Concord
by Firewalk Studios / Sony Interactive Entertainment
About the Game
A premium 5v5 hero shooter featuring an original science fiction cast. Developed over eight years at Firewalk Studios with an estimated budget of over $100 million.
Why the Developer Killed It
Historic Low for a $70 AAA Title
Concord peaked at 697 concurrent players on Steam — possibly the lowest ever for a AAA live-service game. For a $39.99 PC title backed by PlayStation, this implies fewer than 20,000 copies sold across all platforms.
Paid Entry in a Free-to-Play Genre
Every competing hero shooter — Overwatch 2, Valorant, Apex Legends, The Finals — is free to play. Asking $39.99 for an unproven IP in this genre required exceptional differentiation that Concord did not deliver.
Eight Years of Development, No Audience
Firewalk Studios was founded in 2018 and worked on Concord for approximately eight years. Despite enormous investment, no pre-release community or brand awareness was built.
Studio Subsequently Closed
Sony shut down Firewalk Studios entirely in October 2024 — one month after the game's shutdown. Every employee lost their job as a consequence of the launch.
Concord launched on August 23 2024 at $39.99 — a premium price point in a genre where every major competitor is free to play. On its best day, 697 people played it simultaneously on Steam. Sony pulled it 14 days later, issued full refunds, and shut down the servers. It is, by most measures, the most expensive failure per player in gaming history.
The numbers require context to fully appreciate. Overwatch launched at a similar price point in 2016 and peaked at millions of concurrent players. Valorant, Apex Legends, and The Finals launched free to play and built audiences in the tens of millions. For Concord to compete in this space, it needed either a free entry model or a product so differentiated that players would pay a premium over zero. It had neither. The characters were perceived as generic, the gameplay loop offered nothing novel, and the marketing — despite PlayStation's global reach — failed to create demand.
Sony shut down Firewalk Studios in October 2024. The people who built the game for eight years are gone. The game itself is inaccessible. Every copy purchased has been refunded, which is the correct consumer outcome — but does not change the fact that a studio, a team, and a product were destroyed by a combination of strategic misjudgement at the publisher level and a fundamental mismatch between the product and its market.
Information sourced from public records, press coverage, and developer announcements.