When the game came out back in 2024 it barely surpassed 1000 players on steam, eventually the servers were shut down a fortnight after it was released: so the game didn’t even last that long. Development costs were not cheap either, since Sony invested $400,000,000 into the project for it to fall apart upon release, talk about a waste of investors money. Have you played it at the time? If so, what made it a shit game that’s forgotten?
I don’t think free to play would have made any real difference to Concord (highguard says hi).
At the time of announcement, I was in a discord call, and I would say 9 or 10 people were interested at the cinematic trailer, when they had missed it being a multiplayer game, and they assumed it was a action RPG/ space opera.
Everyone who had any inclination of excitement, lost it immediately at the gameplay trailer.
They honestly didn’t care for another multiplayer game, especially with Marvel Rivals having been played and looking better around then as well.
My point is not that free to play would have saved it. I was pretty clear about that. But the scale of Concord’s failure is absolutely staggering even when compared to other high profile failures. Highguard peaked at 97,000 concurrent players on Steam. Concord’s peak? 697. That is literally more than two orders of magnitude less.
So yes, even though Highguard ultimately failed, there’s an argument to be made that with some continued investment it might have found a core player base and built that into some kind of ongoing source of revenue. Would it have made back its development costs? Probably not, but there’s a chance. But Concord’s failure is in a whole different league. It didn’t just fail, it smashed into a brick wall at 200mph. And that was only possible because of the sheer arrogance of slapping a price tag on it.