Sony's failed shooter Concord was updated dozens of time on Steam in October. I'm beginning to feel the comeback.

Concord was not a great game. Sony pulled the plug on Concord just a few weeks after its launch, a move that was virtually unprecedented. Sony stated at the time that they wanted to "explore all options... to better reach out to our players." They left open the possibility of a comeback as a free to play game. I was a little sceptical, but recent events make me think that it might actually happen.

Concord was taken off-line on September 6, but Steam has received a number of updates in the last two weeks. SteamDB shows that the updates started on September 30. They continued at a reasonable pace, with a half dozen or so per day, until October 10.

The words "playtest,""pmtest,"and "sonyqae," which could be a reference to a "Sony Quality Assurance Engineer," are pretty much incomprehensible for non-programmers like myself. But the presence of such words as "playtest,""pmtest,"and "sonyqae," which is speculatively an abbreviation for "Sony Quality Assurance Engineer," seems to indicate that something was cooking.

Updates stopped today, 16th October, with a change in "legal lines" as well as a health warning. "If you have had a history of seizures or epilepsy, consult your doctor before using." Certain patterns can trigger seizures without any prior history. For more information, please read the important health and safety warnings."

It's possible Concord got caught up in an update that affected all Sony games, including Helldivers 2, God of War and God of War Ragnarok. It's not clear how all the previous updates could have been made for a game which is effectively dead.

Sony has not responded to my inquiry last week regarding what all these updates are about, so we're left in the dark. I'm left wondering, though, why Sony would be horsing about like this if there weren't any plans. A free-to-play relaunch seems entirely reasonable: Concord is literally a complete, finished, and released game that cost a presumably-not-insubstantial amount of money to make--Sony bought the entire development studio in 2023, after all--and while people may have balked at its $40 price tag, curiosity might be enough to draw players in if Sony is literally just giving it away.

Concord's return is not a guarantee of success. Firewalk Studios will still have to make it a good shooting game. Even free mediocrity won't keep people coming back. There's no guarantee that it will ever get to this point. All of these updates may be automated housekeeping that happens in the background on Steam every day.

My feeling is that Concord hasn't yet been finished: I'm confident that will come out of the other end, sooner or later. The bottom line is that there isn't much to lose. The money has been spent and the work done, so it's best to grab another handful of cash and shoot it at the wall again to see if this time it sticks.