The upcoming hero-shooter Concord just entered open beta, but it failed to attract many players—at least on Steam. The community caught wind of Concord’s poor performance, and are now, players are discussing whether the game even has a future in such a competitive genre.
One discussion is happening in a July 19 Reddit thread, whose creator even went as far as calling the game “dead on arrival” due to its meager 2,338 concurrent players during peak hours. It’s only the first day of the beta, but those numbers look grim, especially for a hero shooter that’s supposed to challenge Overwatch 2 and Team Fortress 2, both of which are free-to-play.
A player responded to the thread expressing that Concord’s poor reception was to be expected, since the market is very competitive, and its $40 price tag and PSN requirements only make matters worse.
To put things into perspective, various players in the thread pointed out how well other games performed during their open and closed beta periods. For example, The Finals peaked at around 267,000 players during its open beta, whereas Valorant had millions. An upcoming MMO, Throne and Liberty, is also going through an open beta phase right now, with 61,000 peak concurrent players.
Concord managing to attract so few players (there are only 783 players in-game at the time of writing, according to SteamDB) is not a good look. Players who were considering purchasing Concord certainly won’t be too happy to see it performing so poorly right before release.
The hero-shooter genre has rapidly expandied in recent years, though most entries to the market were free-to-play options. Concord’s high price is likely the biggest cause for its underperformance, and it’ll be interesting to see how Sony reacts after the open beta concludes.
