The new first-person shooter game Concord has been confronted by an abysmal Steam player count and the handful of active players are worried about the future of the game. Concord is the latest PlayStation exclusive only released recently on August 23, 2024, but even at launch, the player count on Steam peaked at 697 active users. 

Concord’s Steam count drop has been linked to other confounding factors like the dominant presence of Black Myth: Wukong and its thriving popularity with gamers. However, the Concord game reviews haven’t been too stellar either and it wouldn’t be fair to say the game might have performed better if gamers weren’t otherwise distracted.

Concord game reviews

Image: Concord Trailer

Concord’s Steam Player Count Continues to Drop

The player count on Steam isn’t representative of the total number of people playing a game at any given time, but the numbers are typically a reliable indicator of its overall popularity. Currently, Concord’s Steam numbers have dropped to 79 with a 24-hour peak of 119 players. The all-time peak still stands at 697 players. The game’s failure to cross the 1,000-player threshold was worrying at launch but the steady downward decline ever since has not painted a pretty picture.

We have no indicators of how the game is being received on PlayStation, but according to IGN, the company has only sold approximately 15,000 copies on PlayStation. Pair this with the report of 10,000 units sold on Steam and, while the numbers aren’t impressive, it’s surprising that the active player numbers are as low as they are currently.

Concord PC Player Issues Highlight Why the Steam Numbers Matter

The dwindling player count is not only a matter of the game’s popularity. Concord’s PC players have faced issues finding matches within the game. Players often find themselves having to wait a considerable amount of time before they are able to find a team to play the game with. Considering this is a multiplayer 5v5 game, putting together 10 team members is evidently a challenge. Long queue times are par for the course for many games during the downtime periods when fewer gamers log in, but these issues are said to be a regular occurrence with Concord. 

With a limited number of gamers logging in, it takes much longer for the system to find other players to pair together, causing people to drop out of the game and switch to another title. With limited time on their hands to spend on gaming, most are unlikely to hang around for the over 8-minute wait time that has been reported. Especially if the game doesn’t provide a really riveting in-game experience, players will inevitably leave 

The longer Concord’s PC player issues persist, the lower its player count will fall, creating an inescapable cycle. 

Concord PC match issues

The Many Problems With Concord

Concord is a pretty standard team-based, first-person shooter game where you play as Freegunner space outlaws with different skills and abilities. The 5-person teams set players up for a unique experience every time they log in, throwing together a variety of playstyles and the ability to unlock more features for each character over time. Concord doesn’t do anything spectacularly unique, but the popularity of other similar games should tell you that it doesn’t really have to. These time of shooter games typically tend to perform well. 

Why is Concord’s Steam player count so low then? The PC queue times aside, the early Concord game reviews have also not helped with the popularity of the game. The game’s art style hasn’t appealed to everyone, with players on Reddit calling it bland and boring, while others have criticized the gameplay for being outdated and generic. 

There is also the difficulty of entering the live service gaming market. The games that are successful in the category, whether that’s old or new successes like Fortnite or Helldivers 2, have a huge reserve of loyal players who aren’t looking to switch to something new. On the other hand, games that try out live service without offering anything new are met with resistance instantly. 

Concord PC player issues

Players Say the Price Is Most Certainly “Not” Right

It’s also of note that Concord costs $40 USD. The price is too high for a large number of players who don’t see what the game has to offer compared to others on the market. Gamers predict that Concord will have to switch to a free-to-play model if it wants users to give the game a chance, but Sony has not given us any indication that they are considering this move. 

It’s a tough call—there weren’t too many takers even during the free beta testing of the game, so it may already be too late for this title to survive. A large section of the audience was disappointed by Sony’s decision to offer a multiplayer game instead of another solid single-player, and that could be a part of the problem as well. A significant amount of the hate appears to be from people who haven’t actually tried the game, all of whom are disappointed at the company’s choices and riled up enough to let them know about it.

Concord’s game reviews have also tanked due to its concurrent release with some other popular titles. Black Myth: Wukong has been dominating the Steam charts and many players have chosen to invest in that game instead, considering they were released very close together. 

There’s also the Marvel Rivals game that is expected at the end of the year—another title that has divided users. Many gamers picked the Marvel title beta runs over Concord immediately, while others have expressed confusion over why one game was seeing so much hate compared to the other. The appeal of familiar characters along with the free-to-play strategy could have a lot to do with it, but that’s just a hypothesis for now. The game may perform just as poorly on release, but something tells us this is unlikely.

Sony and developer Firewalk Studios have a lot of thinking to do to determine the future of the game. Whether they cut the prices, make it free-to-play, or introduce irresistible in-game content that draws players to Concord, something has to be done if the company plans to give the game a chance to survive.

tagged in Concord game reviews, Concord PC player issues, Concord PlayStation sales, Concord Steam drop, Concord Steam player count
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