A fan-made recreation of Concord has been hit with ‘worrying legal action’, as Sony scrubs the game from existence for a second time.
Despite doing well this generation in terms of PlayStation 5 console sales, this current Sony era is defined by disappointment over their first party games output, as personified by the dramatic failure of Concord.
The sci-fi hero shooter, developed by Firewalk Studios, was shut down just two weeks after it launched last year, before the Sony-owned studio was dismantled altogether a few months later.
While emblematic of Sony’s ill-fated live service pursuits, Concord had its defenders, and some of them have been trying to revive the shooter on PC.
Last week, a group of fans, led by modders known as Red, open_wizard, and gwog, had managed to assemble a new version of Concord running on custom servers, through reverse engineering work.
While the project was a work-in-progress, the group had managed to get it running in an early state and released two gameplay videos on YouTube showing it off. As reported by Eurogamer, they planned to do some ‘private playtesting’ in the future, but would only host players who already owned the game files themselves.
‘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 on Discord. ‘We will be removing any posts containing links to copyrighted files.’
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Despite these precautions though, Sony has filed copyright infringement claims against videos of the project on YouTube and social media.
It’s currently unclear if Sony has issued takedown notices to the project as a whole, but it seems like the fans’ plans have been halted for now, based on the latest message from the developers on the Discord. ‘Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites for the time being,’ the team wrote.
In other words, unless some sort of agreement is reached, Sony has essentially shut down Concord for the second time – burning bridges with the last few people who actually cared about it.
Despite the failure of Concord, Sony is still chasing other live service hits post-Helldivers 2, with titles like Bungie’s Marathon, which has been indefinitely delayed, and Fairgames, a co-op heist shooter in development at Haven Studios.
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