Kotaku called Concord 'a damn fine shooter.' It was shut down 14 days after launch.

Sony's PlayStation division spent, by most estimates, eight years and somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million developing Concord. G/O Media, Kotaku's parent company at the time, received PlayStation advertising across multiple properties. These facts exist independently. Whether they relate is left as an exercise for the reader.

The review in question — a beta access writeup, because why wait for the finished product when you have a press kit and a deadline — concludes that 'Concord is a damn fine shooter.' The supporting evidence consists of descriptions of gunplay, hero abilities, and a general sense that the maps feel good. Not one sentence addresses the central question facing any hero shooter launching in 2024: why would anyone play this instead of something they already own. That question was apparently not within scope.

Here is what happened next. Concord launched on August 23, 2024. It peaked at 697 concurrent Steam players. Not 697,000. 697. Sony pulled the game from sale on September 3 and shut down all servers on September 6 — fourteen days after launch. Approximately 25,000 copies were sold across PC and PS5 combined, against development costs of roughly $400 million. If you divide $400 million by 25,000 units, you get $16,000 per copy. Sony spent $16,000 per sale on a game Kotaku told you was damn fine.

'Damn fine' is Zack Zwiezen's professional assessment, delivered from a beta event with access provided by PlayStation's PR team, six weeks before the game destroyed the careers of everyone who made it. There is no retraction on Kotaku. No update. No follow-up asking how 697 people happened. The review sits there, cleanly indexed, a monument to what happens when your access and your analysis share the same zip code. Sponsored by the truth.