Video game launches can be a tough time for the teams involved, many years of blood, sweat, and tears go into making these games that we often take for granted come to light. So in the case of Firewalk Studios’ Concord, a game that has been in development for almost a decade now, releasing to universal criticism from a critical point of view and being an almost unprecedented failure from a monetary point of view, with an insanely low 660 player peak, it looks like the worst case scenario every developer fears has come true.

As stated, Concord released on August 23^rd, 2024, three days ago as of today. One could forgive the low player count on a weekend, as Concord released on a Friday, but over the course of the weekend the player count has not increased, in fact it has decreased if anything according to Steamcharts.

Now, Steamcharts isn’t the be-all end-all of player counts, as it only accounts for players playing Concord through Steam. Concord also released for the Playstation 5, so the players on Steamcharts don’t account for the Sony playerbase, but unless the game sold absolute mountains of copies for the Playstation 5 the sub-four digit player count on Steam is not exactly a good sight for Firewalk Studios.

Concord, sadly, seems to be a victim of its development time. Being in the oven for a decade means that Concord released chasing trends both narratively and mechanically that were popular in 2014, but those sensibilities are becoming less and less popular in the current year of 2024. Whether Firewalk Studios will be able to recover from what is almost certainly a flop in Concord is yet to be seen, but this is not a good sign for the studio and not a good sign for the game, whose playerbase will only drop as the weeks go by.