In an unprecedented move for the industry, the new PlayStation game released on August 23rd will disappear from stores and hard drives on September 6th of this year. Just as you heard, in less than two weeks, Concord, a game that took 8 years to make will be completely gone, unbuyable, undownloadable, and will disappear from your account wherever you bought it.
Ryan Ellis, game director and co-founder Firewalk Studios, announced at the Play Station Blog the tragic death of the game. Fortunately, everyone who purchased it will receive a full refund on any platform.
This catastrophe puts a stop to PlayStation’s plans to venture into the games-as-a-service and multiplayer space. And it’s not that the Japanese company doesn’t know how to make quality games, franchises like The Last of Us, God of War or Uncharted have stood the test of time, spawned several sequels and embedded themselves in popular culture in every corner of the world. Of course, all of these have one thing in common, they are single-player games. It’s no secret that the games-as-a-service model is much more lucrative because players have incentives to make recurring expenses. This put Concord in a difficult crossroads, on one hand, the game was designed to be an ongoing experience and have constant profits. At the same time, being a Sony studio, it had to maintain the standard of a premium product and present itself with the pedigree and prestige of any other PlayStation game. This resulted in the feeling that the game was just like any other you would find for free on Steam, but with the price of forty dollars to even try it.
Various journalists in the media point to the price as the main culprit for the lack of players and the premature end of its history, but the truth is different.
Even if PlayStation had given the game away, consumers simply wouldn't have come forward, as evidenced by the low number of players on Steam that the free beta reported.
The real culprit behind this game's death is how awfully generic it was. Concord was like the minimalist art that every company uses, you see it everywhere and its function is to illustrate without raising any particular feeling or thought. Maybe the worst thing about this situation is that the game wasn't even bad, but let's be honest, in what world is someone going to pay 40 dollars for something that you can find for free and better done elsewhere?
Concord's fate also highlights the importance of a video game's design, presentation, and aesthetics. Without a story mode or previous titles to get to know these characters, their story has to be told simply through their appearance, and all Concord's characters were screaming was "generic hero number 3."
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