Concord launches to fewer than 700 peak players on Steam after 8 years in development

And so the day has finally come—Concord is out, to barely any excitement. The game, which reportedly spent eight years in the oven, has failed to attract a significant audience among hero shooter enthusiasts and is sporting fewer than 700 players on its big day.

According to SteamDB, Concord has 685 concurrent players at time of writing on a fine Friday afternoon in the U.S., which is already below its 24-hour peak of 697. The Sony-published hero shooter aimed to dip its toes into the market and take on the behemoths dominating the genre like Overwatch 2 and Team Fortress 2. To put things into perspective, Valve’s genre-defining, 17-year-old title has over 66,000 concurrent players as of this article, and Blizzard’s counterpart sports over 55,000 on Steam (not taking console or Battle.net players into account), making Concord nearly 100 times less popular than the former.

The primary reason that might have caused Concord‘s pre-emptive downfall is its high price, which, though not at the AAA level, still was miles above the rest of the market usually hovering around the grand price of zero USD. Both Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch 2 are free-to-play games. At some point yes, both were paid titles, but that was at a time when the hero shooter genre was relatively new and innovative, and the companies making them enjoyed sterling reputations. Another upcoming hero shooter, Marvel Rivals, will also be a free game, making it even more confusing as to why Sony pushed Concord to be a paid title and priced it so highly.

Indications were dire already when nearly no one showed up to the game’s open and closed betas, and when only a few dozen logged in to play the game three days early—a privilege reserved only for the pre-orders. Many believed it would be dead on arrival, and, unfortunately for the developers who reportedly spent over eight years on the game, it looks like those predictions came true.