Concord is not completely dead. Community developers have brought Sony‘s shut-down hero shooter back online with fan-made custom servers, rebuilding its backend API, and getting full matches running again.
Concord was supposed to be Sony’s next big live-service game: a 5v5 hero shooter from Firewalk Studios, launched on PlayStation 5 and PC in August 2024. Instead, it crashed almost instantly. The game struggled to build an audience, reviews called out its lack of identity, and just weeks after launch Sony announced it was pulling the plug, offering refunds and taking the game offline.
Not long after, Firewalk Studios itself was shut down, turning Concord into one of the fastest and most brutal live-service failures we’ve seen. For most people, that was the end of the story: a $40 multiplayer game that became completely unplayable in a matter of weeks, with its servers and studio both gone.
Behind the scenes though, a small group of developers in the community has been working on a way to bring Concord back in some form. After months of reverse engineering and server work, that effort has now hit a major milestone, Concord is running again on custom servers, and full matches are playable.
Concord custom servers bring the game back online
This new progress comes from a community project led by developers known as Red, open_wizard, and gwog. In an announcement posted in the project’s Discord server, Red shared that Concord is officially running through custom servers.
This is thanks to a full rebuild of the game’s backend API by open_wizard, a major amount of reverse engineering work on Concord and its systems by Red, and additional help from gwog, who assisted in fixing several major issues along the way.
The team managed to get the main parts of the game working: main menu, character loading, matchmaking, and even a full Clash Point match. Along with the announcement, they posted two gameplay videos showing the game fully booting and running on their recreated servers.
It’s still early and buggy, but it works, and that alone is impressive considering Concord was never meant to run outside Sony’s infrastructure.
Here’s the full announcement Red posted in Discord:
“Hey. After a long time of reverse engineering & server development, we just managed to play a match of Concord! This is the match I played with open_wizard (don’t mind my horrible aim, I spend so much time reverse engineering that I no longer have the time to actually play game.
“The project is still WIP, it’s playable, but buggy. Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting, if anyone here wants to join those playtests, let me know (include what region/time zone you are in for convenience).
“Credits to open_wizard for recreating their entire backend API & gwog, for helping me reverse engineer the game & fix some of the major issues I encountered (with Theia)”
You can check out the fully working Concord gameplay videos below.
What do you think about Concord coming back like this? Does this kind of community revival make you want to see the game return in some form? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
