Sony’s new multiplayer shooter Concord is having a rough time in its free beta weekends – and that’s gotta have people at Sony a little nervous. According to the stats, the numbers just aren’t there on PC.
At peak times on Steam, it barely scratched 3,000 players. And during the off hours, it dropped down to just over 500! For a new free game, those are some pretty weaksauce stats. It doesn’t sound much better on PlayStation either.
There could be a few reasons for this lukewarm response. For one, Concord is charging $40 while everything else in the genre is free-to-play. Plus the hero shooter market is totally saturated already with massive games like Apex, Overwatch, and Valorant.
It also seems like Concord might not be delivering anything all that new. The core gameplay is OK, but it needs more than that to stand out these days. Some PlayStation fans are also burnt out on live service games in general too.
This puts Sony in a tough spot since they’ve been hyping up these multiplayer titles lately. Their last one, Helldivers 2, did well – but Concord’s beta is showing just how hard it is to crack into this market.
They’ll need to reconsider some things quick if they want Concord to survive when it launches next month. The pricing, marketing, or maybe even the gameplay loop could use another look. Otherwise this could be an omen of trouble for Sony’s live service strategy going forward.
