The newest PlayStation-published live-service shooter Harmony is right here, and launch numbers are trying fairly unhealthy thus far.
In terms of concurrent participant counts, numbers do not all the time matter, significantly for single-player video games, however live-service titles are a special 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 accordance with SteamDB, a really spectacular determine for a sport that is not even out but. Nevertheless, whereas it has been playable for a short time now, so long as you have acquired an invitation, this weekend did have an precise launch for one more live-service hero shooter, Harmony. Besides, its Steam numbers will not be doing so good, amassing solely 697 gamers at one time on the sport’s launch day.
Numbers simply acquired worse over the weekend, whenever you’d anticipate 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 one more motive: it is smaller than final 12 months’s absolute trainwreck, and studio ruining, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, which has a peak of 758 gamers (which it obtained 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 sport is so generally free. This clearly does not account for PlayStation’s participant rely, which is presumably larger contemplating it is a PlayStation-published title, nevertheless it’s nonetheless not signal. So the place does this depart Sony?
As Sherif wrote about again in January, 2024 is lastly the 12 months 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 undoubtedly obtained a lift by means of phrase of mouth, one thing Harmony seemingly will not get, irrespective of how good it could be.
There’s an issue there too, as Fran gave the sport 3/5 stars in his assessment, 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 growth time of eight years (what sport 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 12 months, on condition that it delayed six of them, and one among its doable greatest was simply outright cancelled on the finish of 2023 too. Should you ask me, it is time for PlayStation to get again on the large, first-party, single-player practice with some contemporary IP. Perhaps we must always simply pour one out for Harmony within the meantime.