Things are moving fast now. After about 12 days for sale, Concord will be going offline. There is a lot in this that needs to be said about this situation.

Months ago, we predicted the game would be dead on arrival. After playing the beta we changed that view. Since the game is Overwatch with Destiny gunplay, with generic Guardians of the Galaxy characters and some pandering, we gave it three months. Then said people would go back to the service game of choice they’ve been playing.

Now news has come out the game is going offline and being removed from stores. The dev team will look for ways to retool it and get people interested in the game. Though people have hated on the game, it’s not nearly as bad as they say. Having the gameplay of other games is not an insult, but it lacked inspiration and was derivative.

I’m thinking others are using Concord’s failure to hide their own. Star Wars Outlaws has flopped and no one is saying anything. Outlaws had the highest budget of any Ubisoft game, and was $10 off a week after launch. XDefiant, a game we thought sucked, and was Tom Clancy’s Overwatch maybe going offline too. Then there is the layoffs at Rocksteady after the failure of Suicide Squad.

Sony now has gaming media questioning service games. They’re now saying we need to rethink GaaS. This only comes after Concord and not all the other service games that have failed. They never said this when you had actual scams disguised as service games. Pulling Concord from shelves was a good move by Sony when they saw the numbers. Unlike most service games it didn’t really launch broken. This game is not getting abandoned, your money is being refunded. There have been many GaaS games where the game is abandoned after weak sales. The servers stayed up for a while but no one was playing. These journalists should’ve been furious with EA, when they cancelled the Anthem 2.0 patch that would’ve overhauled the whole game.

Concord had a big budget and I wonder why. It took all that money and 8 years to make a mix of Overwatch and Destiny? How did other service games get canned and this got approved? Is there a problem with their management? Why was a dev shaming people for not buying the game?

What could be done to fix the game? You could make some inspired characters. Giving the game a single player would also be a good idea. The gameplay is good but they need to look at making it their own. What I’m thinking they’re going to do is rerelease it in a few months as a free to play title. If you have PS Plus, then you’ll get maybe a few perks with a lower cost of the battle pass or cosmetics. But if that happens, it will get more people for a little bit but then fail again.

This is another failed attempt at a Sony service game, along with The Last of Us Factions service game, the Sony London project, the Deviant games project, and Destruction All Stars. You also had the Sony exclusive game FoamStars. Helldivers is one of a few service games that are successful. 

Sony needs to stop trying to be like others and be themselves. This is a loss for them, but a win for gamers. We said it for awhile that Sony needs to stay away from GaaS and PC. This incident could now make Sony think twice about investing in them.