The story of Concord is a cautionary tale in the age of live-service games. Years of development and millions of dollars went into the game, only for it to fail at launch and get canceled by Sony weeks later. However, Conord had some fans, and a trio of them worked very hard to bring the game back to life on a server.
As reported by The Game Post, Concord’s partial resurrection is due to reverse engineering by a user called Red, a rebuild of the game’s backend API by open_wizard, and an additional assist from a programmer called gwog. The team shared a pair of a gameplay videos to demonstrate their achievement, but noted that Concord is still somewhat buggy.
The trio successfully tested their ability to load the game, pick their characters, and run a full Clash Point match.
“The project is still WIP, it’s playable, but buggy,” wrote Red. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”
When Concord launched in 2024, it debuted to only 25,000 players. Sony subsequently shut down the game’s developer, Firewalk Studios. In the aftermath, Sony recommitted to live-service games and shared some of the hard lessons it learned from the ordeal. Sony Interactive Entertainment chief executive of studio business Hermen Hulst attributed its failure to a lack of oversight.
Concord’s fate was recently cited in a debate in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons about the preservation of video games. That session also addressed the Stop Killing Games movement, but lawmakers were unconvinced of the necessity to create laws that prevent games from being taken offline.
