A group of dedicated coders has managed to partially revive online gameplay for the PC version of Concord, the team-based shooter that Sony famously shut down just two weeks after its launch last summer. Now, though, the team behind that fan server effort is closing off new access after Sony started issuing DMCA takedown requests of sample gameplay videos.
The Game Post was among the first to publicize the “Concord Delta” project, which reverse-engineered the game’s now-defunct server API to get a functional multiplayer match running over the weekend. “The project is still [a work in progress], it’s playable, but buggy,” developer Red posted in the game’s Discord channel, as reported by The Game Post. “Once our servers are fully set up, we’ll begin doing some private playtesting.”
Accessing the “Concord Delta” servers reportedly requires a legitimate PC copy of the game, which is relatively hard to come by these days. Concord only sold an estimated 25,000 copies across PC and PS5 before being shut down last year. And that number doesn’t account for the players who accepted a full refund for their $40 purchase after the official servers shut down.
Better safe than sorry
Red accompanied their Discord announcement of the first “playable” Concord match in months with two YouTube videos showing sample gameplay (“Don’t mind my horrible aim, I spend so much time reverse engineering that I no longer have the time to actually play the game,” he warned viewers). In short order, though, those videos were taken down “due to a copyright claim from MarkScan Enforcement,” a company that has a history of working with Sony on DMCA requests.
While the team behind Concord Delta hasn’t been contacted by Sony directly, the YouTube video takedowns have put the group in something of a defensive crouch. “Due to worrying legal action we’ve decided to pause invites [to our Discord server] for the time being,” Red wrote on the Discord, as reported by The Game Post.
Sony would be far from the first publisher to go after fan-run servers for defunct multiplayer games. EA killed off a legacy Battlefield fan server project with nearly a million registered accounts back in 2017. Activision similarly sent cease-and-desist letters to the makers of legacy Call of Duty fan clients in 2023.
And Blizzard famously took action against multiple fan servers for “classic” World of Warcraft before launching its own official throwback servers in 2017. “Failure to protect against intellectual property infringement would damage Blizzard’s rights,” World of Warcraft Executive Producer and Vice President J. Allen Brack wrote at the time. “This applies to anything that uses WoW’s IP, including unofficial servers… there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server.”
Of course, Sony could also decide to simply look the other way and let players enjoy a game the company seems to have no interest in officially supporting. That’s what Nintendo appears to be doing with fan projects like The Pretendo Network and WiiLink, which restore online functionality that’s no longer officially available on classic Nintendo consoles.
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