According to reports, after the game’s release and shockingly low player numbers, the development team, or at least the community management team, removed the LGBTQ+ tag from Concord’s store page.

The official Concord account on X confirmed the game’s launch date on August 23, 2024 at 1:00 PM ET, writing, “Think you can handle the wild? It’s time to find out, because Concord is live NOW!”

Do you think you can handle the wilderness? It’s time to find out, because Concord is live NOW!

Venture across the galaxy and battle rival crews to become the best freegunner today. #ConcordLaunch pic.twitter.com/VmqdaXPZvM

— Concord (@PlayConcord) 23 August 2024

READ: ‘Concord’ dies from the start, release date – Steam’s maximum concurrent player count is 70% lower than the game’s open beta

About 10 hours later, Steam user Moddingspree noticed that developer Firewalk Studios had removed the LGBT and political tags from the game. He wrote on the game’s Steam forum: “LGBT and political tags removed and blacklisted.”

He continued, “The developers made a big deal about this game being for ‘modern audiences’ (all 600 of them), but for some reason asked Steam to not only remove those two tags, but to blacklist them and all similar tags. It’s too late, people already know this ‘game’ has a clear agenda… I mean, the characters speak for themselves.”

Another user, poka, commented: “Rejecting LGBTQ+ tag is a good start. Come halfway to us regular casual gamers, developers more like. See how the modern audience is letting you down with almost zero sales, not enough to cover your development costs. Come halfway to us so the game studio wins, the gamers win, and Steam wins too. Rejecting LGBTQ+ tag is a small step towards better profits for future games.”

READ: Former ‘Concord’ developer denounces critics as ‘talentless freaks’ as game fails to reach 700 concurrent player cap

Another named Kai asked: “Why were the LGBTQ+ and Political tags removed?”

He added: “I kind of understand why ‘Political’ was removed as it’s a game and has nothing to do with politics but LGBTQ+ was a good representative tag, why was it removed? How the hell am I supposed to find good games for me and my husband? I’m not even going to talk about the whole 308 player count thing, those guys DESTROYED it for us, as fans of Destiny 2 we were excited for this game, where the hell are we supposed to go now? Does the developer really care more about money than GOOD, RIGHT, HUMAN IDEALS? SHAME ON YOU! BOTH THE GUYS AND THE DEVELOPER WHO COULDN’T STAND UP FOR THEIR IDEALS.”

At the time of writing, the LGBTQ+ tag has actually been removed, but the game still has the “politics” and “political simulation” tags.

READ: ‘Concord’ lead character designer claims developers are ‘strapped and ready to push it forward for years to come’

As the former World of Warcraft Team Lead Mark Kern, aka Grummz, Firewalk Studios is the one who manages the game’s top five tags. On X he writes: “The developers at Concord are busy removing the LGBTQ+ and political tags from their game. These are added by both developers and users, but the top five tags that appear are sorted by the developers’ control. They used to display them proudly.”

He added: “Since Community Notes claims these are under user control, I’ve published the Steamworks documentation to show how developers control the order of tags and which tags apply. They absolutely evade these conditions.”

Concord developers are busy removing LGBTQ+ and political tags from their game. These are added by both developers and users, but the top five most frequently viewed tags are sorted by developer control.

They used to present them with pride.

Since the community notes claim that these are under … pic.twitter.com/mvMuHsKyzz

— Grummz (@Grummz) 24 August 2024

As you can see in one of the images shared by Grummz, the LGBTQ+ tag was the most listed tag for the game. At the time of writing, the tag is not listed as one of the 16 tags shown to users.

READ: ‘Concord’ developer responds to massive backlash to game after it was revealed to contain pronoun nonsense and feature DEI character designs

Furthermore, Valve’s Steamworks documentation, cited by Grummz, clearly states: “Tags not only help Steam users quickly learn about your game, but they also help Steam determine where to display your game to customers. We recently started requiring that a title be assigned at least 5 tags before it is released on Steam, but we recommend adding up to 20.”

This is reiterated later in the document: “The tags with the highest weighting will determine your visibility more than those with lower weighting. The top 5 tags of your title should paint a pretty clear picture of your game, as these tags are also used to describe your game. The tags will be sorted on your game page by the weight they have for your game, as a result of your own sorting in the Tag Wizard. This may change over time as a number of players assign certain tags to your game. Some store filters prioritize the first 15 tags, so make sure these are sorted by relevance to your title.”

It also makes it clear that developers can override the Suggest Priority feature: “The Tag Wizard helps set these weights with a Suggest Priority feature.” This is a very simple algorithm that pushes tags with a lot of information like subgenres to the top and redundant or tags with little information (like ‘indie’ or ‘singleplayer’) to the bottom. This is just meant as a simple starting point. There is no guarantee of accuracy as it doesn’t know what your game is actually like. Feel free to try it out as a starting point and override it as you see fit.

The document then explains that developers can actually remove tags at will: “Customers will also tag your game, and those tags will be mixed in with the tags you set using the Tag Wizard. As customers add more tags, the weight of those tags increases. You can remove any tags you consider undesirable (‘family friendly’ for a horror game) or inaccurate (‘2D’ for a 3D game).”

READ: The lead character designer of ‘Concord’ believes that “white people need to recognize their privileged position and then actively work for equality” and also claims that the justice system is “white supremacy.”

The removal of the LGBTQ+ tag came after the game failed to reach even 700 concurrent players on its release day.

What do you think about the LGBTQ+ tag being removed from Concord?

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