Can Sony’s Concord survive against other great hero shooters?

Sony and Firewalk Studios’ Concord launches on PlayStation 5 and PC later this month, and faces an uphill battle to success. The team-based hero shooter is, unlike much of its competition, a “premium” paid title — meaning it’s not free to play like rival shooters Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Tom Clancy’s XDefiant.

Concord will also soon have more competition on that front; on PC, there’s hero shooter FragPunk, an upcoming free-to-play game from NetEase. Then there’s the launch of Riot Games’ Valorant (now live on consoles as of Friday) and the upcoming NetEase’s Marvel Rivals (now in a closed beta test).

The latter two free-to-play games have the kind of built-in fan bases that Firewalk would probably love to have. Valorant will launch as a mature product, with four years’ worth of content and refinement, and fans of Riot’s games know that the studio will continue to support their shooter for years to come; League of Legends will celebrate its 15th birthday later this year. About 6 million people play Valorant daily, according to Tracker Network. And then there’s Marvel Rivals, which will star more than 20 playable Marvel superheroes and villains with decades of history behind them. Marvel Rivals’ beta boasts about 40,000 peak players on Steam alone, according to SteamCharts.

So far, Concord hasn’t established a strong enough identity to compete with those powerhouses. Player numbers during Concord’s beta weekends were worryingly low. The game has been widely dismissed by a portion of its potential audience as lifting heavily from Blizzard’s Overwatch and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy characters. What does make Concord stand out from the competition is its price; it’s a $39.99 multiplayer game in a field of free-to-play rivals. It feels like a product of a time now past; Firewalk started working on its multiplayer game years ago, when the Guardians of the Galaxy were still hot, and Blizzard was charging money for the original Overwatch.

Firewalk is positioning the pay-to-play aspect of Concord as a positive. The developer has said it won’t put a battle pass into the game, and will continue to support the sci-fi shooter with new characters, maps, and modes. That would logically endear it to some players who are tired of the battle pass grind, and the ever-present monetization tactics of free-to-play games.

But Concord didn’t seem to draw much of an audience over the course of two beta weekends. The game’s first beta test period was originally intended to be for players who had pre-ordered the game, but an eleventh-hour change in plan opened it up to anyone with a PlayStation Plus membership. That signaled a lack of pre-order interest in the game, and a second beta test weekend — open to all players on PS5 and PC — didn’t draw much enthusiasm either. According to unofficial data from True Trophies, Concord’s player count dipped 8% from its first beta weekend to its second.

I played the Concord beta and found it to be a solid shooter, with interesting hero kits, unique team dynamics, and a very slick presentation. But the beta didn’t communicate clearly how to play Concord; unlike the Marvel Rivals beta, Concord’s playtest shipped without a tutorial mode. Understanding the game’s unique mechanics required digging into a text-based guide and experimenting under the pressure of live team play. Worse, the initial deathmatch-style mode that was in the beta at launch, which Concord forced players to experience first, failed to highlight the game’s character buffs system and important team-based dynamics. I had some fun with Concord, but I mostly stuck with it and dug into the game’s systems out of professional obligation. I doubt it will pull me away from my other live-service games of choice.

I hope that Concord finds an audience, and that players who pay $40 for it (and pay for a PlayStation Plus subscription on top of that) will find many thousands of other like-minded teammates and enemies out there. If they don’t, PlayStation Plus subscribers may benefit in the long run, as Concord feels destined to become a monthly PS Plus giveaway, if early interest is any indication.

Concord is no doubt partly an experiment for PlayStation Studios, part of a larger plan to crack the lucrative live-service game space with future titles like Marathon, FairGame$, and unannounced online projects from Guerrilla Games and London Studios. Time will tell if the PlayStation fan base that’s willing to fork over cash for the likes of God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, and the Spider-Man games will do so for an untested multiplayer experience like Concord.