The PlayStation Network doesn’t have public player numbers, so it’s hard to say what the complete picture is, but things don’t look great for Concord on PC. The $40 hero shooter is sitting at mostly positive reviews on Steam, but according to SteamDB, has so far hit a high water mark of just 697 PC players on its opening weekend.
Reviewers on Steam are praising its graphics and gunplay, which is in line with PC Gamer staff writer Morgan Park’s preview of Concord. The game seems to have the opposite balance of Valve’s finally-public Deadlock: It’s more of a pure shooter than ability-focused, hewing closer to Call of Duty or Destiny’s Crucible than Overwatch.
It’s also a quite pretty game, with a Guardians of the Galaxy-inspired aesthetic and some aspirations to continued seasonal storytelling. Some of the reviews argue it’s slightly anemic on the content front—hardly an unexpected or mortal sin for a live service launch—but the real issue, as several users point out, is the $40 price of admission.
Now, Helldivers 2 blew everyone’s expectations out of the water earlier this year as a $40 Sony-published multiplayer game, but it’s a totally different beast from Concord—and every other game, there’s nothing quite like it out there. Less MMORPG faff and complication than Destiny or Warframe, but way more involved progression and storytelling than co-op shooters like Killing Floor, there were plenty of reasons to bet on Arrowhead even before Helldivers 2’s runaway success.
But there are a ton of hero and arena shooters out there, with the cream of the crop being well-established, cheaper, or even free. No matter how good Concord’s shooting and aesthetic might be, Destiny, Overwatch, XDefiant, Apex Legends, The Finals, and (at least for now, if you can get an invite) Deadlock all fill a similar niche while being completely free, with either established player bases and competitive scenes or (in Deadlock’s case) an upswell of interest and word of mouth. And this genre’s built in live service time commitment demand makes it hard to justify dabbling in multiple games—I think most players just have their one or two favorites.
I don’t mean to grave dance on Concord—it took eight years to develop, and seems to have a lot to recommend it as a shooter—but 2024 would be a tough year to release a competitive multiplayer shooter under the best of circumstances, while Concord’s price tag seems to be an albatross tied around its neck.
