(C) BoingBoing
This story was originally published by BoingBoing and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Sony's $400M failed hero shooter Concord resurfaces in leaked developer build [1]

['Grant St. Clair']

Date: 2025-06-24

Ah, to have all the childlike naivete of a Sony Interactive Entertainment executive. You may remember Concord, the $400 million hero shooter Sony put all its chips on. It received extensive marketing, and it (rather optimistically) got a whole episode of the animated anthology show Secret Level… However, it was shut down and pulled off store shelves within nine days after it proved to be the biggest gaming industry flop in recent memory.

There are several reasons Concord performed poorly, but chief among them is Sony's unwavering confidence in it, which would be admirable if the game were actually good. The runaway success of Destiny appears to have deluded the industry as a whole into believing that people actually enjoy live service games, even if Marathon, Sony's next live service effort, seems headed for a similar fate amid accusations of plagiarism and indefinite delays.

Despite Sony's efforts to bury the memory of Concord, including shuttering the internal studio that produced it, it has resurfaced once again. A pre-release build of Concord dated to 2023 has resurfaced on the Internet, along with a developer menu that seems to point to a disgruntled employee from Firewalk Studios being responsible for the leak. Per VGC:

Loading the game displays a login screen that can't be bypassed. However, the build's uploader has also included an .ini file, which enables a developer menu. When this is applied, the game loads directly to a Select Freegunner screen. From here, it appears the player can go no further, because no Freegunners appear on the screen, meaning nobody can be selected. It is at least possible, however, to enter a pause screen and from there access the Main Menu, where numerous menus can be viewed. This includes a partially completed Galactic Guide, which provides information on the galaxy's various planets, and a Crew section, where information on the game's 16 playable characters and their variant outfits can be found. It also includes a Job Board (which just has placeholder text) and a Store option, which doesn't do anything, as well as a Settings menu containing developer options such as Developer Matchmaking and a style guide for the game's various fonts.

While it may seem like a dead end, it's now the only accessible version of Concord, and it's not outside the realm of possibility for community servers to pop up and enable continued play, sort of like how the original Battlefront games are being kept alive.

Granted, it's still Concord.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/06/24/sonys-400m-failed-hero-shooter-concord-resurfaces-in-leaked-developer-build.html

Published and (C) by BoingBoing
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/boingboing/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.