Yesterday's news that Sony might be temporarily pulling Concord from its new live-action hero shooter won't come as much of a surprise to many.
Within days of the game's launch, there were reports that an estimated 25,000 copies had been sold – 10,000 on Steam, 15,000 on PlayStation – and player numbers were low. According to SteamDB, Concord peaked at 697 concurrent users on August 24th, the day after launch, before plummeting.
Even though we did a GI Microcast on Monday morning this week discussing the myriad reasons for Concord's matches, only 39 people played.
No company takes the decision to end an online game lightly, especially when live services are a big part of your ongoing strategy. Canning Concord will be based on many, many factors, but it is certain that sales and the number of active players among them will be the main ones for Sony. After all, multiplayer games are expensive to run, and serving only a small number of people isn't cost-effective – especially in financially turbulent times like these.
So how many players does an online game need to warrant its further development and support? Of course, the answer will vary for each title, depending on the developer's size, situation, and financial and creative goals. Luckily, we asked analysts and development veterans to help shed some light on the process behind these game-killing decisions ahead of our live podcast Q&A during Devcom 2024.
“Is that a trick question?” laughs Piers Harding-Rolls, Head of Games Research at Ampere Analysis. “There are so many variables at play here that it's really impossible to answer. One game might have 200,000 monthly active users, another might have two million.”
It lists the various factors that influence whether a game survives or dies: R&D investment (pre- and post-launch), salaries and other staff costs, marketing expenses, infrastructure and service delivery costs, the game's business model and monetization strategy, support platforms, funding installments, licensing costs, publishing costs – the list goes on.
“In all of these elements, no game or game company is exactly the same, so the break-even number will vary as a result,” adds Harding-Rolls.
“Besides ROI, there's another factor to consider: having a large enough population to make the game playable and fun wherever you are in the world. As a player, you don't want to wait ages for the game to find other players to join your team or will compete against them.If it feels like the game is understaffed, the players will be turned off and go find something else.
Concord is not eccentric. Over the past two years, we've seen dozens of online games shut down, and sometimes after a relatively short time of being live.
For example, Synched – a free-to-play shooter developed and published by Tencent, the world's largest gaming company – was shut down just a year after launch. A source from Tencent said GamesIndustry.biz by the end, the game only managed 10,000 daily active users, with an estimated 500 to 1,000 concurrent users.
In February 2023, eight termination notices were announced in one week, with affected titles including Apex Legends Mobile, Rumbleverse, Knockout City, CrossfireX, Crayta, and Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai: A Hero's Bonds.
Knockout City was only two years old when its servers went down, and developers Velan Studios had already shifted the game to a free-to-play model in hopes of attracting more players after splitting with publisher Electronic Arts. Velan co-founder Guha Bala tells us that the game hovered between 1,500 and 5,000 peak CCUs before it was shut down.
Bala echoes Harding-Rolls' comments by telling us that deciding whether or not to quit an online game is a “small issue.” Again, the number of active players needed to survive depends on a number of factors, including the type of game you're running.
“For skill-based multiplayer PvP, especially for ranked play, each region should have a maximum CCU of 10,000,” says Bala. “As CCUs are dispersed across regions, asymmetric latencies relative to the server become factors, so matchmaking times can increase dramatically. Some regions, such as Australia, are inherently at risk because they are sparsely populated and far from other regions. “
“There are strategies like the special return code we used in Knockout City that made the game play well at much lower CCUs, so we could push 2,000 CCUs and still deliver a good experience in North America and Western Europe.”
“If there's a sense that the game is understaffed, players will turn off and go and find something else to play.”
Piers Harding-Rolls, Ampere Analysis
Games that aren't based on skill-based matchmaking can survive with lower player counts, with Bala suggesting 5,000 CCUs per region. Meanwhile, PvE games can run on even less—around 1,000 to 3,000 CCUs per region—because bots can serve as both enemies and allies, meaning the player experience is less dependent on the presence of other humans.
Bala adds that the business model may be a “far bigger problem” in terms of keeping the game alive. Continuing to operate and developing new content depends on more money coming in, so player retention becomes essential. For free-to-play games, for example, he estimates that a minimum of 5% of the total user base needs to spend to maintain costs (although this can of course vary from title to title). This means that the number of CCUs needed to be economically viable can approach 50,000 or more for some free-to-play titles, which Bala describes as “a big barrier to entry for most new games”.
However, Concord wasn't free-to-play, instead opting for a mid-range price point in the style of Helldivers 2. The game also didn't feature microtransactions or a battle pass, so the revenue it generated was purely from sales – and while we don't know Sony's sales expectations, it's a bet to be sure, the estimated 25,000 per week is way beyond what a shooter would do. necessary.
Additionally, premium PC and console titles often have larger teams, further increasing your costs. Based on his own experience, Bala figures that a 50-person team would be $500,000 a month in labor costs alone—based on that, he estimates that a $20 game would have to sell 25,000 a month to match that. Concord, meanwhile, had a $40 price tag and developer Firewalk Studios had at least 150 employees.
Despite the cost and the fact that his own game has moved to free-to-play, Bala believes that more games with live services need to be built on top of the premium model.
“Personally, I think that in order for there to be an explosion of innovation in PvP, we need to find more avenues for experiences that players will pay for upfront,” he says. “Otherwise, this segment of the market will increasingly look like mobile titles, where monetization and paywalls often replace compelling emotional experiences.”
Whether this is the end for Concord remains unclear. In a statement yesterday, game director Ryan Ellis said the Firewalk team will be “exploring other options” to move the title forward.
But it's clear that launching a new live service title may be harder than ever. With millions wrapped up in Fortnite, Roblox, GTA Online and more, it's not easy to entice them to try out a new title – even for a short period of time. If even market leader PlayStation is struggling to get the players it needs, it's safe to assume that Concord won't be the last short-lived online game we see in the coming years.