Although I said that everyone was bracing for the fallout from Concord’s inevitable bad launch, even I didn’t expect to see what I’m seeing now. I’ve seen a lot of bad releases in my life and I can’t think of anything that compares to what’s happening here with Concord.

PlayStation’s Concord, a game that was supposedly eight years in the making (since the launch of Overwatch, which is no coincidence), launched on Steam with less than 700 concurrent players. That’s such a low number that I’m really trying to figure out if there’s something technically wrong with the numbers here, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The whole situation is bizarre. When I monitored the game’s performance on launch day, I saw that it reached a peak of 697 players a few hours after launch. While I didn’t think it would positively spike after Americans started coming home from work and school across their time zones, it should have increased to some extent. It actually went down. At 10pm, as I write this late Friday night, there are 615 players. All day, the number has fluctuated between 550 and 650.

There’s a refrain that this won’t be a Steam game first and foremost, but even if you’re extremely generous and ignore the fact that, say, Sony’s Helldivers 2 is currently being played more on Steam than PlayStation, Concord’s numbers on PlayStation could be ten times higher and that would still be a terrible start.

I’ve never seen that before either. Not on this scale. The $200 million loss-making disaster Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League launched with 13,000 concurrent players. Bad at the time, but 20x more than what we’re seeing here from Concord, and it was also number 1 on PlayStation’s most played games list for a while. Red Case launched with 6,000 players when it came to Steam. Ubisoft’s Skull and Bones currently has more players. Last year’s disastrous Gollum game launched with more players. I can’t think of anything that even comes close to being a point of comparison. And the weirdest thing is that it doesn’t even have a bad Game, the whole thing boils down to how unattractive it was. Still, it’s incredible.

If there is anything that suggests this is really happening, it is the memory that the open beta numbers for Concord peaked at 2,300 a few weeks ago. That was a free Beta, where Concord now charges $40 to play. So yes, this sort of lowering of the original number seems possible, and there was never any indication that those numbers were wrong.

If this continues, this will be one of the worst major game launches ever. No exaggeration, especially when you compare it to the time spent on the game (eight years) and the cost (there are no firm reports on this, but again, eight years, and besides, this is a game that uses expensive mo-cap technology for lots of detailed cutscenes). Whatever the surprisingly successful launch of Helldivers 2 earned Sony for its live service plans, this is the exact opposite to the most extreme extent.

You know what’s happening now. Or soon. Probably very soon. Concord will pull the plug and become free-to-play or be added to PS Plus. But that brings with it the complication that there is no real revenue model, since one of the selling points was that Because it cost money, it didn’t sell standard stuff like characters or battle passes. So what do you do?

Concord has a lot more content planned from here, a full roadmap, everything you’d expect from any live service launch. However, it’s unclear how much is being invested here when the game has a few hundred players on Steam and a few thousand on PlayStation at best. Further development would clearly eat up even more money.

There’s a whole article on all the reasons why this didn’t work, but it comes back to the main point that plagued Suicide Squad: This is a game nobody wanted or needed to make. A poorly thought out concept looking for an audience that didn’t find it. But on a worse scale than I’ve ever seen.

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Get my science fiction novels the Herokiller series And The Earthborn Trilogy.