The newest PlayStation-published live-service shooter Harmony is right here, and launch numbers are trying fairly unhealthy thus far.
In relation to concurrent participant counts, numbers do not all the time matter, significantly for single-player video games, however live-service titles are a distinct story. Valve’s new hero shooter Impasse, which it lastly formally revealed final week, had a concurrent participant rely peak of 89,000 simply yesterday, in line with SteamDB, a really spectacular determine for a recreation that is not even out but. Nonetheless, whereas it has been playable for a short while now, so long as you have received an invitation, this weekend did have an precise launch for an additional live-service hero shooter, Harmony. Besides, its Steam numbers aren’t doing so good, amassing solely 697 gamers at one time on the sport’s launch day.
Numbers simply received worse over the weekend, if you’d count on extra gamers to login to test it out, however nope, Saturday was worse than Friday, and Sunday worse than Saturday. That Friday launch determine can also be fairly upsetting for an additional motive: it is smaller than final yr’s absolute trainwreck, and studio ruining, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which has a peak of 758 gamers (which it acquired when it launched and subsequently by no means topped).
That is clearly an enormous, inadvertent indictment of Harmony, a premium live-service title releasing in an period when that sort of recreation is so generally free. This clearly does not account for PlayStation’s participant rely, which is presumably greater contemplating it is a PlayStation-published title, but it surely’s nonetheless not an excellent signal. So the place does this go away Sony?
As Sherif wrote about again in January, 2024 is lastly the yr that PlayStation is delivering on its live-service promise, however questioned whether or not anybody will care. They actually did with the massively profitable Helldivers 2, though that positively acquired a lift by phrase of mouth, one thing Harmony probably will not get, irrespective of how good it may be.
There’s an issue there too, as Fran gave the sport 3/5 stars in his overview, saying it is just about “shooter design by committee”, which does not encourage confidence within the slightest.
It does not assist that Harmony had a improvement time of eight years (what recreation got here out eight years in the past? Overwatch), so general this simply highlights how a lot of a threat live-service is. Now we simply have to attend and see if PlayStation pulls again even farther from live-service – it already did final yr, provided that it delayed six of them, and one in all its doable largest was simply outright cancelled on the finish of 2023 too. When you ask me, it is time for PlayStation to get again on the large, first-party, single-player practice with some recent IP. Perhaps we should always simply pour one out for Harmony within the meantime.