PARIS ― Sony has pulled a major video game just two weeks after its launch, the developer has said, following catastrophic sales figures.
The first-person shooter game “Concord,” rolled out by Sony subsidiary Firewalk Studios, reportedly took eight years to develop but attracted just a few hundred players to its online PC version and sold only a few thousand hard copies.
Firewalk Game Director Ryan Ellis said Concord would come offline on Friday, and players would be refunded, making it among the costliest failures in gaming history.
“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,” he wrote on the official PlayStation blog on Tuesday.
The game received “mixed to average” reviews and a score of 62 percent, according to aggregator site Metacritic.
PC Mag’s Zackery Cuevas labeled it a “bland” game that “feels like it was pumped out of a boardroom algorithm.”
Concord invited players to shoot their way across the galaxy as part of a rag-tag collection of heroes staffing the North Star freighter.
But it attracted just 697 PC online players at its highest, according to the SteamDB platform, and sold only around 25,000 hard copies, the IGN website said.
By way of comparison, independent game “Black Myth: Wukong” was launched last month on PlayStation 5 and sold 10 million copies in its first three days.
Ryan Ellis said the Firewalk team would now “explore options, including those that will better reach our players,” hinting that the game could be relaunched in the future.
But Daniel Ahmad, analyst with games market research firm Niko Partners, wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that he could not see the game making a comeback.
“To put it simply, the game failed to give hero shooter players a reason to switch from their existing game, or other players a reason to try it out,” he wrote.
Be the first to comment