Streamers captured Concord’s final moments before the servers went off-line: 'What an enormous f***ing honour'

Concord's servers were taken offline earlier today, shortly after noon Eastern time. In an official PlayStation blog published earlier this week, Ryan Ellis, the game director of Concord developer Firewalk Studios announced the closure on September 3, 2024, just 11 days after Concord was released.

Concord was a poor seller on PC. It reached a record-breaking peak of 660 concurrent players on Steam. Ellis wrote that while many aspects of the experience resonated well with players, other aspects of Concord and its initial launch did not land as we intended.

Tyler Wilde wrote in a recent article that Concord's biggest problem was not its $40 price tag, nor its cast of characters. Instead, the real problem was its failure "to sell a fantasy or narrative that gets FPS players excited about playing it, before they've decided whether or not they like its characters, guns, and modes." It became a target of widespread ridicule and a victim in our never-ending culture war.

Concord had some supporters despite its rapid demise. Concord's fans were still there, even though the servers were shut down. Some players were streaming matches as they were being pulled.

Streamer gwtmori captured the moment Concord's servers were shut down. He was mid-sentence, saying that it would be "impressive" if we could get Lennox up to level 69 before the game went off. A "version mismatch" error message halted his search for a match, and he was quickly booted back to Concord's start screen. "Guys, this is a huge honor," gwtmori said to his viewers after the game ended.

The server shutdown also affected Nog7_, a Japanese streamer. He had just started his new round. Nog, who was streaming through chat text to speech, expressed their alarm on stream by repeating the letter "a". Nog's viewer, whose message was also read on-stream by Nog, bid the game goodbye with "sayonarakonkodo" or "Sayonara Concord".

My favorite Concord moment comes from streamer, dgunz. It's three-fold poetic. During the time that the servers were down, dgunz had been in the middle a firefight. In the clip, you can see characters calling out through the blackness of the screen, "I'm badly damaged" and "I need a hand." As the realization dawns, a wordless Dgunz salutes his fallen videogame. A PS5 error popup appears with a poignant message from dgunz: "Something has gone wrong."

I hadn't played Concord during its brief lifespan, but the streams of its final minutes online are quite touching. They were sharing their time and playing a game because they liked it, despite the general opinion and Sony's own order to kill it. I admire it.

In the blog post that announced Concord's closure Ellis said Sony and Firewalk will "explore options" while "we determine the best path forward." We'll need to wait to see if that best path will allow us to give Concord a second chance in the future.