Concord, Sony's $200M live-service shooter, shut down two weeks after launch

Concord was a paid, $40 hero-shooter from Firewalk Studios, a team Sony acquired in 2023 after funding its development for years. A Kotaku report carried by IGN in October 2024 put the initial development deal at around $200 million — before the cost of the game's IP and the studio acquisition — making Concord one of the most expensive bets of the industry's live-service boom.

The game launched on August 23, 2024 into a genre already crowded with free-to-play rivals like Overwatch 2 and Valorant. It peaked at 697 simultaneous players on Steam, and analysts estimated fewer than 25,000 copies sold across Steam and PlayStation in its first week.

On September 3, Sony announced Concord would go offline on September 6, that sales would stop immediately, and that every buyer would receive a full refund. On October 29, it said the 'best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio'; Firewalk Studios was shut down. The game had been on sale for exactly two weeks.

Sony had been pushing its studios toward live-service games, and Concord became the industry's standard example of how expensive that pivot can be when a game arrives in a saturated market with nothing to make it stand out.