the future.
As a game, Concord is sound. There is nothing technically or even mechanically wrong with the game. It runs well, plays decently, has a ton of built-in lore, and all that. It's just a game that nobody really wants nor needs. It's a game made for nobody.
To be fair i dislike the characters in most hero shooters so Concord isn't alone there, it just features a slightly different brand of lame.