Dissecting Concord's Catastrophic Collapse: The $100 Million Game That Lasted Only 11 Days

In an industry known for its high stakes and even higher expectations, few games have flopped as spectacularly as Sony’s Concord. Launched with much fanfare, the hero shooter lasted just 11 days before being pulled from shelves, marking what may well be the most colossal commercial failure in gaming history.

To put it into perspective, notorious flops like the Sega 32X and 3DO sold hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of units, while Concord is estimated to have moved just 25,000. For comparison, even the widely criticized E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600 which is often blamed for the 1982 video game crash and the downfall of the seemingly unstoppable Atari sold about 1.5 million copies.

Sony is rumored to have sunk over $100 million into Concord, but with fewer than 10,000 copies sold on Steam, the game didn’t even recover 1% of its budget. After eight years in development, Concord launched to an underwhelming peak of just 660 players on Steam. The low player count, which likely included many journalists, content creators, and developers, would be laughable if it weren’t so sobering. The numbers, while astonishing, underscore the scale of the failure. For context, even heavily criticized titles like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Redfall, with Metacritic ratings of 60 and 56 respectively, saw peak concurrent player counts of 13,459 and 6,124. 

Following the disastrous launch, Sony and Firewalk Studios announced they would pull the game from digital stores and offer full refunds to players. In a statement, the game’s director acknowledged the community’s disappointment, noting that while aspects of the game resonated with some players, much of it “didn’t land the way we’d intended.” 

How did this happen? How did a game with such a substantial budget, backed by one of the biggest names in the industry, fail so completely and so quickly? Was it a miscalculation of the market’s appetite for yet another hero shooter, or did Concord suffer from deeper issues—poor execution, lackluster marketing, or an oversaturated genre?