Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Sony
After eight years in development, it took less than a month for Concord to die.
Yesterday, Sony announced that the game, which only launched on August 23rd, would be shutting down on September 6th. Ryan Ellis, game director at developer Firewalk Studios, said that it “didn’t land the way we’d intended.” That seems to be an understatement: the game is going offline, full refunds are being issued, and it’s unclear if Concord will ever come back. While the speed at which the game ended may be surprising, the fact that it happened isn’t. Concord is just the latest victim of publishers chasing the live-service trend with outsize expectations. Unfortunately, there’s only so much room — and Concord was too generic to find space.
It’s easy to…
