gaming

Enlarge / This team-based FPS combat scene was apparently too familiar to attract all that many players to Concord.

Sony

Sony’s team-based online shooter Concord has been removed from sale and will be taken offline on Friday, September 6, just two weeks after its August 23 launch. Firewalk Studios Game Director Ryan Ellis said in an announcement Tuesday that publisher Sony will offer refunds to all players who purchased the game on PC or PlayStation 5.

Sony may not need to pay out that many refunds. GameDiscoverCo analyst Simon Carless told IGN last week that he estimated an underwhelming 25,000 total sales for the game across PS5 and PC. Circana analyst Mat Piscatella, meanwhile, said that just 0.2 percent of all active PS5 players were playing the game last Monday, making it the 147th most-played title for that day.

The Steam version of the game peaked at well under 700 players just after launch, according to SteamDB tracking. On PlayStation, popular opt-in trophy tracking site PSNProfiles logged just over 1,300 players who owned Concord, a relatively small showing compared to popular recent releases like Star Wars Outlaws (4,300 PSNProfiles owners) and Black Myth: Wukong (16,000 PSNProfiles-tracked owners).

“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,” Ellis wrote.

What went wrong?

Suffice it to say, this quick shutdown is not what Firewalk or Sony envisioned for the game. Just under a month ago, Ellis was talking up Concord‘s impending launch by teasing a “major content drop” planned for October and the long-term potential for custom crew buildouts.

“We see launch as just the beginning,” Ellis said in the August promotional post. “The beginning of not only the vision we’ve set out for Concord, but also the beginning of how we support and grow the game with our players.”

Concord was the first game from Firewalk Studios, which formed in 2018 before being acquired by Sony just last year. The game has been in development for around eight years, according to lead character designer Jon Weisnewski, meaning work on the title started when Blizzard’s Overwatch was a hot new concept rather than the aging progenitor of a crowded genre.

Concord was teased at Sony’s PlayStation Showcase last May and was first shown in a rough playable form this May. By August’s launch, though, it was clear there was little market appetite for yet another live service team shooter that didn’t bring much new to the table. Concord was only recommended by 24 percent of reviewers tracked by OpenCritic and is sitting at an extremely underwhelming score of 65 on Metacritic.

Concord‘s fate brings to mind that of Amazon’s Crucible, another newcomer that found it hard to find a place in a crowded shooter market. That game managed to limp along for just six months before being shut down, though it was delisted from Steam well before that death.

Despite Concord‘s quick shutdown, the door has been left open just a crack for a potential revival at some point. Ellis writes that Firewalk and Sony will “determine the best path ahead” and “explore options, including those that will better reach our players” in the future. Perhaps another increasingly common pivot to a free-to-play model is in Concord‘s future?

If you read Ars Technica regularly, you’ve known since May that Valve is working on Deadlock, a mishmash of genres that has been slowly amassing SteamDB-tracked players through an invite-only playtest. Over the weekend, Valve took the “hiding” part out of that “hiding-in-plain-sight” test, launching a bare bones Steam page for Deadlock, the company’s first attempt at developing a new gaming franchise since collectible card game Artifact launched in 2018 (and fell apart in 2021).

The new page, which went up on Saturday, has precious little information about Deadlock, save for a description as “a multiplayer game in early development” and a 22-second trailer that essentially pans over a piece of concept art. Everything from the game’s system requirements to the release date is still “TBD,” and players who are lucky enough to get “friend invites via our playtesters” are promised “temporary art and experimental gameplay” on the Steam page.

Not that a Steam page is strictly needed for more info on Deadlock at this point. Since the first leaks months ago, the playtest has slowly expanded from hundreds of players to tens of thousands, including some who have posted extensive impressions of the game. Valve has also reportedly lifted rules regarding streaming for invited playtesters, leading to a surge of players showing off live gameplay on Twitch.

Those extended streams and impressions show a six-on-six hero shooter (a la Overwatch) but with teams of NPC drones protecting Dota 2-style battle lanes as well. There’s also the requisite Fortnite-style cover construction, Titanfall-style double-jumping and air-dashing, melee attacks and parries, and all the unlockable abilities you could hope for.

