Concord aside, PlayStation is having a great year

Less than two weeks after it launched, Concord is dead.

Sony announced this morning that the game would be taken offline on September 6, and said it will issue refunds to the few people who chose to buy it. The team-based shooter was one of a scant few new first-party PlayStation games scheduled for release this year. Sony released it on both PS5 and PC on August 23. As for the scale of its failure, the company doesn't typically reveal detailed player numbers for its own platforms. However, Steam does. The numbers there are not pretty.

A Steam player count isn't entirely reflective of a game's success, Still, it’s a key data point from which we can extrapolate some assumptions. In its first weekend, Concord failed to break 700 concurrent players on Steam. That's a dismal figure for a reasonably high-profile launch, especially one from a major publisher.

For perspective, Galaxy Burger, an indie cooking sim I'd never heard of that came out on the same day, had more than four times the number of concurrent players on Steam (469) as Concord (104) at one point on August 28. As far as a comparison for a supposed blockbuster from this year goes, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League peaked at more than 13,400 simultaneous players on Steam. That co-op game was a notorious flop that led to a $200 million loss for Warner Bros. Discovery.

In addition, Concord has amassed 766 reviews on Steam at the time of writing. Some analysts estimate that each Steam review translates to between 30 and 50 sales. At the midpoint of the scale, that would put Concord's volume of sales on Steam at around 30,000. Given its concurrent players never surpassed its disastrous opening weekend figures, that feels like a generous estimate.

We don't have a strong idea of the sales numbers on PlayStation just yet, but its swift shuttering suggests things were not much better. Either way, it’s clear sales didn’t remotely come close to covering the development and marketing costs for a game that took Firewalk Studios (which Sony bought last year) eight years to make.

There are a bunch of reasons why Concord just didn't grab people's attention. I played a few rounds during the open beta and thought it was so-so. The combat was okay and some of the core ideas — such as a cool, lore-filled map — were interesting, but it felt like there was not enough novelty.

The first wave of characters was bland, which is not ideal for a hero shooter when Apex Legends and Overwatch 2 (vastly more popular rival titles that are free-to-play) each have dozens of distinct, engaging personalities for fans to connect with. The influence of Guardians of the Galaxy is keenly felt, for better or worse, which makes it seem even more like Firewalk and Sony chased after trends that were popular in 2016.

The biggest mistake of all looks to be the price point. With players able to access so many similar games without paying a penny, having to shell out $40 for Concord was evidently not an enticing proposition for the vast majority of PS5 and PC owners.

It's likely that we haven’t heard the last of Concord. Sony says it plans to “explore options, including those that will better reach our players,” which sounds a lot like a free-to-play pivot.

And yet, Concord seems to only be the one real sour note on what's actually been a quietly strong year for PlayStation overall so far.

The Sony-published Helldivers 2 is the second-best selling game in the US so far this year, according to industry analysts at Circana. Only College Football 25 has sold more copies in the country. In fact, Helldivers 2 is the fastest-selling game Sony has ever put out, with more than 12 million copies sold in its first 12 weeks.

Opting to release the game on PS5 and PC simultaneously paid off, as most of the initial wave of sales came via Steam, per analysts. However, the Steam player count has dropped off significantly in recent months, in part because of a controversial account-linking requirement.

Stellar Blade, another Sony-published game from a third-party studio, received a generally positive response from critics and it’s doing well commercially too. Developer Shift Up estimated that sales topped 1 million units within the first two months and said in June that a PC port was under consideration as a result.

Sony's strategy of bringing its major exclusives to PC in the years following their PlayStation debut has been paying off over the last few years. It's released two somewhat older games on Steam this year in the form of Horizon Forbidden West and Ghost of Tsushima. Both are excellent, faithful ports that perform well on my high-end PC as well as my Steam Deck. They were successful sales-wise too, with the former cracking the list of the top 10 best-selling games in the US in its first week. Ghost topped the overall US game sales charts for May overall, per Circana, just after Stellar Blade did the same thing in April.

Sony has at least two more blockbuster PC ports on the way this year. God of War: Ragnarök will hit that platform on September 19. The previous game sold more than 2.5 million units on PC as of last February, per the major Insomniac leak, so the sequel seems primed to do well too. The Until Dawn remake is coming to PC and PS5 just a couple of weeks later.

And then there's the small matter of The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, which arrived on PS5 earlier this year with a great new roguelike mode included. There's no PC release date yet, but TLOU Day (Naughty Dog's annual celebration of the series on September 26) is fast approaching. That seems like a prime opportunity for an announcement ahead of the second season of the HBO adaptation debuting in 2025.

A cautious approach seems wise for Part 2. Sony will want to make sure the PC port has nothing like the kinds of technical issues Part 1 had when it arrived on that platform, so giving developers as much time as they need for polish is important.

Sony even has a couple more first-party games lined up for the last chunk of the year. It might not have to wait long to wash off the stink of Concord as the highly anticipated and completely adorable platformer Astro Bot lands on PS5 on September 6. Lego Horizon Adventures — a more family-friendly take on the Horizon series — is headed to PS5, PC and Nintendo Switch in a notable multi-platform debut this holiday season.

And then there's the hardware side of the equation. In the first half of the calendar year, Sony sold just under 7 million PS5s. That’s down from 9.3 million over the same period in 2023, but a dip’s to be expected at this point in the system’s life cycle.

How the PS5 stacks up against the competition tells a bigger story. Although Microsoft has long kept quiet about how many Xboxes it's selling, earlier this year some analysts pegged the ratio of PS5 to Xbox Series X/S sales at more than five to one. Yeesh. Given Sony’s larger install base, it’s little wonder why Microsoft is increasingly eager to bring its first-party games to PlayStation.

Meanwhile, at first glance, the PlayStation Portal seemed like an edge-case peripheral for the diehards. All it does is let you play games from your own PS5 remotely without even supporting Sony's cloud gaming service.

However, the Portal has proven to be a surprising hit. Sony said the device, which was often sold out for months, exceeded its expectations. It's the best-selling games accessory so far this year by dollar amount, according to Circana. And rumors are swirling that Sony is "paying very close attention to the current handheld market," perhaps suggesting that the company is finally ready to work on a proper Vita/PSP successor. One can hope.

Even the beleaguered PS VR2 seems to have had an upturn in fortunes after a recent sale and the release of a dongle that lets owners use it to play virtual reality games on PC. According to one report, the lower price led to a sudden 2,350 percent spike in sales. Sony may have even sold more units in a single day (July 28) than it did in the previous seven months overall, according to The Shortcut. Reports suggest that PS VR2 sales have been disappointing for Sony, but such a sharp increase (or anything close to it) would be astonishing. Along with the discount, the extra utility of being able to use the headset for PC gaming surely helped, as the actual PS VR2 games library remains fairly small.

There's one other piece of hardware that could make 2024 even more of a barnburner for Sony: the widely rumored PS5 Pro. For months, leaks have been suggesting that a mid-generation refresh is coming this holiday season. Rumors point to the PS5 Pro being able to deliver higher speeds, faster game rendering, improved graphics, better ray-tracing performance and an 8K performance mode. Given that Microsoft's new Xbox variants either add internal storage, change the box's color or take away a disc drive, the PS5 Pro may look like an even tastier option for current-gen holdouts.

Update, September 3, 3:15 PM ET: This article was originally published on August 28, six days before Sony announced it was taking Concord offline. It has been updated and republished to reflect that news.