Concordis dead. We’ve seen multiplayer games shut down before, but Firewalk’s shooter is a different story. It was online forless than three weeks before Sony decided to cut its losses and pull the plug, announcing that everyone who purchased the game would receive refunds as the servers were pulled offline last week. Now there’s no way to play a game that was in development for the better part of a decade, and I have to ask, was it really worth it?
Obviously, it wasn’t in constant production for eight years. Firewalk had to build a team, find a publisher, figure out what sort of game it wanted to create, and make that vision come to life. Now we know how it worked out, but that’s still an awful lot of time to spend on your first game only to have it shut down in less than a month. I feel not just for the team, but for players who were excited about Concord and even went so far as to pick up a copy. Now that game doesn’t exist.
Earlier this week,Sony began sending notifications out to digital owners of Concord letting them know that the game will be removed from their libraries, as it’s no longer playable. It’s an unprecedented move, and surprised me when I booted up my PS5 to find that a game I paid for was now wiped from existence. Yes, I’m going to get my money back, but to watch as a product is not only taken away from me, but any means to access or interact with it are now impossible feels like a very big, and very scary, step forward.
I expected Concord to remain in my digital library until it was brought back in a different form, whether that be in months or years. But Sony is taking the scorched earth approach as it wipes this piece of art from the Earth with no remorse. Concord had a physical release too, but it seems trying to install the game and launch it now greets you with an error. You cannot play or even boot up Concord anymore, because as a multiplayer title, it’s unfit for purpose.
The logical side of this decision makes total sense. Why allow a product to remain online if nobody is going to interact with it, and your business strategy is an entire rebrand. But the act of forcibly removing it from our possession doesn’t feel right, and represents a truth of the digital era that most of us are yet to accept. We don’t own any of the games we bought digitally, instead picking up a licence that can be revoked at any moment.
It reminds me of whenKonamireleasedP.T. as a playable means to unveil Silent Hills, then the demo was pulled from the PlayStation Store months later because the project that it was created to advertise had been cancelled. There was no business reason for it to exist, but it had already made its mark as a piece of art. A classic piece of survival horror that has become a precious relic stored on the hard drives of the lucky few who downloaded it in that short window and have kept it downloaded for a decade. P.T. still shows up in my library, but I can’t download it. Konami didn’t even go as far as Sony has with Concord. Some PS4 titles which lack native PS5 support also can’t be accessed anymore, but they still exist on the backend.
This has never been done to this scale before, and it speaks to a larger landscape that I’ve never really considered until now. A corporation could delist a game I’ve bought and put ample time into at any moment, claiming I no longer have a right to play it anymore. Yes, they could give me a refund or some other sort of concession, but the fact a piece of art has such flimsy permanence is a reality that should worry all of us. What happens when servers for a similar multiplayer experience goes offline, or it isn’t making money anymore and those responsible for it believe profits are far more important than preservation? We’ll be powerless to stop it.
