Sony pulled the plug on a new PS5 game after 2 weeks and is offering refunds. What happened?

Every video game has a lifespan. Some, like Pac-Man, are played for decades. Some support a small, but dedicated, player base for a few years before quietly disappearing. Concord, an online multiplayer video game recently released by Sony, lasted less than two weeks before its publisher decided enough was enough.

Sales of the action game have been halted “immediately,” Sony announced in a blog post, and the company will offer full refunds to people who have purchased the title for either the PlayStation 5 or for PC via Steam or the Epic Games Store. Current owners have until September 6 before the servers are shut down. Analysts have estimated that the game sold just 25,000 copies.

It’s an ignominious finish for a title that stumbled hard out of the gate—and it’s certainly a candidate for the shortest life cycle of any major video game release. (Even EA’s much-maligned Anthem lasted two years before the publisher pulled the plug.)

What happened?

This history of Concord is an unusual one, even in the often-turbulent video game industry. The game spent eight years in development, a phenomenally long time for any title. (Three years is a more typical length from concept to release.) During much of that time, developer Firewalk Studios (and its team of 150) was a part of the ProbablyMonsters family of studios. Last April, however, Sony acquired Firewalk for an undisclosed price.

Sony hasn’t disclosed how much was spent on the development of Concord, but in 2022, ProbablyMonsters closed a $250 million fundraising round—and the company has not had any other releases beyond Concord.

The game didn’t get the big marketing push that some other major titles might see, though it was hardly ignored. Early reviews were underwhelming, though, saying the game had impressive visuals and mechanics, but didn’t offer players anything they hadn’t seen before. Being labeled “generic” by critics and players dampened any enthusiasm that might have been brewing. (Concord currently has a Metacritic score of just 62 out of 100.)

To call the launch underwhelming is a dramatic understatement. SteamDB, which tracks games on the PC gaming service, recorded a peak concurrent player count of just 697. On Tuesday afternoon, 100 people were playing. (In comparison, at the same time Tuesday, there were more than 908,000 people playing Counter-Strike 2.)

Concord also entered an oversaturated market as a new intellectual property, something that’s always an uphill battle. Players were asked to spend $40 upfront when there are a number of free-to-play shooters that were similar, including Destiny 2, Overwatch 2, and Call of Duty: Warzone. Concord also had the bad luck to launch just three days after Black Myth: Wukong, a vastly different type of game, but one that has become one of the biggest launches of 2024.

Whether Concord will return in some other form is unknown. Sony stopped short of declaring the game dead forever, but the outlook it gave wasn’t exactly optimistic.

“While many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” wrote Ryan Ellis, game director at Firewalk, which developed Concord. “Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”

Sony did not reply to requests for comment beyond the blog post. Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities, however, says the wording of the announcement makes him believe Sony could retool the game to a free-to-play title.

“Refunding all proceeds is pretty generous, and ‘exploring options . . . that will better reach our players’ sounds a lot like FTP to me,” he tells Fast Company.

Even with what can only be described as a catastrophic failure of Concord, it would be foolish to count Sony out of the live-services game market (online multiplayer games that evolve over time via additional content releases and updates). The company needs to expand its footprint beyond the PlayStation as the industry redefines itself, even if most of its early efforts in this category have fallen short—and the company has cut back the number of live-service games it plans on releasing. A multiplayer Horizon Zero Dawn is still being worked on; and Bungie, which is now a Sony studio, is set to release its next shooter Marathon next year.

Earlier this year, Sony saw notable success in the live-services market with Helldivers 2—and a hit live-service title (like Fortnite) can mean billions of dollars in revenue. Concord, though, was not that game.