Unity
Concord is ranked 40+ in terms of PlayStation Store sales after its opening weekend. From its already shocking low point on Steam, where it opened at under 700, it continues to be on a steady decline, now peaking at under 250 players per night.
So let’s face it: Concord going free-to-play is inevitable. While it might work for now, a continued lack of interest will soon cause problems in the game, ranging from matchmaking (some modes already have issues) to justifying continued support. Basically, it needs more players, and free-to-play, the model every other game in this genre has, is one way to get more players.
However, this raises a number of questions and problems.
- How soon? – Remember that this is a game that did sell at least a certain number of copies to players for $40 or more for special supplements. A too rapid transition to free-to-play would be had supported the game and god knows they don’t want to do actual refunds, so the timing of this is tricky and may have to be pushed back for many months while the game loses players.
- F2P or PS Plus? – There’s a difference here, which is that if it was fully F2P it would also be available for free on Steam, whereas making it available in PS Plus wouldn’t cover that. Given that the Steam player base is so weak, you could either A) decide to write it off completely at this point and just do PS Plus, or B) try to boost it a bit with F2P, but that raises an additional problem.
Unity
- Changes in monetization? – It’s not as simple as flipping a switch. The whole point of Concord was this premise, that they could charge an upfront fee and thus do away with things like expensive skins and battle passes that plague most live service games. But even if that’s what every says you want, reality does not confirm that. And if you then go F2P, then have to do these other things to keep the game sustainable for ongoing content. Changing this on the fly so soon after launch would be chaos.
- We have already seen the problem here – The problem with the idea that F2P would significantly change Concord’s fortunes is that we’ve already seen a trial balloon for it, and that didn’t go well either. Just weeks before launch, Concord had a free open beta that attracted a maximum of 2,300 players on Steam. Then it launched with less than a third of that, and is now at less than 10% of that. That suggests that while the $40 price tag wasn’t a good idea, there’s no indication that just being free would make the game attractive to those who had no interest in playing it to begin with. Or that the game has the ability to retain players once it has them. Do turn up.
This is an example of how going from paid to free-to-play would, in my opinion, cause more trouble than good, and would almost certainly not change the game’s trajectory. You would upset the players who paid for it, and you would have to rework the entire monetization model. And you would potentially triple or quadruple an incredibly small player base that would remain incredibly small even afterward. The game is unrecoverable on Steam. The PS5 might be a little better, but there’s no indication that it’s anywhere close to “fine” there.
I still think they’ll try at some point. I don’t think it’ll make a difference. It’s over.
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