Concord, the hero shooter with the shortest lifespan in gaming, didn’t have an easy life: originally released in August 23, 2024, the game failed to live up to what was mostly Sony’s — and only Sony’s — expectations on a genre that is chock full of better, more fun options everywhere, and the situation got so bad it got shut down less than a month after it came out.
And now, some people took it upon themselves to bring Concord back.
Kinda. Sorta.
You see, a group of modders has decided to do what Sony wouldn’t and engaged on a fan project that seeks to bring Concord back to the land of living. By way of custom, fan-made servers and a few changes here, the game is live, and theoverall experience is seemingly on par with what Sony had originally put out in the market. As of today, the whole thing is still very barebones, very much under development, in the “in-the-works” phase, but two testing sessions can be seen below:
Judging from the videos above, it seems that the team behind it (read more about them below) has some mid-to-long term goals in mind, as some of the most notable bugs in the original game (namely, wall clipping and such) seem to be fixed here.
Why was Concord shut down
Concord had less than a month alive due to the rapidly tanking player number — which can be attributed to a serious Sony mismanagement: this PlayStation and PC exclusive came out with a full price tag (while titles like Overwatch, Apex Legends and Marvel Rivals can be played for free and are far better), which already complicated things.
Then, when only the most curious players decided to stick around, they quickly realized the game, although somewhat alright in its features, had little to offer when compared to other options in the genre. At the time of its release, it averaged a 22/100 on OpenCritic, which is the opposite of “ideal” as review scores go.
The result was obvious: the game was shut down and delisted from every store on September 6, 2024, and Sony closed Firewalk Studio’s doors for good. Nowadays, you can still find it — Amazon has some way overpriced physical copies, but you should know: they’re all unusable since there’s no servers nor maintenance to speak of, which is kind of an essential thing given the game was entirely online-based.
Now, as to why anyone would get near this without two extra pairs of gloves is anybody’s guess, but the story — originally reported by The Game Post — is operated by a trio of developers who go by the name of Red, open_wizard, and gwog. One of them made the announcement via a Discord server, along with some gameplay information. At any rate, seeing Concord back from the grave definitely wasn’t on my bingo card for 2025.
Paraphrasing Game Post:
“This is thanks to a full rebuild of the game’s backend API by open_wizard, a major amount of reverse engineering work on Concord and its systems by Red, and additional help from gwog, who assisted in fixing several major issues along the way.
The team managed to get the main parts of the game working: main menu, character loading, matchmaking, and even a full Clash Point match. Along with the announcement, they posted two gameplay videos showing the game fully booting and running on their recreated servers.“
According to the report, full matches are already playable, although you still have no way of getting in on this — it is still under tests, after all — and there is no word if you ever will or this commendable community effort is made just for sake of preservation.
Even if that preservation is, well, Concord.
