Sony has issued a number of DMCA notices against a fan project working to bring Concord back to life.
Concord was infamously pulled from sale just two weeks after its PS5 and PC release, amid suggestions it had sold less than 25,000 copies. At the time, Sony said the game would remain offline indefinitely so Firewalk could “determine the best path ahead” and “explore options, including those that will better reach our players.” Later that same month, though, Concord game director Ryan Ellis stepped down, and by the end of October 2024, Firewalk Studios, the Sony-owned developer behind the ill-fated shooter, was also shut down.
Fast-forward to today, and a team of volunteer developers have been working for months to get the game up and running again, getting the main menu, character select, and matchmaking working on private servers. “The project is still WIP,” one volunteer developer wrote on the Concord Delta Discord, but confirmed “it’s playable, but buggy.”
“Hey. After a long time of reverse engineering [and] server development, we just managed to play a match of Concord!” the team announced on Discord.
“The project is still WIP, it’s playable, but buggy. Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting, if anyone here wants to join those playtests, let me know (include what region/time zone you are in for convenience).” The announcement ended thanking a couple of volunteer developers for “helping […] reverse engineer the game”.
Crucially, the team only hosted players who already owned the game files themselves through a legitimate purchase, and slapped down anyone trying to share “copyrighted files”.
“I know this sucks for people who got forcefully refunded, but lawyers are most likely already watching everything we do and I want to ensure this project stays as legal as we realistically can do,” the team wrote. “We will be removing any posts containing links to copyrighted files.”
Despite the team’s caution, however, Sony has targeted the project, filing copyright infringement claims against videos showing the project in action on YouTube and social media. And while it’s unclear if Sony has filed against the team itself, it seems they’ve been cowed into submission for now, with one of the devs writing on Discord: “Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites for the time being,” (thanks, The Game Post).
The UK’s House of Commons recently debated the need for improved video game consumer protections as well as video game preservation. In this debate, Concord’s sudden shutdown was used as an example, and the requirement for strong consumer protections in such a case.
One MP stated: “A recent example is Concord, a game released for PlayStation 5 and Windows in August 2024. Following a disappointing launch, Sony Interactive Entertainment made a commercial decision to shut it down. To their credit, they did refund all purchases, but this isn’t always the case.”
