A Video Game Flopped Harder Than Anything At The Box Office This Year, And The Mainstream Press Barely Noticed
In the summer of 2024, an entertainment project went more spectacularly wrong than possibly any entertainment project in human history. A venture that cost an approximated $400 million, and is thought to have made back only $1 million, representing a flop that dwarfs the likes of movie disasters Joker: Folie à Deux and Borderlands . Yet, if you don’t read the specialist gaming press, there’s a really good chance you’ve never even heard of it.
Why this enormous story remains so obscure taps into a deeply peculiar issue with the broad mainstream press and its decades-long refusal to accept a reality in which video games are a normal part of everyday life.
Concord was a multiplayer shooter game, in development for eight years by one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, Sony. Released into a very crowded market of what’s become known as “hero shooters”—games in which players pick from predesigned heroic characters and team up for online battles—it felt generic, derivative, and, in its character designs, narrative concepts, and use of color, outrageously reminiscent of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy.
However, even with all those factors, no one could possibly have predicted the scale of its failure. This game, released on August 23 to the PlayStation 5 console and PC, sold an estimated 25,000 copies, and never saw more than 700 people playing at once on PC. It was such a colossal disaster that Sony took the entire game offline some 14 days later, then deleted all evidence of it ever having existed from their websites and online stores. This erasure even extended to removing the purchased game from PS5 owners’ gaming catalogs .
