Last week I wrote about the upcoming live-service shooter Concord, which is due to launch in just a few short weeks. A beta weekend was held for the game but only those who had pre-ordered the game or had an active PSN membership could join up. While we couldn’t see what the console numbers were, the player count on PC was worryingly small.
This weekend, the beta has been opened up to absolutely everyone which should mean, in theory, much higher player numbers. That isn’t what we’re seeing though.
According to SteamDB, which tracks all sorts of handy Steam information, the game still isn’t drawing in many players. On the beta’s launch day, July 18, it peaked at just 2,388 concurrent players. To be fair, that is still over twice what the closed beta managed the week prior. But 2,388 still seems alarmingly low for a first-party live-service shooter, and is surely an indication that people aren’t very interested in Concord.
The player numbers didn’t improve with word of mouth, either. On July 19 Concord only achieved a peak player count of 1,666, indicating that many people didn’t bother returning. Today, July 20, the peak count was 1,447, so at least the drop-off wasn’t as bad as it was on day 1.
Of course, we have no way of knowing what sort of player counts Concord is getting on PlayStation. It could be far, far better. But Sony is pushing simultaneous PC and console launches for its live service titles to ensure a strong community, so to see such low player counts for an open beta where the only barrier to entry is some download time does not bode well for the future of Concord. At this rate, the game is going to need some incredible word-of-mouth when it launches, or else it will end up as yet another corpse in the live-service mass grave.