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News video games 04 September 2024, 06:51

author: Jacob Blazewicz

Concord Players Fight for Platinum Trophy While Others Wonder About the Fate of Another Sony's Online Game

Concord players are rushing to get all the achievements in the game before the announced shutdown of the servers.

Source: Firewalk Studios / Sony.
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Sony's new shooter has arguably become the biggest failure of 2024 (and perhaps even the decade). However, Concord players are racing against time to obtain the platinum trophy in this game before the servers shut down on September 6th.

Concord's "success" (releasing a title with the support of a huge publisher, costing tens of millions of dollars, and closing it within 2 weeks has to be considered quite an achievement) didn't really surprise anyone. Nevertheless, probably even the biggest pessimists didn't expect that the new Sony game would not even reach a four-digit "peak" on Steam.

No one could also think that the title would be abandoned after just 11 days. Only The Day Before disappeared faster, and even that isn't quite true. The game had open servers for over a month and they were only closed at the beginning of 2024.

Platinum for collectors

If you're wondering what's the point of earning trophies in a title formally sentenced to execution in 2 days - this very "sentence" made the "platinum" of Concord a treat for achievement collectors. After September 6, it will no longer be possible to obtain all achievements, making the platinum trophy a collectible decoration (via Reddit).

It may sound paradoxical, but players really try to get all trophies before Concord's "death." It's enough to show how the matches in the game look like - let's say they end very, very quickly.

That looks really bizarre, but it's supposed to be the fastest way to gain experience in the game. This, in turn, is required to obtain some achievements/trophies, one of which requires advancing to a 100 level of reputation.

Concord as a sacrifice?

Aside from these "collectors," some developers were said to have shown sympathy and support for Concord's creators, including Josh Scherr (screenwriter for the Uncharted and The Last of Us series) and Evan Berman from Tencent. Project director Josh Hammrick thanked for the kind words.

However, even more interestingly, there were suggestions that Sony anticipated Concord's failure and wrote off the game to concentrate on other projects. This was claimed by, among others, Chris Dring from GamesIndustry.biz, in a material published yesterday, before the announcement of the server closure.

Let's note that the journalist is by no means presenting this as confirmed information. Nevertheless, he spoke about the focus that Sony is expected to give to another project – Fairgame$, which was announced in May, a game that appears to be inspired by the PayDay series (developed by Haven studio, founded by Jade Raymond, the producer of the first Assassin's Creed installment). Dring suggested that while the trailer wasn't well-received, internal opinions about the project are much more positive.

In this context, he mentioned that Sony should focus "on this and other projects." He also previously suggested that the company didn't believe in Concord (via ResetEra).

Some players aren't convinced by these reports, and certainly not by the fact that Fairgame$ won't share the fate of Concord. As they claim, internal opinions about the game from Firewalk studio were probably also positive, since they led to its premiere.

What about the Concorde in Secret Level?

We emphasize: this is just speculation, perhaps based on some clues, but completely unconfirmed. Releasing a title that has already been declared a loss sounds completely ridiculous. The entire issue of the release and rapid demise of Concorde is a unique case that is difficult to compare to any other gaming industry failure. Maybe except for a certain title so bad that it was buried in the desert.

As if the whole situation wasn't bizarre enough, let us remind that Concord will be one of the games to appear in the Amazon series Secret Level. Each of the 15 episodes of this show will focus on a different game, and one of the episodes will be dedicated to the shooter game from Firewalk studio. Even though at the time of the series premiere, the title will have been "dead" for over 2 months.

Jacob Blazewicz

Jacob Blazewicz

Graduated with a master's degree in Polish Studies from the University of Warsaw with a thesis dedicated to this very subject. Started his adventure with GRYOnline.pl in 2015, writing in the Newsroom and later also in the film and technology sections (also contributed to the Encyclopedia). Interested in video games (and not only video games) for years. He began with platform games and, to this day, remains a big fan of them (including Metroidvania). Also shows interest in card games (including paper), fighting games, soulslikes, and basically everything about games as such. Marvels at pixelated characters from games dating back to the time of the Game Boy (if not older).

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