I do have to admit that bringing up Concord feels like digging up a dead dog that perished in a horrendous, preventable accident, but it feels important given how quickly it died and what the means for how we engage with it. You see, it seems that this week the largely panned hero shooter was revived through community-run custom servers. Except it seems like this may be over before it truly begins.
As reported by The Game Post, developers that go by the names Red, open_wizard, and gwog opened up a Discord server where you could try out Concord through said custom servers. This is apparently possible through the trio recreating the game’s backend API and thusly reverse engineering it. Some videos were even posted to YouTube showing off these custom servers in action, which is where things have started to go legally iffy.
Both videos, as again reported by The Game Post, were taken down through a copyright claim filed by MarkScan Enforcement, most likely on Sony’s behalf. I say most likely, as MarkScan did the exact same thing to Bloodborne PSX on behalf of Sony earlier this year. It’s not surprising the same thing has been done to Concord here, especially as the custom servers won’t have much legal ground to stand on.
It should be noted that these takedowns are for the videos themselves. So far nothing seems to have been done about the custom servers themselves, but in a statement in the Discord for the project, developer Red said “Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites for the time being.” At the time of writing, any links to the Discord server no longer work.
This all feels pertinent to the ongoing situation with Stop Killing Games, a campaign that seeks to “challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers.” Personally, I don’t love the consumerist angle to the campaign, but there is something to be said of the need to protect online-only games from certain doom.
Games like Concord are toys, you smash action figures together in them for ridiculous results, yet you can only do it in the way you’ve been told to. That stinks! I often think of the success of Team Fortress 2 in particular, and the playful space Valve created with it that allowed for many a machinima. That feels like more important a reason to preserve online games, to allow for a freer sense of play once the corporate overlords have stopped making money from their toy business. Let’s see how things play out for new, slightly less legal Concord.
