Concord Physical Copies are Now Reselling

News

By RC Staff

06 September 2024

Less than two weeks after its launch, Sony has pulled the plug on Concord. The game was mocked ahead of its release and recorded sub-100 player counts over the last few days. Now that the game has been digitally delisted, physical copies of Concord are the only way to buy it. Resellers have begun flipping these for more than they paid.

Concord Pulled from Sale

By now, you might have heard about the failure of Concord. While the last few years have been tumultuous for the video game industry, it’s still shocking to see a game flop this badly.

Here’s a quick TL;DR. Concord is (was?) a first-party video developed for the PlayStation 5. Sony promoted the game heavily during their May State of Play, but gamers dismissed it as derivative, uninspired, and a latecomer to a saturated market.

The game launched on August 23, and things did not improve. Steam’s player charts showed around 700 players at launch, and those numbers would quickly deteriorate. Within a few days, the game was averaging under 100 players.

While we don’t know how many were playing on PlayStation, the numbers probably weren’t much better. Facing dismal sales and hostile reviews, Sony officially killed the project on September 3. All digital purchases would be refunded, and the game was fully shut down today.

To state the obvious, this is a colossal failure. Concord has been in development for years, and is the product of millions of dev hours and a AAA budget. And in less than a month, that effort has simply disappeared.

Nothing is truly too big to fail, and the burden of Concord’s failure will be borne by the developers and designers that breathed life into the game, never the C-suite that pushed it.

It’s easy (and fun) to make jokes about a flop of this scale, but chances are this will just reinforce the safe, sequel-heavy strategy pervading media. From movies to games to music, bigger budgets will always mean less risk and more slop.

Concord Physical Editions Resell

But what about the consumer? Sony has at least refunded the unfortunate gamers that bought Concord digitally, so there’s at least a little goodwill there. With the servers dead and buried, there’s not much of point in owning the game anyways.

That said, there are plenty of Concord physical editions floating around. The game retailed for $40, and gamers started hawking their used copies shortly after its disastrous launch.

And while some people might have expected this outcome for Concord, it’s still shocking how fast the game was pulled from sale. Usually flops like this will have a few years out at pasture, quietly languishing before the publisher puts them out of their misery. Concord was killed in its crib with the entire gaming world watching.

The point is that no one was ready for this. There are very few Concord physical copies out there, and none more will be released. It’s incredibly public collapse has spiked interest in them, and now they’ve become a collectible.

Right now, Concord physical copies are reselling for upwards of $100 at a time. We’re guessing most of the people buying these will be putting them on the shelf next to their copies of Redfall and Immortals of Aveum.

And that’s pretty much the story. A flop becomes a flip, a few resellers make a buck, and a studio full of developers is facing layoffs thanks to inept corporate direction. The next 6v6 futuristic hero shooter will probably do much better though.

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