Concord’s shutdown was one of the highest-profile failures in not just video games, but all of entertainment last year. Sony pulled the plug on its Guardians of the Galaxy-esque hero shooter days after its PS5 and PC launch failed to bring in players, and then subsequently shut down its developer, Firewalk Studios. It was a highly publicized mess of mismanagement and callous corporate calculus, and it was also a damn shame because the game was actually pretty alright. Although the game seemed lost to time, some fans have taken it upon themselves to try and bring it back with fan-made servers, so if you wanted to see what all the fuss was about, you may have the chance.
A group of fan modders has been working to rebuild Concord’s backend and create new servers (thanks, TheGamePost), and have officially played a match of the game once thought lost to time.
Red, one of the modders leading the project alongside Real, open_wizard, and Gwog, posted an update on Discord letting folks know the group had managed to play a match, though there are still a lot of bugs to iron out before they’re ready to open it up to more players.
After a long time of reverse engineering & server development, we just managed to play a match of Concord! This is the match I played with open_wizard (don’t mind my horrible aim, I spend so much time reverse engineering that I no longer have the time to actually play games)
The project is still WIP, it’s playable, but buggy. Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting, if anyone here wants to join those playtests, let me know (include what region/time zone you are in for convenience).
I still consider Concord’s fate to be a consequence of Sony’s terrible fumbling of its ill-advised live service pivot, but it’s always a bad thing when games are wiped from existence by their owners. A lot of people worked hard on Concord, and it deserves the dignity of being playable, even if Sony isn’t supporting it. So shoutout to fans for picking up the torch.