I have to admit that parenting Concord it's like digging up a dead dog that died in a horrific accident that could have been prevented, but it feels important given how quickly it died and how we interact with it. You see, it seems that this week's widely criticized hero shooter has been revived thanks to community-run custom servers. It just seems like it might end before it really begins.
According to Game postThe developers under the names Red, open_wizard and gwog opened a Discord server where you could try out Concord through the specified user servers. Apparently, this is possible thanks to the trio recreating the game's server API and thus reverse-engineering it. Some videos were even posted on YouTube showing these custom servers in action, and this is where things started to go wrong from a legal perspective.
Both videos, as reported again Game postwere removed following a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by MarkScan Enforcement, most likely on behalf of Sony. I say most likely since MarkScan did the same with Bloodborne PSX on behalf of Sony earlier this year. It's not surprising that the same thing was done with Concord, especially since custom servers wouldn't have much of a legal basis.
It should be noted that these removals relate to the videos themselves. Nothing has been done yet regarding the custom servers themselves, but in a statement on Discord for the project, developer Red said, “Due to troubling lawsuits, we have decided to pause invites for the time being.” At the time of writing, the links to the Discord server no longer work.
All this seems appropriate in the current situation with Stop killing gamesa campaign that aims to “challenge the legitimacy of publishers destroying the video games they sold to consumers.” Personally, I don't like the consumerist approach to this campaign, but there is something to be said for the need to protect online gaming from certain doom.
Games like Concorde are toys where you smash pieces together to get ridiculous results, but you can only do it the way you're told. It stinks! I often think about success Team Fortress 2 in particular, and the playful space Valve created with its help, which allowed the creation of many machinima. This seems like a more important reason to keep online gaming alive, to provide a freer gaming experience when the corporate overlords stop making money from their toy business. Let's see how things go with the new, slightly less legal Concorde.
