Playing Concord at the end of its world

Firewalk Studios and Sony Interactive Entertainment’s new hero shooter officially launched on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC on Aug. 23. But in less than two weeks, Firewalk Studios and publisher pulled the game from storefronts and will soon close its servers. Game director Ryan Ellis announced on Tuesday that Concord servers would shut down on Sept. 6, after which the studio will revisit the game and “explore options.” (A community manager wrote on Concord’s official Discord server that the game will go offline at 1 p.m. EDT.) According to Sony, everyone who bought the game will get a refund. It’s not something you see very often, but it’s not unprecedented; Sony took Cyberpunk 2077 off its storefront in 2020, but the game was still playable elsewhere. More analogous is Warner Bros.’ Multiversus, which was pulled offline for about a year.

The shutdown schedule for Concord left just a few days for players to ride out the rest of the game’s life. Not a ton of people purchased Concord, but it wasn’t a complete non-starter: an IGN report estimates that 25,000 people purchased the game. At its peak, nearly 700 people played Concord concurrently on Steam. (PlayStation 5 numbers aren’t available, which is typical for PlayStation games.) The count dwindled down to 119 concurrent players on Steam on Sept. 2, one day before the shutdown was announced.

Still, for Concord’s few dedicated players, the last few days have been a mixture of chaos and sadness. After jumping in during the final hours, Polygon spoke to a half dozen Concord players about riding out the game in its death throes.

My experience was not out of the ordinary; if I hadn’t heard the news, I would have never known Concord was not thriving. There was no mention of the shutdown within the game itself, and very short waiting periods to get into games. I had fun during the matches, akin to playing Overwatch for the first time. No one joined team chat, which one player told me was normal — he’d played more than 100 matches and hadn’t communicated with a single person, something he said was a boon due to other games’ toxicity problems. While I was one of just a few dozen players on Windows PC, there were seemingly many more on PlayStation 5. One Houston-based player, Ahmed, told Polygon that he was hoping to play Concord at least once more before the shutdown, but wasn’t able to: Valve did a nearly immediate automatic refund for the game when Firewalk announced the game’s end.

Elizibeth, a Concord player from Canada, told Polygon she put around 21 hours into the game — and thought it was worth its price. “Playing Concord has been a blast, despite its troubled reputation,” Elizibeth said. “Its detailed maps filled with charm, its skyboxes made to really give off that interstellar vibe to its punchy sound design and unique take on hero shooters really made it unlike any other hero shooter out there.”

The experience of Concord changed once Firewalk Studios announced the shutdown. Now, people are hunting achievements — specifically, the Experienced Freegunner one, which requires a player to reach level 100. It’d be a feat to do that in just two weeks. As of Thursday, it’s got a 0.4% achievement rate on Steam, meaning that a fraction of a fraction of people have gotten there. The problem for people looking to enjoy the end of Concord is that experience farming means people aren’t actually playing the game.

“Since the shutdown was announced, what used to be fun and engaging fights has devolved into most players grinding away single characters to grab achievements as quickly as possible,” Elizibeth said. “Ironically, its Rivalry game mode, which recently saw a massive xp buff per match, has become almost an instant que. Previously finding a match in the playlist was all but impossible to now being [able to] jump in and play. On the surface that sounds wonderful but the games finish as fast as they are now found as many folks are indeed jumping to their own demise like lemmings to quickly grind exp.”

She likened the experience to Let’s visit grandma on her deathbed. “Where people once swapped characters to maximize crew bonuses and apply any semblance of strategy, all there is now is people sticking to one character to grind them to max level or just fling themselves into oblivion to end the match to gain more Freegunner ranks before grandma kicks the bucket,” Elizibeth said.

Most of the players I encountered in my matches (as a player beginning at level 1) were lower levels, from 1 to 15 — a mixture of people who, like me, were starting the game just as it was ending and others who’d spent a bit more time. The pace of the games were frenzied, as is natural with an action shooter, something reflected in the trophy hunter rush or race to consume as much content as possible before the shutdown. Either way, time spent by the players I spoke to was generally enjoyed.

And that’s why, when Concord shuts down indefinitely on Friday, a few players plan to go down with the ship.

“So to answer your question of why I keep going… It’s because the game is enjoyable and I was having a lot of fun playing it,” one Concord player, Kevin, said. “I’ve never waited more than 90 seconds for a game and I’ve always had fun every game I’ve played. Why wouldn’t I keep going if I’m enjoying playing it?”