Welp, that didn’t last long, did it? After we published the story about Concord, the ill-fated, less-than-a-month-alive hero shooter Sony put out in August last year, only to kill it in September last year, being brought back to life through custom servers and a more indie-led effort to keep the game alive, the entire project got the kibosh.
And who kibosh-ed it? I’ll give you three chances and even tell you the name starts with an “S” and ends with “ony”.
Sony. It was Sony. Sony killed Concord again by issuing a bunch of DMCA takedowns on the project’s videos on YouTube — which were all signed by “MarkScan Enforcement”, which a quick Google search tells us it’s a company based in India, whose specialty is…issuing takedown requests.
Although no major case can be attributed to its brand, a lot of online forums’ complaints mention them specifically, most notoriously on Bloodborne game tutorials and walkthrough videos (which platform is Bloodborne exclusive to, again?) and even app closures on Play Store and App Store. Some cases even mention specifically one-sentence commentary videos on several titles of which one or two happen to be from a publisher who’s a MarkScan client.
To be fair on our reporting, Sony did not, apparently, target the project itself (which was called “Concord Delta”, so we don’t have to say “project” over and over), just the gameplay videos attributed to it (because, you know, the entire Concord revival idea was to keep the game faithful to its original release…).
Still, after the DMCA requests were issued, one of the three developers involved came out in the project’s Discord server and stated the following (thanks, WccfTech):
“Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites for the time being.”
Look, it’s not like we loved Concord: I reviewed it for another site at the time of its release and the most candid word I used to describe it was “shit”. We hated it, and a lot of people agree it was a bad game.
But it is important to note that the Concord Delta team was careful enough to develop it in such a way that prevented people from downloading it and sharing it illegally, and from the get go, it was promoted as a fan-made endeavor on, again, a project that failed mostly due to Sony’s mismanagement. An entire studio died because of it, no less.
“I know this sucks for people who got forcefully refunded, but lawyers are most likely already watching everything we do and I want to ensure this project stays as legal as we realistically can do. We will be removing any posts containing links to copyrighted files,” the team wrote.
At any rate, this has to be a milestone for the PlayStation maker: not only the original Concord lasted about 10 days before being axed, its second coming also got killed because of its corporate shenanigans.
Way to go, Sony.
