Not everything is Concord

Sometimes a company or product fails so spectacularly that it becomes a metonym for the failures and vanities of its broader industry. Theranos. FTX. Blockbuster. Enron. Lehman. Concord, Sony’s 2024 live service hero shooter megaflop, has become one such class representative.

Concord, a $40 online-only first person shooter, went offline on Sept. 6, 2024 — just two weeks after its release — having scraped together seemingly no more than a few thousand players against a reported budget of $200- to $400 million. The studio that developed the game was shuttered soon after. Ask ten people why the game failed and you’ll get ten answers: the character designs were uninspiring; the gameplay had no hook; audiences are sick of hero shooters; the live service market is oversaturated; the game’s price tag was too great a barrier to entry; the game’s development was marred by “toxic positivity”; the online outrage ecosystem never gave it a fair shake; etc. Whatever your view, the game’s launch was an undeniable and historic failure — and the first hint of impending reputational turbulence for the game’s publisher, Sony Interactive Entertainment, which had invested heavily in spinning up dozens of now-seemingly-ill-fated live service multiplayer titles. There was no shortage of schadenfreude. Much of that was snotty “The Out-of-Touch Devs are being punished for doing Wokeness by the Righteous Gamers!” stuff from the benighted engagement farming set. But also, it was a little thrilling to see a called shot fall so short of its mark, to rubberneck at the slow motion pratfall.

Since then, Concord has been the standard against which many new games — mostly but not exclusively multiplayer shooters — are measured. For most people, this comparison begins and ends with “game flopped”; the title has become shorthand for thing bad. But there’s also an activist short seller tendency here. I’ve written before how games discourse can devolve into business augury, and one of the safest moves on the vibe market (lock it in as ReaderGrev’s 2026 Stock Pick of the Year™️) is to write off any new release with a whiff of downward potential as Concord 2.0, the next sure-fire flop. (Not to overcook the metaphor but: Engagement farmers with a short position on some new title have little incentive to recalibrate their take barring major sentiment shifts because often their whole approach is New Game Doomerism. If they do change their mind — “I used to hate X, but now I’m hype for it” — the conversion becomes an engagement play of its own. The stakes are obviously lower in the metaphorical “engagement” market than in some real financial market, but for people with monetized audiences, the money is actually quite real.)

And yet, Concord is an imperfect point of comparison. The biggest, most obvious targets have been Highguard and Marathon — both manifestly different games from Concord, released or slated for release under very different circumstances than Sony’s ill-fated 2024 shooter. Highguard, for all of its flaws (I’ve written about some of them here) was downloaded and demoed by a lot of people, and launched with a unique core mechanic as its primary selling point. Neither of these things are really true of Concord, which fundamentally was just not played by very many people. Bungie’s Marathon, meanwhile, has generated visible demand and excitement, as reservations about its visuals and past controversies have slowly faded in the run up to release. Again: not true of Concord. These are cases of over-interpretation, where certain patterns — “hero shooter” or “colorful” or “developer said something I didn’t like on social media” — are taken as evidence of 1:1 correlation.

But I’m not just trying to be a pedant about surface-level distinctions, or the merits of this or that assessment of some new game’s market viability. More than that, what’s interesting to me is that one of the primary lenses through which video games are discussed today is a game that — famously! — nobody played. More bluntly: The bulk of Concord comparisons stand up games that haven’t been released back to back with a game virtually nobody experienced firsthand. In media and criticism circles, there’s this basic idea that the stories we tell and metaphors we use reveal broader cultural preoccupations: we metabolize our fear of “the other” through monster movies, concern over capitalism and barbarism through zombie movies, and so on. So what does Concord-as-metaphor reveal about the state of games today?

I want to preface this by acknowledging that it’s possible your algorithm is completely different from mine — that you don’t see the same vapid and annoying posts I do. It can be tough to write about conversations happening online (or, with scare quotes: “conversations” “happening”) because there’s virtually no way to comfortably quantify the scale of the discussion, or even to be sure of the sentience of the participants. I recently saw this headline in Kotaku: “PlayStation Fans Mad About Bluepoint Are Boycotting Marathon.” On the one hand, I believe this unreservedly. Of course somebody is mad on the internet. On the other: What does “PlayStation Fans” mean? Who? How many? Where? There is nothing faker on the internet than a media boycott.¹ It’s hard to give a shape to stuff supposedly “happening” on social media, which is by its nature unserious and vaporous and slippery. And yet I have to imagine you know what I’m talking about, that we all sort of accept that, yeah, at any given point, there’s some group of people being annoying about something in a stupid way, people we would have once ridiculed as “trolls” and relegated to the metaphorical underside of the bridge, but who have somehow over the years ensconced themselves into the virtual subdivision and been elected somehow to the figurative school board.

A year and a half after its collapse, the prominence of Concord as a cautionary example represents a retreat from talking about games in favor of talking about business and marketing — a sort of rot in the culture. Has a developer successfully sold me on XYZ new game? Did the trailer rollout make sense? What’s the view count on somesuch marketing material? And how will all this redound on player counts and units moved? These aren’t my favorite subjects, and I look a bit askance at people who really care about this sort of thing, but I’m resigned to the fact that even in saying so, I’m trying to hold back a river with just my hands. Still, no matter how you feel about sales figures, it does feel like those subjects have squeezed out discussion of games themselves in most of the places “gamers” congregate or pay attention to. To put on my best YouTube video essay voice: We don’t talk about games anymore. We just talk about Concord.² (See disclaimer above about the “unserious and vaporous and slippery” nature of defining the “we” here).

