Concord Collapse

It’s been all over the videogame interested internet; the poor performance of Sony’s Concord hero-shooter has been treated as a signpost of derision and disappointment for its critics and supporters. Several reasons have been put forward to reason the failure of Sony’s exclusive, from pursuing a paid-for-model for a game in a genre that (including the biggest games in that genre) free-to-play is common, to presenting what could at best be described as niche social and political beliefs to an audience that (should be) as broad as possible.

Now we have the news that Sony has taken the decision to cease sales for Concord for the foreseeable future, taking the game offline and giving refunds to the people who have purchased the game.

Although Sony hasn’t spelled out what to expect for Concord going forward, it’s hard for me to believe that the games giant will walk away from Concord entirely given that the game is a big budget title. Just how Sony will look to recoup some of their investment though, who can say; perhaps they could relaunch the game as a free digital download, maybe even rework the cast of playable characters which has been received very poorly by just about anyone, or even reuse the assets of the game and make something else out of them. Whatever the case, things have gone very wrong from Concord.

Playing videogames, writing about videogames, considering videogames—that about sums it up. Videogames are the one hobby that I’ve kept since I was only little, zapping ducks on the NES or knocking out MR. X. And when I’m not enjoying classics from the bit generation of games or checking out those earliest of polygons, I’m probably playing something from today’s age of modern gaming: if I’m not complaining about it. Something I’m doing at the moment? I started dipping my toes in the vast sea of Kemco JRPGs.