Valve and Sony's new hero shooters show the highs and lows of live service games, as Deadlock courts 64,000 players and Concord fails to reach 700 on Steam

This weekend's two new shooters show off the best and worst of what companies can expect from launching live service games.

"New shooters" might be a little inaccurate since Valve's Deadlock has been in not-so-secret playtesting for months now - images, videos, details, character lineups, and more were leaked weeks in advance as literally tens of thousands of players signed up to the pre-release tests - though the company waited until this weekend to officially announce the MOBA and hero shooter mash-up. 

Despite access to Deadlock being "limited to friend invites via our playtesters," the shooter still courted over 64,000 concurrent players just yesterday, according to data from SteamDB, and reactions to the genre-blender have been universally positive. Since Valve lifted the lid on the project, players have flocked online to share the most wild clips of Deadlock's chaotic, skyrail-racing matches.

PlayStation's FPS Concord, on the other hand, didn't fare as well when it properly came to PS5 and PC earlier this week. We don't have a clue for how well it performed on console, but SteamDB estimates that the hero shooter failed to even scratch 700 concurrent players on PC in its debut weekend. That puts its concurrent player peak below the troubled launches of games like Redfall, Gollum, and Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League, despite receiving overall strong praise from the people who did jump in. 

Sony knows how to launch a successful live service because it did just that with Helldivers 2 earlier this year. If Concord is also getting praise, then why is it fumbling so terribly?

One Concord developer claimed the game had been in development for eight years, meaning it began life straight after the first Overwatch's debut, presumably to jump on the short lived hero shooter craze that has all but died down. Overwatch 2, Apex Legends, and Valorant are still majorly successful games, but new hero shooters are pretty much dead-on-arrival nowadays. Marvel Rivals only seems to be attracting so much interest because, well, it stars some of the most famous faces in the world right now - not to mention that Concord comes with a $45 price tag, as opposed to all of its free-to-play competitors.

PlayStation just came face to face with the highest highs and lowest lows that the genre can offer, right at the beginning of Sony’s live-service push.