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Concord, the short-lived shooter from Firewalk Studios that was pulled offline just two weeks after its release in 2024, has recently resurfaced with custom servers thanks to the hard work of dedicated fans – but it seems they may be going down as quickly as the game did itself.
Just a few days ago, news of the playable Concord servers made by fans went live on Reddit, where the creators – known as Red, open_wizard, and gwog – were credited with "a long time of reverse engineering and server development" to get everything to work properly. At the time, matches were described as "playable," although it was noted, "The project is still WIP and buggy, but functional." Footage of said matches was linked, too.
Sadly, the videos were removed almost as quickly as they went up, following swift DMCA takedowns issued by MarkScan – the very same company behind most of Sony's copyright enforcement actions, as The Game Post reports. In a message in the fan project's official Discord server (one that is no longer open to join), the players running the custom servers explain, "Due to worrying legal action, we've decided to pause invites for the time being."
Concord is now running on custom servers from r/ConcordGame
The team doesn't specify what its next move might be, but all content showcasing the servers seems to be going down. Unfortunately, there's a high possibility here that they won't be able to press on with their work to bring Concord back online – even though that means the death of the shooter for good, considering its cancellation last year. It doesn't sound as though the journey to making the fanmade servers function was simple, either.
In response to Polygon, one of the project's creators – Red – revealed it's all been a year in the making, basically. "I started looking into it pretty much immediately after the game died," he admitted. The process of reverse engineering and reconstructing server code was no easy feat, with Red calling it "incredibly tricky." As the team's developers "care a lot about preserving games," it made sense to push on with the attempt to host custom servers.
Here's hoping everything works out for the fans who are evidently giving the project their all – even if Concord can no longer "officially" run online, it would be nice to see players still have access to the shooter somehow following its shutdown.
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