Given all that direct info, the presence of a new Steam page mainly serves as an anchor for Wishlist-based reminders, user-defined tagging (bot “MOBA” and “cute” are currently popular), and a lot of spammy/scammy invite-begging in the Community hub and forums. Still, it’s not every day that a completely new title appears on Valve’s old Steam developer page—we’ve set a reminder to check for the next one in 2030 or so.

Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Randy Pitchford surveying the Epic Games Store landscape years after Borderlands 3‘s exclusive launch there.

It’s been five years now since the PC version of Borderlands 3 launched as a high-profile timed exclusive on the Epic Games Store. At the time, Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford memorably mused that Steam “may look like a dying store” in “five or ten years” thanks to increased competition from Epic and others.

Fast-forward to this week’s announcement of Borderlands 4, and despite Pitchford’s old comments, the sequel will not follow its predecessor’s example of EGS exclusivity. The new game plans to launch on Steam and EGS simultaneously sometime in 2025 (alongside PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions).

When one social media user noticed that change this week, Pitchford responded with another lengthy message explaining why his early hopes for the Epic Games Store’s rise to dominance were “misplaced or overly optimistic.”

In the short team, Pitchford said his high hopes for Epic’s effort were initially “validated” by the launches of Borderlands 3 and 2022 spin-off Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (which was available on EGS for three months before its Steam release). “Borderlands 3 and Wonderlands demonstrated clearly that the customers show up for the games, not the storefront,” he said.

But Pitchford now says Epic didn’t “successfully press its advantage” to take a significant chunk of Steam’s dominant market power. “Famously, Steam does very little to earn the massive cut they take and continues its effective monopoly in the West while would-be competitors with much more developer friendly models continue to shoot themselves in the foot,” Pitchford said.

“The industry gives Steam their monopoly because publishers are afraid to take the risk to support more developer and publisher friendly stores,” he continued. “It’s all very interesting and there is a huge amount of opportunity in the PC gaming space for retail disruption, but no one seems to be able to make it happen.”

A limited success or an Epic failure?

Internal documents revealed in the Epic vs. Apple case in 2021 show that both Gearbox and Epic seemed to benefit from the Borderlands 3 exclusivity deal. Epic set a guaranteed sales floor of $80 million to help attract Borderlands 3 to the platform—if the game sold less on EGS, Epic would pay Gearbox the difference to reach that amount. But Gearbox’s game managed to hit that sales floor in just two weeks, bringing in more revenue on its own than the entirety of EGS had for the previous nine months while also attracting plenty of new EGS users.

Not all of Epic’s attempts to secure exclusives were so successful, though. In 2019, Epic paid roughly $542 million in minimum guarantees for exclusive titles projected to earn just $336 million over their lifetimes. That $206 million difference that amounts to throwing money at publishers in hopes that their exclusive games would help attract new users to EGS.

And that continuing effort hasn’t been a total failure for Epic; by the end of 2023, the company said there were 75 million active monthly users for its PC store, up from 68 million the year before. But that’s still relatively tiny compared to Steam, which had 132 million active monthly users back in 2021. While Valve hasn’t released monthly user numbers since then, Steam’s concurrent user peak has increased about 67 percent (per SteamDB tracking) since the end of 2021—from 21.17 million to 35.55 million. That suggests Steam’s current monthly user number could be well over 200 million.

Things look worse for Epic when you compare the $950 million spent by EGS players in 2023 to the estimated $8.8 billion Steam players spent that same year.

To be fair, pushing a new PC storefront from a standing start to about 10 percent of Steam’s massive revenue in about five years is impressive. But that result still has to be disappointing for Epic, which projected in 2019 that EGS could represent 35 to 50 percent of the entire PC games market in 2024.

It’s an open question whether Epic’s limited success is a result of the company’s failure to “press its advantage,” as Pitchford opines, or just a sign that Steam’s massive entrenched network effects have proven more resilient than he expected. Regardless, Borderlands 4‘s Steam launch— following the lead of other former EGS exclusive publishers—doesn’t mean Pitchford has given up hope that a Steam-killer could still come down the pike.

“I sincerely hope Epic keeps up the fight and makes headway,” Pitchford said. “Epic is going to have to prioritize the store and try some new initiatives while also doubling down on earning pivotal exclusives if it is going to have a chance. I also hope other viable competitors arrive. I am sure we will all be watching.”