Sony has pulled the plug on Concord, ending a two-week-long saga that saw critics and players alike rip Firewalk Studio’s debut title apart as pretty much everyone refused to play the latest PlayStation exclusive because of several valid reasons that surely has nothing to do with the fact that it’s trying so hard to pander towards the “woke” market that may or may not really be interested in playing video games at all.
Now that Concord is officially one of the worst video games in recent memory, the hope is that Sony will have learned its lesson, listen to players—and Bungie, because everyone knows their live service experience is why Sony bought them in the first place—and avoid wasting even more money on an oversaturated genre.
However, if we go by this recent statement from Chris Dring on a recent episode of GamesIndustry.biz’s GI Microcast, Sony isn’t quite ready to give up on its live service endeavors.
According to Dring, he’s “heard good things about Jade Raymond’s game,” saying that the “internal chatter is very positive about it” and it has Sony’s full backing (the words he used were “support, and try and make work.”)
And while this could certainly be true for Haven Studios’ debut title Fairgame$, you could make the exact same argument for Concord.
Keep in mind that Sony bought Firewalk and spent more than $100 million to make the poster child for how not to chase video game trends even though the studio hasn’t released a game yet. Do you know what other studio Sony bought with zero track record with hit titles? Haven Studios.
To make matters worse, arguably the only thing that Fairgames$ and Haven Studios have going for it is its founder, who helped build Ubisoft Toronto and Motive Studio, aiding in the creation of Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs—Raymond left the sinking ship that is Ubisoft just in time to avoid its worst quarter in years.
On a similar note, Firewalk’s team is made up of people who previously worked at Bungie and Destiny, which kind of explains why many are referring to the soon-to-be-defunct game as a more PvP-focused version of Destiny.
As you can see, there’s a pattern forming between Fairgame$ and Concord here and it’s not looking good for the former.
We don’t know what went behind the scenes with Concord and why what happened, well, happened, but we can only assume that the internal discourse about Concord was also positive. Sony has no way of controlling the narrative once the game goes public, and it certainly couldn’t have predicted that it would go as badly as it did, even though there were signs during the initial open beta test.
Also, many games that came out in recent years that fell flat at launch enjoyed similar if not better internal reception. Redfall is a good example of this. In fact, it’s very rare for companies to admit that they canceled in-development games because the in-house talent felt it wasn’t good enough, similar to what happened with The Last of Us’ multiplayer spin-off last year.
The only consolation here is there’s talent at Haven Studios, and Sony should have some takeaways from what made Concord work. Given how closely PlayStation’s first-party studios work together, Fairgame$ can learn from the good things that came out of Concord, like its gunplay, among other things.
Given how Payday 3 failed to give fans a proper sequel to Payday 2 and The Finals couldn’t keep up with the initial wave of momentum, Fairgame$ can carve itself a spot in the criminally underserved third-person PvPvE heist genre.
But if it doesn’t, at least there’s still Marathon and Guerilla Games’ Horizon MOBA spin-off.
