Two weeks ago, Concord had failed so badly that it was taken offline, leaving the team at Firewalk Studios sitting in despair at the situation they’d found themselves in. The game that they’d spent years putting together was DOA, pulling in so few players and missing the mark so monumentally that it failed to gain an ounce of traction at release.
Now, the game’s director, Ryan Ellis, has stepped down from his position and moved into a ‘support role’, per a report from Kotaku.
Going Down
In Kotaku’s report, it was mentioned that Ellis ‘was the main shot caller’ on Concord, which failed miserably from the moment it hit the market last month. It was only this summer that the game received a proper trailer, with many baulking at the price tag attached to what would have fared much better as a free-to-play shooter.
In a quote handed to Kotaku, it was said:
Ryan deeply believed in that project and bringing players together through the joy in it. Regardless of there being things that could have been done differently throughout development… he’s a good human, and full of heart.
It was Ellis who published the blog post highlighting the failure and imminent shutdown of Concord. He wrote that the game hadn’t landed the way the team at Firewalk had intended and that it would be taken offline to ‘explore options’. That was two weeks ago, and already, the wider industry has forgotten all about Concord.
Firewalk Studios numbers some 160 developers, many of which are now concerned about their job security. It could go either way at present – the team could alter the operating model and remove the premium price point, or the studio could be shuttered and Concord will become nothing more than a painful memory.
For more Insider Gaming coverage, check out the news that IShowSpeed hit 1 million concurrent viewers
The “toxic positivity” of true believers.