Has there ever been a more competitive time to release a video game? Possibly. Without resorting to the blunt summation of metascores and sales figures and some sort of division by the gap between release dates, it’s not really something you can measure. A particularly rectangular part of my brain was tempted to undertake the same doomed endeavor as Civilization 7 designer Ed Beach, who tried to mathematically quantify whether his team was adhering to Sid Meier’s rule of thirds. After a physicist who helped launch the Hubble telescope told me he couldn’t do it, I changed my mind.

Instead, we have to orient ourselves to the mood, and the mood at the moment is It is a very competitive time to release a video game. Or perhaps more accurately, a Live service Video game. This has been one of the many great conundrums for the folks at the top of the games industry lately. At the risk of repeating already well-trodden ground: Big publishers, as we all know, want big profits. More specifically, they want the kind of smash hits, hobby-quality, zeitgeist-defining ones you get with Grand Theft Auto or Pokémon Go, League of Legends, Fortnite, Warzone, Counter Strike or just a good old Wordle. The catch is that these hits are mostly live service games, and live service games require not only tons of players, but now tons of those players’ attention. They take time – time to make them, yes, but also time to play them – and as any sorely overstretched modern person will have noticed, a day’s time is finite.

I suspect this is why games have struggled so much in their attempts to ‘grow’. They have gone from being part of the entertainment economy – ‘do I spend my leftover £40 on a new video game or a couple of new albums?’ – to being part of the engagement economy – ‘do I tick off a few daily goals in FC24 while listening to Spotify and talking to friends on Discord, or watch another episode of Star Wars while scrolling through Tiktok, with occasional breaks for Twitter/X and my partner’s voicemail about what I’m cooking for dinner?’

All of this is so painfully obvious that it almost seems redundant to say it out loud. And yet, at the same time, it seems strangely unacknowledged that this is our reality, that we all know it is completely untenable, but that no one seems to be able to stop it.

Most importantly, it’s a heartfelt game made by a group of people who genuinely believe in what they’ve made.

Enter poor eight-year-in-development PlayStation-exclusive multiplayer shooter Concord, which somehow launches in August of a notoriously bleak year for video games and feels like an underdog. (I know, it’s not a bleak year for Good Video games – quite the opposite, which only exacerbates the problem – but by all our usual standards, it’s a fallow year for the big triple-A blockbusters.)

Concord is perfectly fine. We’ve got a full review coming soon that will hopefully be a bit more forensic—and may claim otherwise—but after the few hours I spent with it for a preview earlier this summer, and a few more hours after the servers went live this week, I think it’s perfectly fine. There are new ideas here, despite previous trailer-based dismissals of Concord as some sort of derivative Guardians of the Galaxy clone. The crew bonus stacking mechanic, for example, where you get a unique buff for each character class you switch between over the course of rounds, is an interesting twist on the sense of in-game progression that the developers at Firewalk took from their experience with games like League of Legends. It encourages careful planning for how you might move through the roster as the game progresses, as well as on-the-fly customization.

It is also quite stylish, with sleek, simple menus and beautiful synths and almost still in trend ’70s retro-futurism. Those interested can look around in their own bucket of lore. There are wonderfully pretty skyboxes in garish Hulk green and thunderous red. Multiplayer rounds are quick and brisk, with at times the rhythmic swing of Destiny’s Crucible. Some weapons pack a decent punch and Concord’s broad character design puts a nice emphasis on beginner-friendliness, with some being a little more mechanically simpler and featuring varying forms of homing missiles or bullets to get you started, while others like the obligatory gunslinger or sniper require real skill. And there’s no battle pass, no loot boxes, no free-to-play traps to worry about. You buy it up front like the good old days.

Ironically, though, that might also be Concord’s downfall. In a developer Q&A following the summer preview, the questions Firewalk was quick to answer centered around how they plan to get people to play the game without artificially increasing the level of engagement that comes from occasionally unlocking “surprise mechanics” or playing through a pass. The answer – to Firewalk’s credit, and perhaps also to their undoing – was that they had made a game they hoped was good enough that people would just want to play it.

And despite all of that slightly gloomy and definitely premature praise, Concord only officially launched today. It could surprise the sceptics and become another hit. It could be a smash hit, even though publisher Sony let it out rather limply during Gamescom, at the same time as the massive (and also PlayStation exclusive) Black Myth: Wukong and an open-world Star Wars.

I really hope it hits home. More than anything, it’s a good-natured game, made, at least in a brief impression, by a group of people who genuinely believe in what they’ve made. But like so many other nice young games with good intentions and all sorts of other competing forms of “content,” it’s now Concord’s turn to dutifully go overboard. It leaves the trenches of development and heads into no man’s land, clutching its weapon and its special ability, hoping for the best and bracing itself for what is probably inevitable as the eternal war for our attention continues.