Concord studio Firewalk has one final message to fans in the wake of its closure and the game's permanent cancelation, and it's a reflection on the studio's hard work and vision for the failed hero shooter.
On Tuesday, Sony put the final nail in Concord's coffin as it announced the definitive end to the game and the closure of developer Firewalk. Despite some last-minute hope that the game would come back from the dead, inspired by backend Steam updates, Concord is officially a thing of the past, and its studio shared a farewell message to Twitter with a few key reflections.
"Firewalk began with the idea of bringing the joy of multiplayer to a larger audience," reads the tweet, which goes on to reflect on some of the challenges the studio managed to overcome before release, including the pandemic, the switch from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, and its acquisition by Sony.
- Despite more than $60 million in investments, Shroud-backed FPS Spectre Divide and its dev are shutting down after the first season failed "to cover day-to-day costs"
- Helldivers 2 boss says "death and rebirth" is a natural part of the games industry, but it's "unnecessarily brutal" right now "because we don't diversify enough"
Ultimately, Firewalk says it shipped "a great FPS experience to players – even if it landed much more narrowly than hoped against a heavily consolidated market." The cutthroat state of the hero shooter space and the broader live service market, which routinely leaves even great games to starve, was a recurring talking point throughout Concord's floundering release.
"We took some risks along the way – marrying aspects of card battlers and fighting games with first-person-shooters – and although some of these and other aspects of the IP didn’t land as we hoped, the idea of putting new things into the world is critical to pushing the medium forward," Firewalk says.
With Concord officially in the rear view, credible reporting suggests Sony has been forced to eat an estimated $200 million development deal, a price tag rivalling some of the publisher's biggest IP including The Last of Us 2 and Horizon Forbidden West.
Meanwhile, here are the best FPS games you can play right now.
Former Valve exec recounts the meeting where Half-Life's publisher almost killed the iconic FPS: "Half-Life would quietly die. I was stunned"
FBC: Firebreak may be Remedy's first live-service game but the Control creators are going about it the right way, confirming that all playable post-launch content "will always be free"
