After an infamously rocky launch with low player counts and mediocre reviews, PlayStation’s live-service hero shooter Concord is going offline, and the developers are issuing full refunds.
Firewalk Studios game director Ryan Ellis announced the move in a PlayStation blog post on Tuesday, saying that the studio needs time to “determine the best path ahead.” As such, the game will be removed from storefronts and taken offline on Friday, September 6 — just two weeks after launch.
“However, while many qualities of the experience resonated with players, we also recognize that other aspects of the game and our initial launch didn’t land the way we’d intended,” Ellis wrote. “Therefore, at this time, we have decided to take the game offline beginning September 6, 2024, and explore options, including those that will better reach our players.”
The developers are also offering full refunds for game owners. PlayStation owners will receive a refund back to their original payment method. Steam and Epic Games Store will refund players over the next few days, while players who purchased the game through a retailer like Amazon will need to contact that retailer directly.
The blog post doesn’t explicitly state what Firewalk Studios will be focusing on to reinvent the game, but there are a ton of criticisms from both reviewers and the player base. Whether Concord was just too late to the hero-shooter trend, didn’t have anything original to bring to the table, needed some gameplay retooling, or players are dealing with live-service fatigue, there’s a lot that the team needs to look at if they want to bring Concord back online.
Concord has been in development for around eight years, according to lead character designer Jon Weisnewski. Firewalk Studios was acquired by Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2023 as part of its larger push into live-service games, coupled with its purchase of Destiny 2 developer Bungie. Ahead of launch, Firewalk Studios was committed to three seasons; the first, called Tempest, was scheduled to launch in October. It also had two beta periods in July with all freegunners (the playable characters) available.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.