Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Gaming
  3. News

Sony’s new live-service title Concord is having a rough launch

Add as a preferred source on Google
A sniper from Concord leaping in the air.
PlayStation

Sony’s live-service hero shooter Concord launched on PC and PlayStation 5 last week, and the early numbers are looking grim.

According to third-party data site SteamDB, Concord peaked at a disappointing 697 concurrent players on PC on launch day. At the time of this writing, there are 252 players in the game. This is despite two beta periods, an early access period that began on August 20, and a public launch on August 23. In comparison, Helldivers 2, another PlayStation first-party, live-service game released simultaneously on PC and PlayStation 5, hit a concurrent players peak of 458,709 around launch. Six months in, it still rakes in tens of thousands of players.

Recommended Videos

Concord is also on PlayStation 5, and while Sony hasn’t released its monthly top downloads report yet, things aren’t looking great there either. If you go to the PlayStation Store and sort the PS5 Games page by “bestselling,” Concord is ranked 38th at the time of publication. This doesn’t represent how many people are actually playing, but it’s a low placement for a game that just came out and was marketed heavily by PlayStation.

There is some Concord activity over on Twitch, with 505 viewers watching streams at the time of this writing. For comparison, Star Wars Outlaws, which also just launched, has 112,000 viewers on the site.

Concord is a 5v5 hero shooter developed by PlayStation Studios-owned Firewalk Studios as part of the larger company’s live-service push. It’s reportedly been in the works for “around eight years,” according to the lead character designer, and has been heavily marketed by Sony since it acquired Firewalk in 2023. Reviews, however, have been mixed. Digital Trends’ Giovanni Colantonio wrote that Concord has “fun hero-shooter bones,” but that the game “lacks original ideas that elevate that promising foundation.”

It’s unclear what the future looks like for Concord. On one hand, it could start drawing in players with a few updates. The developers have already committed to at least three seasons that should take the game to January 2025. It’s also just another release in the live-service shooter market, which is heavily saturated by long-running titles like Fortnite or Destiny 2, and is about to get the much more anticipated Marvel Rivals in December.

Carli Velocci
Carli is a technology, culture, and games editor and journalist. They were the Gaming Lead and Copy Chief at Windows Central…
Anthropic cracks down on video game cloning with new Claude restrictions
Claude can still help develop original games, but copying existing titles is now off the table.
Claude website open on laptop

AI has been making its way into video game development for a while now, but the recent developments have started raising some serious concerns. Popular games are being reverse-engineered with AI assistance, recreated for web browsers, and made playable on platforms they were never released for. Between all that, indie developers have started pulling down their demos over fears of getting copied. Anthropic has now stepped in with new restrictions for Claude Code.

The change was first spotted on X and subsequently confirmed by Anthropic's Addy Osmani. The new instructions prevent Claude from recreating specific existing games, even if they are renamed or presented as original projects. Users can still make original games, work on games within a genre, and use their own designs and assets.

Read more
Ubisoft shares major Assassin’s Creed updates, including disappointing news about remakes
New Game+, a final Black Flag treat, and a 20th birthday on the horizon.
Assassin's Creed, Gaming, Remake

If you have been looking for an excuse to jump back into Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft just gave you a couple of good ones. Its Fall 2026 update is packed with news, from fresh content to a big birthday celebration next year.

What’s new in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla?

Read more
Phantom Blade Zero hands-on: An extraordinary game with unbelievable combat that I can’t get enough of
Every fight feels like a beautifully choreographed martial arts movie, except I'm the one controlling every move.
Phantom Blade Zero poster

We have had a considerable number of high-profile game releases this year, but none so far have had as much hype behind them as Phantom Blade Zero. The source of all that hype was a 2023 trailer highlighting its fluid kung-fu-derived sword combat. Considering that, at the time of writing this piece, there are over 700,000 concurrent players on Steam alone, on a weekday no less, I think it's safe to say that the hype has converted into gamers actually showing up for the game. I have sunk around 10 hours into this game today, and so far, it has been nothing short of an absolute masterclass in action combat.

A world that pulls you in from the start

Read more