Concord, Sony’s live service hero shooter, has been in development for around eight years.
That’s according to lead character designer Jon Weisnewski, who joined the development team at Sony-owned Firewalk Studios five years ago to work on the game.
Weisnewski tweeted to celebrate this week’s launch of Concord (it’s available to play now across PlayStation 5 and PC for Digital Deluxe Edition owners, but its full release is set for tomorrow, August 23).
“The game has been in development for around eight years and I’ve been there for almost five of them,” Weisnewski said. “We don’t get a lot of Launch Days in our careers so today is special for a ton of reasons. Oblige me some good vibes today.”
Concord is a 5v5 first-person shooter that follows Sony’s strategy with the phenomenally successful Helldivers 2 by launching on PS5 and PC at the same time and with a cheaper price. However, early indications are that Concord is set to endure a tough time on PC, with extremely low Steam concurrent player numbers for pre-launch betas. Sony does not make PlayStation player numbers publicly available.
And so, there is a degree of concern about Concord as a viable live service as the game launches. But, according to Weisnewski: “we’re strapped in and ready to push it for years to come.”
Concord’s eight-year development suggests a significant investment from Sony and a degree of pressure on the game to perform. Indeed, Concord has one of the 15 animated shorts that make up Amazon’s recently announced anthology Secret Level.
But Concord is perhaps also yet another triple-A video game that has taken years to make and launches into an already crowded market drowning in live service shooters. The most high-profile casualty of this live service push in recent years is Rocksteady’s much-maligned Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which flopped to the tune of $200 million for publisher Warner Bros.
Sony itself has scaled back its live service ambitions following big investment. In November last year, Sony president Hiroki Totoki said the company was reviewing the 12 live service PlayStation games it had in the works, and committed to launching only six of them by the end of financial year 2025. The following month, in December 2023, Naughty Dog announced the cancellation of The Last of Us Online, its troubled attempt to create a live service version of its hugely popular franchise.
Then, in February this year, Sony announced a significant round of layoffs affecting around 900 staff at its global PlayStation workforce. The layoffs hit a number of PlayStation studios, including Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Guerrilla, Firesprite, and, most significantly, PlayStation's London studio, which closed down. Alongside the layoffs, a number of in-development games were canceled. Last month, Sony-owned Bungie, maker of the Destiny series, suffered devastating cuts, with its PvP-focused extraction shooter Marathon still in the works.
Amid ballooning development costs and protracted development periods, the video game industry is enduring the toughest time in recent memory, with tens of thousands laid off, multiple studio closures, and various games canceled.
As for Concord, fans are already pointing out that if development on the game began around eight years, then that lines up with when Blizzard's hero shooter Overwatch blew up.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
