How many players did Concord need to survive? As we know, sales were really poor, with around 25,000 total copies made between PC (10,000) and PlayStation 5 (15,000). The number of players was therefore very low, with SteamDB counting a peak of 697 people at launch.
It is clear that with these numbers Concord could not sustain itself and Sony decided to close it, in order to save on the huge costs of maintaining the servers and services related to the game. Converting it to free-to-play or recycling it as something else were not viable options, at least not in the short term, for those who were wondering.
Each game has its own story
But how many players did it actually need? The analyst Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis made it clear that there is no one-size-fits-all figure for every game, explaining to Games Industry: “There are so many variables to consider that it’s really not possible to answer.. For one game it might be 200,000 monthly active users, for another 2 million.”
Among the main factors to considerthe analyst listed R&D investments (both pre- and post-launch), salaries and other personnel-related costs, marketing expenses, infrastructure and service provision costs, the game’s business model and monetization strategy, platform support, production funding reimbursements, licensing fees, publishing costs, and more.
In short, approaching the issue superficially is definitely wrong, given that we are talking about something much more complex than it seems. “Considering all these elements, there are no games or companies that are identical, so the number of players to break even is always different,” added Harding-Rolls, who then explained how similar games also thrive on the ability for players to play whenever they wantthat is, not to be frustrated by waiting to find available games: “If a game is perceived as having gone deserted, players will lose motivation and go looking for something else to play.”
#players #Concord #survive
