Sony and Firewalk Studios’ latest foray into the live-service co-op shooter genre has been off to a concerningly slow start. Following a launch day that saw the game peak at less than 700 players on Steam, the intergalactic shoot ’em up’s downward trend continues, as this time, players are having trouble finding matches, with Concord queue times reaching upwards of 5 minutes. If you somehow avoided playing live-service games all this time, queues to get into lobbies shouldn’t take this long.
In games like CoD, Overwatch, CS2, or Valorant, waits are much shorter and usually finish in less than a minute or two. So, people queueing up for five minutes typically means one of three things: either your internet connection’s wonky, the game’s suffering from server problems, or it has a glaring lack of players. Although the first two problems are commonplace for any live-service game and can be resolved by waiting it out, the latter is much more worrying and could potentially spell even more trouble down the line.
Unfortunately, a small player base is exactly what Concord is experiencing based on a few player complaints. Over on the Concord subreddit, user Wickie09 said, “Just waited 8 min for matchmaking, and then it timed out. Decided to come back and play something else [during] peak hours.
This really doesn’t look promising at all.” Afterward, they clarified that they were playing at 11 am in the EU region on the PS5, which supposedly has a bigger player count than its Steam version, so turning crossplay on may not even help. Now, you might argue that their Concord queue times were this long because they weren’t playing during peak hours.
But for a recently launched game, you shouldn’t have trouble finding matches no matter where or when you play, especially since it’s available in multiple regions. So, alas, even though lead character designer Jon Wesinewski recently said that the team is “ ready to push it for years to come, ” they may not get a chance to do so the way things are going..