But all that talk of a Concord 2.0 or 3.0 is also indicative of a pervasive feeling of suspicion and disaffection toward video game industry leaders — a category I tend to understand as “the collective c-suites of major publishing houses” but which I think has grown to encompass “developers” more generally in the popular discourse. I tend to believe that more often than is obvious, developers working on failed games are earnestly excited and committed to the thing they’re working on (with some caveats³ ). But also, games release from out of a black box into an ecosystem marked by intense parasociality and paranoia. Who wouldn’t be a little on guard? One common line about Concord was that “nobody asked for this.” That’s a flawed way to approach the arts; I think if you had asked anyone two years ago if they wanted a French role playing game made by former Ubisoft devs they would have looked at you funny. But the overarching idea that snob developer elites aren’t listening to the normal gamer masses strikes me as the beating heart of every unflattering comparison to Concord. If you don’t have a sense of solidarity that allows you to distinguish between rank and file devs and the c-suite, or if you’ve written off the modern games industry workforce as irredeemably “woke,” then it is perhaps pleasing to imagine something you don’t recognize as catering to you specifically as comparable to one of the worst flops in video game history.

Post scriptum: What’s next?

I want to think out loud here about how I’m looking at the possibilities around ReaderGrev’s future.

Writing this newsletter for the past three (!!!) years has been tremendously fulfilling. It has granted me the opportunity to publish news-cycle leading scoops (see: here and here), sharp takes (like this, this and this one), interviews with interesting folks (I’m quite pleased with this recent post) and some stuff I’d struggle to classify that probably couldn’t have run anywhere else.

Still, ReaderGrev slipped the leash on punctuality basically as soon as I started it. Over the next three months, I’d like to refocus my efforts on this project and publish on a more consistent basis. No promises on an exact schedule, but I’m aiming for 1-2 sends per week. I’ve got a nice backlog of material and am always seeking out new leads. (I’m also working on some cosmetic tweaks to the website; WIP here.) Call it a test run.

With that in mind, I wanted to gauge folks’ willingness to pay for my journalism. Candidly, I’m a long way out from ReaderGrev being a full-time or sustainable gig. But after being unceremoniously dumped by The Washington Post, I’d like to get at least a rough estimate of how many readers would be willing to pay a small monthly subscription fee (I’m thinking $5 — the cost of a some-frills-attached coffee in Washington D.C., where I live) to have a clearer picture of whether this is a moonshot or a manageable mid- to longterm project. Beehiiv, the newsletter platform that I use, runs an ad network that would allow me to put ads into the newsletter to generate revenue, but beyond generally despising ads, I have not seen a single compelling offer in the network that wouldn’t make me want to write a disclaimer somewhere in my post: “Clicking the ad makes me a few cents, so please click, but under no circumstances should you use this product or imagine that I endorse its use.” I suspect that kind of disclaimer would break some sort of ads TOS.

The poll below assumes that 1) I fulfill my obligations with respect to regularly publishing content and 2) that you’re interested in supporting my work. The question is mostly: What’s the right amount? I don’t expect to offer yearly subscriptions; mostly, I’m hedging against the possibility that I take a job that makes it difficult for me to commit indefinitely to a regular publishing schedule (though I will gladly accept large one-time donations from wealthy benefactors, if I can figure out how to do so). That money will help broaden the ambit of this newsletter, allowing me to take bigger swings and cover expenses relating to my work. (One such recent expense: prepublication review of an article by a lawyer trained in media law.)

None of the options below are binding, obviously.

One wrinkle: I have a couple of really big stories on my plate. Frankly, at this stage, I’m trying to discern whether they’re worth publishing here (assuming certain legal and security risks in the process) or if I should seek outlets with teams of experts and support staff who might help oversee their publication. I’m still thinking about it. The priority is really to just get the stories out there.

I’d welcome any and all feedback from readers. How do you see the value proposition of ReaderGrev? What draws you to the newsletter, and what do you think are its strengths? These qualitative insights — the stuff I’m not already getting from open/click rate or pageview data — will be super helpful in the days and weeks to come. As always, appreciate you all reading. Cheers.

Thanks for reading ReaderGrev! Consider sharing it with a friend, on Discord, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even a subreddit where folks might appreciate it. Word of mouth helps this newsletter grow!

If you have a tip, I can be reached on Bluesky, on Twitter or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1  I always feel the need to clarify when I refer to Kotaku in a story: I am not singling out the site in some pejorative way. I like and read Kotaku.

2  Yes, I realize that in writing about this, I’m guilty of this too. I will be trying to fix that.

3  I wrote this in 2024, about Concord: “I have a theory (this is not based on reporting or sources or interviews; I am just guessing lol) that for the past few years you could split the developers at Firewalk into three camps: 1) The people who were like ‘holy shit why are we launching a $40 Overwatch competitor this is obviously going to fail.’ 2) The second and largest camp, who thought: ‘This is what we’ve been asked to deliver so this is what we’re working on’ and 3) The people who sincerely believed they could sell Concord for $40. I would be very curious to learn who falls into this last category. It should be the higher-ups at Sony, the people who presumably made the decisions around how to publish the game. If so, they have some soul-searching to do. But if it’s not the higher-ups at Sony — if those folks believed they were shipping a dud and didn’t believe in the title — well, that also merits some soul-searching, obviously.”