Concord, one of the most infamous videogame flops of all time, may already be flopping again as Sony brings the hammer down on revival mod

Recent updates

November 15: Well, that was fast: Sony appears to already be DMCAing gameplay footage of the Concord revival mod, including the very videos once embedded in this article. At this time the mod's servers themselves are still up, but it doesn't look good.

Concord is one of the most famous flameouts in videogame history: Years of development, hundreds of millions spent, and about two weeks of uptime before Sony decided it'd seen enough and took it all out behind the wood shed—the game, the studio, the dream—and put it to rest. But somehow, Concord returned.

"The project is still WIP," developer Red said on the Concord Delta Discord. "It's playable, but buggy."

The team shared a video of one of the test matches today on YouTube. It's not the most pro-tier shooter action I've ever seen, but yeah, that's definitely Concord.

With the Concord revival now drawing a new level of attention, Red posted a follow-up asking everyone to be respectful, "whether you like the game or not," an unfortunate acknowledgement of the ugliness that surrounded Concord's development and demise.

They also made it clear that piracy will not be tolerated, and that the developers will not provide the Concord game files for anyone who doesn't already have them.

"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," Red wrote. "We will be removing any posts containing links to copyrighted files."

Here's another internal gameplay test video, from developer open_wizard:

I'm really eager to see how this goes. Obviously there's no money to be made on it, and I think the most likely outcome is a cease-and-desist letter from Sony's legal department. But with Concord now officially a "failure," it presumably won't have to worry about perpetually aggrieved gamers howling about how it's "woke," and that means—if it can dodge the lawyers—it's free to be judged on its own merits. That's what interests me, because who knows? Concord might turn out to be not so bad after all.

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.

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