On September 6, Sony Interactive Studios (Sony) pulled their game “Concord” from the market and shut down its servers, just two weeks after releasing the game on August 23. The game, developed by Firewalk Studios, was in development for eight years, according to Jon Weisnewski, the lead character designer at the studio.
This instance is just one example of a game being made unavailable to people that purchased it originally. A new law passed in California aims to address this issue by preventing digital stores from using the words “buy” or “purchase” on a product, if they are only providing an online license to said product.
Concord’s Release
Concord, a hero shooter, was pulled after astronomically low playership and sales. At debut, the game only had 697 players on Steam and had only sold 25,000 units, according to IGN.
In comparison, Apex Legends had almost three million unique users and almost 600,000 peak and current users on a single day when it was first released, according to publisher Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson in a conference call with Yahoo Finance.
Anna Donlon, the lead Valorant developer at the time and now head of Valorant at Riot, said in an interview with ESPN in 2020 that they had nearly three million daily players during Valorant’s beta.
This low of a playerbase is a rarity for a game with as big of a budget as Concord. According to the Playstation podcast Sacred Symbols, a Concord developer revealed the game reportedly had an estimated $400 million budget.
Concord falls in the same genre as games like Fortnite, Overwatch and the aforementioned Valorant and Apex Legends. However, unlike these free to play games, which rely on in-game microtransactions and the selling of in-game cosmetic skins to make money, Concord cost $40 on release.
This may have contributed to its low playership numbers. According to IGN and NYU Stern lecturer Joost van Dreunen, while free-to-play games allow players to easily try out games to see if they’d like it, the $40 price of Concord reduces that accessibility.
The low popularity of Concord led to turnover at Firewalk. Ryan Ellis, the game director, stepped down from his position on September 19, according to Kotaku.
Ellis started leading development on Concord in 2017 and was the primary leader of Concord’s development. Moving forward, Ellis should remain with the company, but will instead be in a support role.
Other Instances
While this is not the first case of a studio pulling a game from stores after its release, it is the first time that it has happened this soon after its launch day. The proximity between launch date and deletion of the games forced Sony to refund players.
In December 2023, Ubisoft announced that they would be shutting down the servers of their 2014 racing game The Crew in 2024. As this was an online-only game and required an internet connection to play, this effectively made the game unplayable.
On September 19, Pokemon Unite announced that service in Belgium and the Netherlands would be shut down in November 2025, with local players unable to make in-game purchases after October 31.
Earlier this month, EA announced that their mobile game, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, will be shutting down in the coming months, with the game being delisted from app stores on October 31 and completely removed for all players on January 25, 2025.
The website delistedgames.com has a long list of games that have been removed or pulled from markets.
In response to games being removed from stores or their servers being shut down, a movement called “Stop Killing Games” launched, with the aim of ending this action by getting a new law in the EU passed to prevent it.
California’s AB 2426
In response to games like Concord being pulled from stores or game servers being shut down, California governor Gavin Newsom signed a new law late last month aimed at addressing this issue.
The bill, called AB 2426, will go into effect on January 1, 2025.
AB 2426 prevents sellers of digital products (such as digital games) from using the terms buy or purchase if they’re going to pull the game or shut down the servers, preventing the consumer from having permanent access to the product.
While this doesn’t go as far as the “Stop Killing Games” initiative in the European Union, as it does not outright ban the practice, it aims to increase transparency among digital marketplaces, as noted by Game Rant.
This is only the first step towards more consumer protections within games, with the main goal being to lessen the impact of another situation like Concord on players.
Concord’s (Possible) Return?
When Concord was initially pulled from stores, it was assumed that the game would be gone from stores permanently. However, in the weeks that followed, it has continued to receive updates for the version on Steam, as shown by SteamDB. According to Insider Gaming, the updates have increased since October 6, with 20 updates since then.
This increased update frequency has led some people to believe that Concord might return as a free-to-play game, which Insider Gaming says is even more likely due to the high budget and the long time it took to develop Concord originally.
Additionally, in Firewalk Studios’s original statement announcing Concord being pulled from stores, they said they were going to explore their options, suggesting that Concord was not going away completely.
Firewalk Studios and Sony have not addressed these rumors yet.