Firewalk is ending their open beta period for Concord, and things have not improved much for the game at all.
We reported last week that while players had a positive impression of the game when they got their hands on it, Firewalk and Sony was not able to drum up a lot of enthusiasm and interest for it. As indicated on SteamDB, the Early Access beta last weekend ended with a player peak of 1,124 players, and ended with 297 players.
This weekend, Concord was able to raise that peak to 2,388 players. As of this writing, that player count is down to 284 players. Those remaining players are likely in fewer regions where the beta period is still live, so it really won’t be going any higher for the last few hours.
As it turned out, Firewalk had to briefly take the game down for maintenance during this open beta period, with a one hour outage occurring on July 21, at 7 AM PT as they applied a new patch. From what we can see in SteamDB data, there was no real discernible change in player count during that period.
Several YouTubers have been chiming in on this, of course, but we want to focus on some really good insights from Destin, who is also a contributor at IGN. Destin put forward a hypothetical scenario, where 200 consumers were willing to pre-order the standard version of Concord, at $ 40. That would have meant Sony made $ 9,600, on what is a multimillion dollar game.
He then put forward another hypothetical scenario. Let’s assume Concord made $ 100 million to make. Let’s then also assume that the game makes $ 100,000 on PC. And then, on PlayStation, it makes ten times that amount. That $ 1.1 million that they made on the game is clearly far from what Sony needs to make that money back.
It is now unclear what the future holds for Concord and Firewalk Studios. Concord launches on August 23, 2024, on PlayStation 5 and PC via Steam. That would arguably give Firewalk Studios a fully month to retool various aspects of the game, such as character balance and stability.
However, that is not enough time to address some of the bigger complaints that fans have had, that the characters are visually unappealing, and that the story and writing also do not give players reasons to like the game and its characters. To retool these things would require Sony to invest once again, and to delay the release so that Firewalk could have enough time to make these changes.
That would just add even more investment that may not prove worthwhile, and Sony must be reviewing other immediate options. They could swallow their pride and release the game as is. They could also cancel everything at the eleventh hour, and possibly minimize the financial damage as much as they can.
Sony will likely go for the former, as they may be thinking the same way WB has with Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League. And that line of thinking is, even if the gamers dislike it now, if they fix it over time they might win players over. Of course, that line of thinking hasn’t worked out for WB Games, and we have already seen the consequences of that mistake.
There are other options too, of course, such as putting the game on PlayStation Plus, releasing it as Early Access, or going free-to-play. For now, we’ll wait and see what Sony’s next actions in regards to this game will be.
