TLDR:
- Marvel Rivlas reached over 50,000 concurrent players on Steam during its closed beta.
- Concord only managed to hit a little bit over 2,000 players, while having an open beta testing.
- Some Concord players criticize the game’s bizarre character design.
- The fact that Concord requires a PSN account before it lets you play could be one reason for the poor open beta performance.
When Concord released its open beta on Steam for free and only reached maximum concurrent players of over 2,000, some believed that it was a red flag for the hero shooter genre as a whole, but it didn’t take long to prove them wrong, thanks to the stellar performance of Marvel Rivals on its first day of closed beta testing.
Marvel Rivals hit over 52,000 concurrent players on Steam, a significant achievement for a closed beta launch. Remember that only players who had previously requested closed beta access on Steam have been able to play the game. This means if it was an open beta, like that of Concord, and players were able to join the game at any time, we could have seen an even higher number.
So, is it safe to say that the hero shooter genre is safe and sound when we have a game that delivers what it promises? Of course, Concord and Marvel Rivals are quite different gameplay-wise. The former is a first-person shooter, while the latter uses a third-person perspective. More importantly, Concord requires a PSN account, which is not available in many countries, but Marvel Rivals doesn’t give you such headaches.
That being said, both games represent a single genre, and with all the differences in gameplay, you never expect a player gap of 50,000 between them, while both are coming from big AAA publishers with massive budgets. So, this indeed is a red flag for Concord and Firewalk Studios.
Things become worse for Concord when you know that it is not even free-to-play. For a game that only accumulates over 2,000 concurrent players in an open beta, how could you expect to perform well enough financially with a price tag of $40 at launch?
The bigger problem for Concord is the fact that the developers don’t have much time until launch. The game is supposed to be released globally on August 23rd, and that’s less than a month away from now.
This is probably a tough decision that Sony needs to make: either release a game with a massive red flag on time or delay it further so that developers can fix whatever caused players to not want to play Concord.
But what is really wrong with Concord? If you take a quick look at the game’s subreddit and read the open beta impressions, most players point their fingers toward the character design. Concord players believe that the characters do look cool and don’t dress cool.
“The art style, IMO, isn’t very cool or interesting,” reads one of the impression topics on Reddit. “It is like a watered-down Guardians of the Galaxy.” The Guardians of the Galaxy inspiration in Concord’s character design is too in-your-face that you can see it mentioned by more than a few players.
Aside from that, you can see complaints about the progression system, or the lack of a super competitive game mode that encourages to come back with a hunger to win again and again.
Hopefully, all these problems can be resolved. You barely see anyone questioning a fundamental aspect of the game like gunplay or the movement system, which could be quite time-consuming to fix. But character design and art style are not that difficult to change. The easiest way is to start by assigning new skins and clothing to characters rather than the ones showcased in the open beta.
At the time of writing this article, no official news has been shared on a delay for Concord or a significant change in its art style and gameplay features. But, we can still hope for a better final product, right?
