Sony’s new multiplayer shooter, Concord, has had a rough start, selling just around 25,000 copies according to industry analysts.
Concord is a game that came out not too long ago, but things didn’t go so well for it. Even on its best day, there were only about 697 players playing on PC at the same time, and at one point, it dropped to just 82 players. And when it launched on PlayStation 5, less than 0.2% of all active players were playing it. That’s like only a tiny number of people.
IGN shared some rough sales figures and said that Concord sold around 10,000 copies on Steam and another 15,000 on PlayStation. Now, this might sound like a lot, but for a game made by Sony (which is a really big company in the gaming world), it’s actually pretty low.
The first time people even heard about this game was in some trailers at the end of May. So, there were only a few months for players to decide if they wanted to try it or not. And here’s what one expert, Mat Piscatella from Circana, said: the game had “low awareness and purchase intent.” This basically means most people didn’t even know the game was out, and even those who did know about it weren’t really excited to buy it.
Moreover, since Concord was a brand-new game with no fans already waiting for it, it really needed some strong marketing to tell people about it, but that just didn’t happen. So, it didn’t get the attention it needed to be more successful.
Another point to note is that many games today are free-to-play and doing much better, but Concord was launched with a $40 price tag, which felt like a lot for many people. Rhys Elliott from Midia Research said that more people would have tried the game if it had been free-to-play or part of a PlayStation Plus subscription. He said the more people play, the more fun the game becomes. But without a free option, it was hard for this multiplayer shooter to get a big player base from the start.
Simon Carless, another expert, also talked about the low numbers. At one point, only 71 people were playing the game on Steam, and it reached just 151 players in 24 hours. Concord was ranked 147th in daily active players on PS5 in the US, which is not good for a new game.
Liam Deane, an expert from Omdia, talked about how bad the situation looked, especially with the low player numbers on Steam. He said that even though we don’t have exact numbers for PlayStation 5, it’s clear the game isn’t doing great. Concord was in development for about eight years, but even with all that time and work, it got mixed reviews. On Steam, player feedback was a bit better, with 67% of more than 700 reviews being positive. But that wasn’t enough to help the game from its slow start.
Most experts agree that the high price, bad marketing, and the fact that this game isn’t very unique in a crowded market are the main reasons for its poor launch.
However, it’s not over for Concord yet. Its first season will start in October, with a new character, a new map, and a shop where players can buy cosmetic items. But after such a bad start, the devs of this title have to work really hard to win back players and become popular in a very competitive market. We’ll have to wait and see if the game can turn things around or if this bad start is too much to fix.
For constant updates, keep following Gamevro.
